SHOUTING FOR JUSTICE

The Journey of a Jewish Journalist Across the Century of Hitler and Israel

by Herb Brin. Copyright © September 2002. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: Days of Poverty and Hope

     or warmth in winter, outside the Crane plumbing supplies company on Kedzie Avenue in Chicago, my father and I would start two huge fires in 55-gallon steel drums.
     We'd feed the fires with yesterday's news -- than which, it was said, there was nothing deader. The news seemed to cover world events which one day would put to shame that old newspaper cliché.
     The Hitler years were beginning to unfold in Europe. A world would soon be propelled into the most enormous, the most shattering events in human history. We were burning the newspaper pages describing events that were beginning to rage. Events without parallel for mankind. The worst century.
     As a young man, I was hoping to become part of the profession of journalists. This, I must do!
     My father, Sol Brin, already was a regular contributor of articles to the Polish press in America. He put it directly on the line: These were the most dangerous of times in history and there seemed no way out of it. Certainly not by way of a dictatorial Soviet Union led by a murderous Josef Stalin.
     With the fires roaring higher in the steel drums, my mother, Pia, would come along with a sack of woodscraps, a wizened woman of 40, her head protected from the subzero winds by a babushka. She brought along a few sandwiches, some soft drinks. Coffee for my father.
     Back in Belarus, where she was born in a shtetl called Pietrikov, Pia and her four sisters would go into the woods to collect wood scraps for their father, Reuven Goroway, who earned a bare living in the village along the Dnieper River by going into forests seeking broken limbs of trees. These he chopped up and, by horse and wagon, transported them to town.
     Not an easy living for a family of eight -- five sisters, a brother named Aaron and my grandmother, whose name I'll never know.
     One Easter Sunday, to avenge Christendom's feelings against so-called Christ-killer Jews, one of the sisters was torn limb from limb in childbirth. Long before Hitler. Before Hitler, indeed.
     Pia, a beautiful dark-haired child, was a total illiterate. She was my grandmother's helper. Pia and her 12 year old sister, Rose, came first to America, by steerage, of course. Children fleeing a czar's wrath. Pia and Rose were the first of my family to see the awesome Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
     Castle Garden was their point of entry to the New World.

My father's father -- my grandfather-- was Julian (Israel) Dobrzhinsky, chess aficionado. His spirit revolved around the game. I understand that he was one of the greatest players in Poland. Poland had about three and a half million Jews, and maybe three million of them played chess.
     The Dobrzhinskys were a Polish branch of a family quite prominent in Germany. My father's cousin, Maximilian Hardin, was a press attaché for Bismarck and a brilliant journalist. In fact, they had a statue to honor him, but I understand that it was destroyed during the time of Hitler.
     My father was born in 1883, and brought up in Poland, in a town called Konin, northwest of Lodz. This is the same town the Goldwaters came from. Barry Goldwater's father was Moses Goldwater. I suspect my grandfather and Moses Goldwater were friends, in such a small town of 2000 people. Barry Goldwater, of course, ran for President of the United States as a Republican. But he didn't run as a Jew. Typically for the time, Solomon Brin was forced to join the Russian army, because Poland was occupied by the Russians.
     During the Russian-Japanese war of 1905-1906, the Tsarists insisted that Sol join the war against Japan, so my father went to battle as a baker in the Russian Army. I think Sol got as far as Mukden when the war ended in one of the greatest and most horrible of all land battles -- humiliatingly for the Tsarists -- and he was sent back home.
     Under the old regime, Jews were forbidden to live in Moscow, or even to visit, except under certain restricted situations. But since Sol had served in the army, he was allowed to go to Moscow. On arrival, he joined the Moscow Art Theater, where he worked several seasons as a supernumerary in the opera. Which meant that he carried spears in Aida and La Bohème, and in shows of that sort. He couldn't sing for beans. They used him as people to fill out the cast, and I guess Sol Brin was a people for the Russian Opera. So you see we don't come from a very artistically creative family. We are merely spearcarriers for the Russian opera. At least my father was.
     Sol returned to his hometown of Konin, in Poland. His mother had died. (Her name was Chaya, for whom I was named Chaim.) Soon, my father's father, Julian, the chess player, had taken for himself a bride, and my father discovered that he couldn't go home again.
     He decided to visit relatives in Germany, and they made it possible for him to travel to America on steerage. My father hoped to make it to the Alaskan gold fields that were entrancing young men to the Yukon -- the fields that then had enthralled Charlie Chaplin. He was supposed to go to Ellis Island, around 1910, but he was told aboard ship that he'd have to come to Galveston, Texas. The immigration authorities were trying to disperse new arrivals in America. They didn't want too many Jews coming to New York.
     My father's ship arrived in the new land on the Fourth of July. At least that's what he told me, though maybe he put me on a little bit. Anyway, there was a big fireworks show going on, and my father understood why... that he had arrived, and all of America was celebrating! Nobody could ever tell Sol Brin that the celebration was really for the Fourth of July. With a wry smile he insisted it was for his arrival in the new world.

