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My grandfather asked to have his oldest son exempted based on illness. My father was the third of the children, and during World War I, things were rather different than they were subsequently. Kirschstein: He taught chemistry on and off there through my childhood. Kirschstein: Peter Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Harden: Can you elaborate here? Which high school did he teach in? At the time they graduated-I do not remember the year because my father had spent a year in the Army in World War I, and I can come back to that story in a little while-it was about 1920, I guess, the professor said to the students as he went down the line, “Well, I’ll get you a job here and you a job here and you a job here.” When he got to the two Jewish men, he said, “I have no jobs to give you.” My father therefore ended up teaching chemistry in high school in New York City and creating some inventions of various types on the side. He was one of two Jewish men in the class of maybe 30 or 40. He went to Columbia University, in the School of Engineering, and majored in chemical engineering. My father actually had a chemical engineering degree. Harden: Now, your father himself was a chemist. One of my uncles, my father’s brother, actually went on and continued the business, because he used to provide us with seltzer water at the house.

I do not have much of it left, but I have a little bit. Some of it is stained ruby red and that is similar to what I have seen in Russian exhibits on occasion. He must have been involved a little in some sort of glass bottling business in Russia, because I inherited from my mother, who inherited it from her parents, some beautiful cut glass. When my grandfather settled on the Lower East Side in New York, he went into the business of bottling sodas, seltzer water, and so forth. One of them had lived until I was a year old, but I have no recollection of that at all. Unfortunately, both sets had died before I was old enough to know them. First of all, I should say that I knew none of my grandparents. Harden: What did the family do? Do you have any sense of that? But the border and the village names did not always stay the same. Kirschstein: Probably in the border area near Vilna, on the borders of Poland and Russia. Harden: Do you know where in Russia they came from? I have no idea, nor did my father, what the family name was originally. When they asked my grandfather his name, he said something that obviously started with a “k” sound, and the Germans interpreted it as Kirschstein, which is cherrystone. You may remember that in those days, the most recent immigrants very often manned the immigration desk, and so the people behind the immigration desk were Germans. We have no idea of the name of the family originally. He came with about four siblings, and three or four more were born here, although not all lived. Kirschstein: My father came to the United States when he was seven or eight years old. Could you tell us something about his family, his parents and his siblings? How and when did they come to the United States? Kirschstein, we like to begin our oral histories by exploring the family background of high-achieving people, and I can see that your father, Julius, was born in Russia. Please Note: These interviews have not been verified for complete accuracy Ruth Lillian Kirschstein, the Deputy Director of the National Institutes of Health, on 21 September 1998, in her office in Building 1 at the National Institutes of Health.

#Turo cube world slider series#

This the first in a series of oral history interviews with Dr. Kirschstein Oral History 1998 Aĭownload the PDF: Kirschstein_Ruth_Oral_History_1998_A (PDF 823 kB)