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Globalization and Some of Its Contents: The Autobiography of a Russian Immigrant
Globalization and Some of Its Contents: The Autobiography of a Russian Immigrant
Globalization and Some of Its Contents: The Autobiography of a Russian Immigrant
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Globalization and Some of Its Contents: The Autobiography of a Russian Immigrant

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I was born in Russia in 1920, and came with my mother to the United States in 1923 after my Father had died. My mother had a brother and sister here.
I was brought up and educated in Bridgeport, Coan; and Brooklyn, New York and got my Ph.D. at Princeton. My study area is Economics especially economic development in Asia and international trade. I have taught Economics at BARD College and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Between those two academics I worked with the U.S. State Department, the UN, the Ford Foundation, the MIT Center for Intl. Studies, RAND Corporation and the Asian Development Bank carrying out research teaching and providing policy advice on economic issues for the U.S. and for various Asian countries. I have lived and worked in India, Nepal, China, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia and have written eight books on political economic issues in those countries, as well as one book on Chicago decision-making. My autobiography both describes and examines my life and attitudes over those years. I could never have done this if I had not immigrated here, and I think not only I but the U.S. and the world benefited by my being allowed to come here. I could not have done that in Russia over the past 50 odd years.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherXlibris US
Release dateAug 12, 2005
ISBN9781469109336
Globalization and Some of Its Contents: The Autobiography of a Russian Immigrant
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George Rosen

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    Globalization and Some of Its Contents - George Rosen

    Copyright © 2005 by George Rosen.

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

    or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any

    information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright

    owner.  

    This book was printed in the United States of America.  

    To order additional copies of this book, contact:

    Xlibris Corporation

    1-888-795-4274

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    27618

    Contents

    Dedication

    INTRODUCTION

    CHAPTER I

    Growing Up

    CHAPTER II

    You’re In the Army Now

    CHAPTER III

    Starting My Career

    CHAPTER IV

    Japan – My First International Economic Work

    CHAPTER V

    Almost Decade In India and Nepal

    CHAPTER VI

    With RAND Living In California and Working on India and South Asia

    CHAPTER VII

    Four Years In Manila with the Asian Development Bank

    CHAPTER VIII

    A Year of Writing and Finding an Academic Post

    CHAPTER IX

    Heading a Department and Starting a New Life in Chicago

    CHAPTER X

    Research and Teaching at UIC

    CHAPTER XI

    My Scholarly Life in Chicago After 1978

    CHAPTER XII

    Living with Sylvia in Chicago

    CHAPTER XIII

    My Life in my Seventies and Eighties Until Today

    APPENDIX

    List of George Rosen’s Economic Books

    I write in the light of a lamp

    The absolute the eternities

    Their outlying districts

    are not my theme I am hungry for life and for death also

    I know what I know and I write it

    The embodiment of time

    the act

    The movement in which the whole being is sculptured and destroyed . . .

    . . .

    I am a history

    a memory inventing itself I am never alone . . .

    I move in the dark

    I plant signs

    From: Octavio Paz, Vindaban, Select Poems (1984), p. 62.

    Dedication

    To the Memory of

    My Mother who brought me to America and raised me;

    My Uncle Sam and Aunt Sarah who made our coming possible and helped us after we were here; My Aunt Esther and Uncle Isaac who raised me as a boy in Bridgeport and were Ma and Pa to me;

    My Stepfather, Sam Levine, who raised me to be a man.

    All died many years ago, and all were Russian immigrants to America, as I am.

    And of my generation in my family,

    My cousins Walter and Paul who were brothers to me in Bridgeport and ever after, until they died;

    My cousin Helen’s husband, Sam, who was a brother-in-law to me and one of my closest friends; My nephew John, Walter’s son, whose early death in his forties was both a shock and the personal loss of a close friend.

    My step-sister Eva, with whom I lived for five years in Brooklyn, and was a close friend thereafter.

    My sister-in-law of 25 years, Judy Mitchell, Sylvia’s sister, who became my sister as well, whose death just before the end of 2004 was not a surprise but is a great loss for us.

    My sister-in-law, Kitt Egan, mother of Kymberlee, my son Mark’s wife. Kitt died most unexpectedly as I was writing this book. It is a great shock, and loss, for myself and Sylvia.