When my father came to America, he did as many immigrants, and dropped "Dobrzhinsky," taking in its place the name of a cousin of his, Solomon Brin, who was supposedly the "tobacco king" of Russia. He might just as easily have taken the name Abravanel, which I think I would have done. Isaac Abravanel was leader of the Jewish community in Spain, and represented the Jews in the court of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. His family fortune was turned over to Christopher Columbus to finance his first voyage. When the Abravanel family left Spain in 1492, during the expulsion, one branch settled in Holland. When problems arose in Holland, they went on to Metz, the Alsace-Lorraine region of France, and onward to parts of Germany. How do I know these things? My father told me stories. He said there exists a historical book of family records that was retained by the family in Konin, kept by Henry Glicenstein, the sculptor.
     In a recent years, while researching my book, Ich bin ein Jude (I am a Jew), during a trip to Poland, I tried to locate this family record. Unfortunately, much of Konin had been destroyed in the war. The Jewish cemetery was demolished. All I found was a mass Jewish grave that contained five or six thousand people buried, nameless, alone.

Sol found his first job as a section hand on the Union Pacific Railroad and made it all the way to Chicago when he chanced to meet Pia, a picture beauty at 18. Enchantments of the Yukon faded swiftly for Sol Brin.
     Sol and Pia were married. Brother Robert arrived promptly -- and in due course, some 13 months and nine days later, Herb Brin was born in the kitchen bedroom of a cold water flat on Lincoln Street in Chicago. My parents called me Hymie. The birth certificate said I was Henry Brin. (I was later told that a few blocks away lived a young man by the name of Hymie Rickover. He later developed nuclear submarines for the United States Navy, one of the great admirals of a new kind of defense force, never before seen.)
     At the time of my birth, my mother was 19 years old, and my father 34.
     My father, a graduate of the gymnasium in Konin, Poland, stemmed from an important Jewish family. His cousin, Maximillian Hardin, was an eminent writer and served as press secretary to Bismark, the celebrated German chancellor. His mother's brother would become governor of the great state of Idaho.
     Sol Brin was early on fascinated by the writings of the Russian poet Pushkin. He would read Pushkin poems to me as a child in his arms.
     "Come," he often said to me, "we have a secret..."
     Russian poetry. I absorbed the Pushkin cadences. My father's secret.
     For a living in Chicago, my father worked for the People's Gas Co. as a "gas engineer" -- selling water heaters to the natives: the Poles, the Germans, the Swedes, an occasional Jewish family.

