What a Life is a unique book that is part memoir, part historical
chronicle, part a social psychological dissertation of the impact
of a set of diverse social systems upon a single soul. It is the
result of a lifetime of evidence-gathering, thought, and
introspection. Salomon Rettig, professor emeritus at the Department
of Psychology, Hunter College CUNY, was born into and subsequently
experienced three radically different social, political, and
economic systems of the twentieth century: Nazism, Neo-Marxism (the
Israeli kibbutz), and the academic system of the United States of
America. Now in his nineties, he attempts to compare this diverse
set of experiences, their historical and political context, and
their effect on him, especially as he has related to other people.
The results are not very pretty. He watched Hitler come to power in
his native Berlin and experienced the depersonalization of the
Jewish population on the part of the Nazis, prior to escaping at
the age of thirteen to an orphanage for Jewish Holocaust refugees
in British Mandate Palestine. He subsequently worked on a kibbutz
for ten years, subjugating his personal will to the will and
interest of the collective. Finally, he arrived in the United
States, completed his education, and embarked on a career as a
professor of social psychology just as the United States entered a
historic, post-war period of rapid, unprecedented economic growth.
Was it the estrangement from his nuclear family at a very young
age, assimilation into the commune of the kibbutz, or something
else that led to his inability to relate to the other people in his
life, even those as close to him as his first wife?
General
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