    And my close friends of over sixty years of my life, many of whom died in the past few years, and who are remembered in this book of my life. One of these very close friends, Martin Blumensons, just died. Three of my closest and longest friends for about 50 years, Terry Neale, Subbiah Kannappan, and Prakash Tandon died while I was writing my book. Their deaths are a great loss.

    INTRODUCTION

    I HAD BEEN thinking of writing my autobiography for a few years. I thought I had an interesting life, but I wanted its story to be more than just a chronology of events – it should have a theme. That focus came to me after I read Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents. Immigration is an element of globalization. Migrants from all over the world from the 16th century on created the United States and made it what it is today. I am myself one of those immigrants, as was my mother who brought me from Russia when I was three years old, and her brother and sister who were already here and helped us to come. Today there is a strong movement in the United States to restrict immigration and even to close our borders. Even stronger movements are active in many other countries to close their borders to migrants.

    I am convinced from my own life and that of many friends of mine that immigration is a very positive part of globalization. I know my life as I have lived it as an American citizen would never have been possible in the Russia I left, and I might not even have lived very long had I remained there. I have had a good life in the United States. Apart from the personal benefits to me and my loved ones, I feel that I’ve helped to improve the lives of other American citizens, and of people in the many countries in which I have worked. I made Economics my career because I believed by practicing it I could make that contribution. The greatest economists from Adam Smith to Keynes, including Marx, Marshall and Veblen, stressed that goal of Economics. I hope that my autobiography will continue what I have done in the past by showing not only how I have enjoyed my own life, but have contributed to the well-being of others. By doing so it will strengthen the position of those who support freedom of immigration into the United States and into other countries of the world. That is why I have titled the book Globalization and Some of its Contents, as distinguished from Discontents. In talking with friends who are like myself immigrants to the United States, but from Asia and Latin America as well as Europe, I am struck by their experiences and achievements here compared to what they might have been able to do in their countries of origin. Their hope to achieve this inspired their migration to this country, and our freedom and economic opportunities made it possible. They have also been able to contribute to improved well-being of family members and others in their countries of origin. This contributes to the argument from my own experience.

    I am trying my best not to repeat in this autobiography what I have already written in my nine earlier economic research volumes. I’ve given the titles of those books for any interested reader. This autobiography is of my own life experiences and ideas since I was a child, and not about my economic and social research. I have not kept diaries or journals during my life. I have largely relied on my memory as I’ve written the manuscript during the summer of 2004, with reference to short published records I have. My memory has become worse with age, and I have forgotten some names and dates. I hope friends will forgive my not mentioning their names and any incorrect dates where they are concerned. The main events are correct.

    My wife, Sylvia, has read drafts of those sections of the books where she and her family are involved. Her comments and corrections were essential for the final version. Her memory is much better than mine. Even more important was her support during the many days that I was writing this. It would have been impossible to write without her support.

    Geoff Huck, a close friend for many years in Chicago, who now lives in Canada, knows me and my life well. When I first began to think of writing my autobiography he strongly encouraged me to do so, but it took time for me to follow that up until I read Stiglitz’s book. I hope this comes up to what he expected, and I thank him very much for his strong encouragement.

    The manuscript was written in pencil. Fortunately I have good handwriting and have always done this at an early stage. This penciled version was edited and typed by Susan Gray, a neighbor and friend in Falmouth, who had done the same for my previous book. She has put my handwritten pages into semi final form and improved it in that process for all of which I am most thankful to her.

    Final revisions were made by one of my close friends in Chicago, Ann Hoselitz, for which I am very thankful.

    CHAPTER I

    Growing Up

    A. Russian Family Background

    I KNOW VERY little of my Russian family history. As I write this I am very sorry that I never asked my mother for more about our family or about my father, but I thought I might hurt her if I did. I also suspect that as part of my Americanization I didn’t want to, and it is now too late.

    My Russian family was a Jewish family from White Russia, centered about Minsk with its then large Jewish population. My family was a large one generally not well off, but my mother was brought up by a well-to-do uncle living in St. Petersburg, and she was able to study dentistry in that city before 1914. An elder brother, Sam, and sister, Esther, had migrated to the United States from White Russia soon after 1900. Her brother set up a successful photo studio in New York City in the Bronx, settling there and marrying my future Aunt Sarah. Her sister had married a skilled machinist, Isaac Werner, working in Bridgeport, Connecticut. My grandfather and her other brothers and sisters remained in Russia in The White Russia and St. Petersburg regions during this time.