While my mother's family was of the Jewish peasant stock of Russia, my father stemmed from prominent Jewish families of Europe. And this carried through in the New World, too. Gov. Moses Alexander of Idaho was my father's uncle on his mother's side. I actually met that great man, when I was a very small boy.
     As World War I ended, Gov. Alexander wrote to my father to meet and visit with him at the Dearborn Street Railroad Station, as he passed through Chicago on a trip to Washington with other notables. Pa took me along with him and we took our first taxi ride to the Dearborn station. He explained how important a governor was and that I must act with great respect. It was a brief encounter, but Moses Alexander, resplendent in his brown woollen suit and happy smile, was now as important to me as the Moses who climbed a mountain for God.
     The governor patted me on the head as he departed, saying: "A bright boy. A bright boy." I must have said something. My father embraced me.
     When I was about three years old, my parents decided to move to an English basement apartment on Claremont Avenue. This was an improvement, since the house on Lincoln Street was a hovel, but a rather shabby improvement. Although I was young, I remember that move with the horse and wagon of my Uncle Shalom, the carpenter. The furniture was piled high. It went clippity clop on down Claremont Avenue.
     We moved into a small apartment building next to the synagogue, a Hungarian synagogue as I recall. Many times when I was playing baseball out on the street, the men would twist my arm to come in to complete a minyan, the ten men required by Jewish tradition for formal prayer. The other kids on the street would run away when the shamash came out looking for someone, but I must admit I felt honored they would take me as a minyaner, even before I was bar mitzvahed. So, I would complain all the time that I preferred baseball, but I went when they called.
     The kids on the block were rather tough. Misty Reuben lived next door. Misty's Yiddish name, Misso, means nut, an appropriate name. His father had been killed in an accident. His mother took over a little trucking company, a moving van of some sort which they rented out. She lived on the first floor of the apartment building on 22 North Claremont Avenue, which she owned.
     We moved into the apartment where Joey Rake used to live. Joey played piano at Julliard. Next door lived Benny Feinman, who instructed me on how babies were born. We were sitting at the curb one day when it was raining, and we were racing chips of wood down the sewers, our sailing vessels that went down to sea. Benny Feinman said to me, you know how babies are born? Your father heps your mother. I beat the hell out of Benny. I chased him up and down the street, and around the back of the synagogue. My father don't do that to my mother, you sumbitch. So that's what happened to Benny Feinman.
     When we moved over to 1244 N. Claremont Avenue, we lived on the third floor of a three story apartment building. On the first floor lived a rabbi, H. N. Rosenblum, and his son, a medical doctor. When I became 13, Rabbi Rosenblum made me a stickholder for weddings that were conducted in his living room. I must have held the stick for more than a hundred weddings. Four men were required to hold the corners of the hupa, the wedding canopy. When he was a stickholder short, Rabbi Rosenblum with his full flowing beard, would point a finger at me, to indicate that I should come.
     I wouldn't ever haggle with a rabbi. I was taught by my father to respect rabbis. I would never even call a rabbi by his first name, after he became a rabbi. Although I am extremely close to Rabbi Kramer, I've never once called him Rabbi Bill or William or Mordecai; I always refer to him as Rabbi. It's a matter of the way you must treat people. I know rabbis aren't perfect; when a man enters the rabbinate, alas, the rabbinate doesn't always enter the man. Many rabbis playing on the name shouldn't. But since I am hardly one to judge personalities, I've always accorded all rabbis the dignity of their office. Anyway, Rabbi Rosenblum had a delightful family who would serve meals, not real meals, but crackers, matzoh,and fruit, in order for us to say a prayer. It always felt good to be invited to attend dinner with Rabbi Rosenblum.
     The apartment building was next to a vacant lot, which my father also purchased. When the Depression hit, we lost everything.

