A legacy in labor How the labor movement has shaped the values of one family throughout a century. By Niyaz Pirani
Samuel Gerstein was in his living room, filling a metal box with some of his most precious books: works by physicist Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. It was the early 1950s, and Samuel, a scientist who specialized in blood pathology, was bracing for the fallout as Senator Joseph McCarthy whipped the nation into a frenzy over rampant claims that Communists had infiltrated the United States government. In post-World War II America, one question weighed heavily on the minds of some of the country’s top lawmakers: “Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?” Even though he wasn’t, Samuel didn’t want suspicion coming his way. “How come you’re doing that?” Samuel’s young daughter Sharon remembers asking her father as he hid the books away. If the landlord sees them, her father explained, he might tell somebody. Samuel couldn’t afford to lose his job as others had over accusations of being a Communist. 10
OCEA EMPLOYEE
“Someday,’ he said to me, ‘Someday it will be the time when you’re going to have a chance to carry on this kind of a fight,’” recalled Sharon, who grew up to become a marriage and family therapist at Orange County Health Care Agency, and an OCEA member. “That’s all I can think about,” she said. “I’m very old — I’m 74 — and this is the time.”
Humble beginnings Sharon’s American roots were planted in New York around 1915 when the Raskin family, Minnie and Philip, arrived from an oppressive Jewish ghetto in Vitebsk, Russia. Minnie spoke only Russian and Yiddish. She was pregnant at the time with Sharon’s mother, Mary. “I asked her, when I was about 10 years old, ‘How did you learn to speak English?” Sharon said of Minnie. “Her answer was, ‘If your children are hungry, you can even learn Japanese in an hour if you need to feed them.”
Find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/oceamember.