    I know that my mother and her family members in Russia were not orthodox Jews, but were secular and non-religious, and were strongly sympathetic to socialism. My mother served as a dentist in the Russian Communist Army after the 1917 Revolution and met my father in that same army in which he was an engineer. I was born in February 1920 in Petrograd, and my father died soon after in the flu epidemic that ravaged Russia in the early 1920’s. My mother told me that he had carried me on his shoulders in a parade in Petrograd in which they both marched to hear Trotsky speak. If my father had not died, my mother might have remained in Russia rather than leaving in 1923. I remember nothing about those earliest years of my life. My mother told me I spoke Russian well when we left, but I certainly forgot it soon after coming to the United States. When I tried to learn it about thirty years later, it was very difficult – it had sunk deeper in my subconscious than I expected.

    My Uncle Sam in New York thought that my mother would be able to practice dentistry in the United States. He told her that and offered to help bring her with me from Russia if she wished to come. My mother accepted his very kind offer, and she and I left Russia by train for Holland in late 1923, arriving in Rotterdam to find a ship to take us.

    B. Coming to the U.S. and Life in Bridgeport

    We were able to get steerage passage on the ship Nieuw Amsterdam in December and arrived at Ellis Island on December 23rd. On our trip across the Atlantic, I picked up chicken-pox and was interned in the Ellis Island hospital after our arrival. Fortunately, I recovered a few days before the time limit for such internment; if I had not, we would have had to go back to Europe. Uncle Sam met us when I recovered, and we went ashore with him to his and Aunt Sarah’s apartment in the Bronx, where we would stay until my mother resettled.

    But that resettlement was entirely different from what she and her brother expected. She could not practice dentistry in the U.S. without a New York or other state license. She could not get that without training in dentistry in an American dental school and a degree for that profession – her Russian degree, license and experience were not recognized. She would have to find other work. The only work she could get was in the New York garment trades in the city’s sweatshops in short-term, low pay work. She lived in a small flat near the city garment district. She could not care for me nor afford a nurse, so she arranged for me to live with Esther and Isaac in Bridgeport, Connecticut, 50 miles from New York. They had a large house in which space would not be a problem. They had four children ranging from Helen, then age 12, to Gertrude, 2, and including two boys, Walter, 9, and Paul, 4, so that I might grow up with my own generation. Moving to Bridgeport in 1924 gave me 4 sisters and brothers – relatives called cousin-sisters and cousin-brothers in India’s extended family system. Living with my cousin-brothers and sisters for 8 years was undoubtedly the most important formative experience in my life. I learned English quickly –

    the children did not know Russian of course, and I had to speak English to play and talk with them.

    We were a Jewish family, but a secular one. My uncle and aunt were members of the Workmen’s Circle. This was an organization, the Arbeiter Ring, that was started in East Europe by Jews of a socialist orientation. The Jewish migrants to the United States from East Europe established the American equivalent with the same name in English. There was a very active branch in Bridgeport, an industrial city with many migrants. This Bridgeport branch set up a Jewish school to teach Yiddish, and Jewish history based on the Old Testament, to Jewish children. There were many family events and meetings of Jewish adults to exchange ideas, to celebrate Jewish holidays in a secular fashion and to advocate social causes.

    With Bridgeport being a major industrial city in Connecticut and near New York a large number of workers from many European countries other than Russia lived there. These workers, from Hungary, the Balkans and Italy among other countries, had socialist traditions, and it was not surprising that Bridgeport had one of the largest socialist parties in the United States. During the 1930’s Depression, Bridgeport elected a Socialist mayor, Jasper McLevy, and was the only city other than Milwaukee, Wisconsin to have a Socialist Party mayor.

    My cousins and I attended the Bridgeport public schools. I only went to grammar school, since I moved to Brooklyn after finishing eighth grade; my cousins completed high school. We got good educations in basic reading, writing and arithmetic and also literature and history. The city’s public library was excellent with a great variety of books from the classics to the nineteenth and early twentieth century novelists, and we read them. I myself read and saw some Shakespeare, and read Dickens, Conrad and Hemingway before I left Bridgeport.

