I was honored to participate in ADL’s 80th anniversary “Pay It Forward” video tribute to past presidents and their impact on their descendants.
In my family, my grandfather Max Goldberg has achieved near legendary status. With good reason, to be sure. Born into poverty, he successfully pursued a career in media, as well as political and community work, and greatly influenced the formation of community institutions like Rose Medical Center and, of course, this newspaper.
His achievements and accomplishments, as well as the ethos that drove him, are well documented. But that’s very different from reflecting on how he informed my life. I thought answering that would be easy, but what makes it hard is that it requires investigating oneself, and seeing not only how you do or do not measure up, but also exploring how certain choices you’ve made were impacted by a previous generation.
Such as: Do I love to travel, am I curious about the world, because Max Goldberg was? Am I committed to journalistic principles because Max Goldberg was?
A true journalist, Max believed that any important or influential figure was worth speaking to. He interviewed the famous segregationist George Wallace, which seems inconceivable today when a lot of media are far more involved with tailoring their content to a certain narrative. Max was always well spoken, never incendiary. Let the extremists — as Wallace inevitably did in the interview — dig their own grave.
Civil discourse has significantly waned in our society, but I believe newspapers are one place where civil debate continues to exist. That’s a legacy I inherited from my grandfather and which I’m trying to continue.
Assessing my grandfather’s impact on me is a bit esoteric, as I sadly never had the opportunity meet him in person. I’ve tried to fill the void with family lore and genealogical research. Perhaps most impactfully, working at the IJN has given me the greatest insight into what may have motivated and driven him.
I did have the pleasure and gift of knowing my other grandfather, Herman Silberstein, but a deep regret I have is not understanding at the time what tales he held within him. (To be fair, I was a child and young teen.) There is so little I know about his family, their pre-war life, the interests, hobbies and passions he had as a young boy, or the kind of relationship he had with his parents.
I’ve often wondered what he made of the Deep South, where he landed upon immigration, as that is where his aunt and uncle, his sponsors, lived. While he moved to the US from Hungary’s second largest city, he grew up in a small village, as many Hungarian Jews did. So perhaps the town of Ruleville, Miss., with its population of a little over 1,000, was not especially different from his childhood home. But what did he make of segregation? How did he feel upon enlistment in the US Army, possibly the only Jew at Camp Shelby, Miss.?
I wish I could ask him these questions. But what I do know from having known him personally is that he was a kind, gentle, loving and devoted person, qualities that would be difficult to deduce from historical records, and which any person would seek to emulate.
Thank you, ADL, for giving me the opportunity to reflect on the blessing of carrying on the legacies of two great men.
Shana Goldberg may be reached at [email protected].