    When I was about seven years old, we moved to North Bridgeport on Capitol Avenue, and I lived there until I was twelve. I visited that address this summer with Gertrude, my cousin two years younger than I am, who also lived there then and after I left Bridgeport for Brooklyn. She recalls that we were living in near poverty, but I certainly didn’t think that then. Paul and I shared a room, and Gert remembers hearing both of us arguing and yelling about sports – we were baseball and basketball fans. In the backyard there was a basketball net into which we would throw balls, and several small golf holes into which we played miniature golf. Walter caddied at the local club. The public grammar school and the Jewish school we went to weekly were within easy walking distance, and schoolmates lived nearby, some on the same street. Gert remembers how unhappy I was to leave there when I did in 1932.

    At home we read the Jewish Forward with its socialist approach in Yiddish, and also got and read the Bridgeport Post daily, and the New York Times on weekends. This socialist, secular education and approach to life was a fundamental basis for my attitudes and the framework of my thinking on social policy issues, especially during and after the 1930’s Depression, and it contributed greatly to my decision to go into Economics as the field of my career.

    My elder cousins’ aims and experiences after grammar school influenced mine after I left Bridgeport. My aunt and uncle made it possible for them to achieve those aims. Helen, my oldest cousin, wanted to go to college after she finished high school in about 1930. This was very unusual for a Jewish girl at that time. Her mother strongly supported her wish and her father’s work made it possible. She went to college in Bridgeport and then to New York University for graduate work. Her brother Walter was an excellent high school student and was admitted to Yale in about 1932 as an undergraduate, which was then rare for a Jewish applicant. Walter majored in Economics as an undergraduate, did well and went on to Yale Law School, where he edited the Law Journal. Paul, one year older than I, was also admitted to Yale as an undergraduate majoring in science before going into the Air Force when the U.S. entered World War II. Gert later followed Helen into college and her own career. The fact that all my cousins went to college and beyond influenced my own plans and intentions. Walter’s majoring in Economics and his study with Thurman Arnold and Walton Hamilton, two leading institutional economists, was a factor in my decision to go into that field.

    One of my greatest pleasures in Bridgeport was the summer and our daily swimming. Bridgeport is on Long Island Sound and has a lovely beach, Seaside Park, on the Sound. During the summer, my Uncle would drive my Aunt and the children who were at home to the beach every morning on his way to the factory where he worked. He left us off and then picked us up on the way home after his work day ended, and he went for his swim. It was a great pleasure and made my taste for salt-water ocean swimming when I grew up, rather than fresh water and swimming pools.

    I had eight great and formative years with my Aunt and Uncle and cousins in Bridgeport from 1924-1932. During that time, I saw my mother about once a month when she came for the weekend or holiday in Bridgeport – we went down to New York sometimes on family visits. My mother, on her days off from work, was active in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (The ILGWU) and politically as a socialist. She also enjoyed theatre, ballet and concerts in the city. In 1931 she married Sam Levine, a widower and older man, who owned a stationery store in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. He had come to the U.S. from Russia before 1914, first to the Midwest where he had been a farmer, as his Russian family had been, before he moved to New York to open his store.

    He had five children by his first marriage. Those children were adults when he married my mother. The two sons had their own careers and homes: Max, a dentist, was married and with a family living and working in the New York area, and Morris, partnering with his father in the Brooklyn store, was married and living with family near the store. Two of the three daughters, Jeanette and Ida, were married with their husbands, Harry and Sigmund, successful businessmen, living in Brooklyn with their children. The third and youngest daughter, Eva, lived with her father and my mother in Brooklyn, and worked in New York. She was about ten years older than I was.

    C. Living in Brooklyn and High School and College

    The apartment of my stepfather and mother was near the store in Flatbush, and that is where I went to live. It was also within walking distance of Erasmus Hall High School, the oldest public school in New York city, going back to the Dutch settlement. I began going to Erasmus Hall in September 1932. It was an excellent school that gave me a very good education. I had excellent classes in Latin and English. I am told it is not as good today as it was then. I still remember, almost 70 years after I graduated, the names of my English teacher, Ms. Molendyk and my

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