At the age of four years, I was accepted into kindergarten at the Schley school, a block away from our apartment. Many famous people attended the Schley school, including writers such as Ben Heck, who wrote The Child of the Century, who I suppose influenced me to become a journalist more than anybody else. I have great respect for Ben Heck. My father knew his father. I met him when I was just a kindergarten student, and he was a high school graduate who visited the Schley School.
     In my class was Saul Bellow, who much later won the Nobel Prize for literature. He had came from Canada. Saul Bellow kept to himself, and I didn't live on his block, but we did meet at the Schley School, where we were both students up to Junior High School. He then went on to Tule High School. I also took some classes at Tule, but most of my classes were at Crane Tech. Crane had more of a sports identity, and I was a sports aficionado. I loved basketball and football. Crane Tech was about three miles away, and I would usually walk there along Ofree Boulevard, if I couldn't hitch a ride. I was the greatest hitchhiker in Illinois, I guess. My thumb was constantly flying. In those days, it was quite safe to hitchhike, though I wouldn't recommend it today.
     I remember coming home once from Crane Tech High on the streetcar, and seeing the big newspaper headlines: "Wall Street Collapses." It was 1929, the October Massacre on Wall Street, which resulted in the Great Depression. But I'm getting ahead of the story.
     At the Schley school, we had a Miss Hoierman, a German woman who always wore high lace collars. None of her arms or legs could be seen, what with her floor-length dresses. She was stiff and austere, and wore those pince-nez glasses. Nobody haggled with Miss Hoyaman. Her assistant was Mrs. Larson, an Irish lady. (Of course, it seems to me now that Larson must have been Scandinavian). She too, was staunch, and had no entangling alliances. These were the two toughest teachers in my whole experience in school.
     When I was six years old, we were visited by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. The Temperance Union ladies came up on stage with one of those huge 10 gallon water bottles, which was empty. They had a ten foot long rubber tube, at the end of which was a lighted cigarette. Suddenly the inside of that tank became filled with smoke of the ugliest yellow color you ever saw. Just out of one cigarette. One of the Christian Temperance ladies got up and said "This is a warning to you children not to smoke. One cigarette can do this to your lungs. And if you smoke at all, you'll probably be smoking a pack or two a day. You can imagine how much of this dirty gas would fill your lungs in just a day's time." Then she passed out punch cards. I was so frightened by that demonstration, and I believed in its truthfulness, that I took a card, pledging never to smoke in my life. And I never did smoke. Others pledged not to smoke until they were eighteen, or twenty-one or older. I think that I was the only one in class to take the pledge for life.
     I wish my brother had taken the same pledge. We were close, so close. Robert became a fine optometrist but I could never make him see the dangers of smoking, that robbed him so many years.
     I went through classes very easily. Teachers would always say, "Herb, you're one of the smartest kids in class, why are you afraid to do arithmetic?" I was so fearful of doing arithmetic, that I flunked one whole semester in the fourth grade, because I couldn't do the math problems. If you asked me today to do the problems of the fourth grade, I'm sure that I wouldn't be able to do them.

Sol was fired after working for the gas company for 29 years -- just before he became eligible for a pension. No longer a "gas engineer." The oncoming Depression became hungry days for the young Brin family. But my father's faith in the national system that spelled democracy never wavered. These things my mother could never quite understand. But her eyes reflected love for her learned husband.
     My father's pursuit of the American spirit brought him in conflict with communism that had taken root in Russia, and he wrote numerous articles for Chicago's leading Polish newspapers, especially the Chicagoski, warning that dreadful consequences would be inevitable should Poland fall back on anti-Semitism as a way of life.
     These things, he insisted, would never happen in Germany. Never mind that a German idiot with a Charlie Chaplin mustache had taken over the country.

In further chapters read --

• how Herb Brin became a spy, infiltrating the German-American Bund and helping to undermine the Nazi Party...

 

• the life of a tough Chicago newsman, covering gangland killings and grabbing hot scoops under the noses of America's top reporters...

 

• serving in the Army during the Second World War...

 

• moving to California and blowing the whistle on McCarthy-ite terror tactics...

 

• serving as an ace reporter for the Los Angeles Times...

 

• the last Californian to wave goodbye to a little tramp...

 

• covering the Eichmann Trial for the Times...

 

• undergoing hardship in order to establish the Heritage chain of newspapers to serve the needs of a people...

 

• as the first journalist to investigate the condition of Soviet Jewry, blowing the whistle on a rising tide of persecution...

 

• "how I first broke the story of Schindler's List!"...

 

• long years of struggle... and poetry...

 

• taking on the Aryan Nations and other crazies...

 

• travels, investigations, and always the fight for Justice.

Now, for a limited time, a complete edition of "Shouting for Justice: The Autobiography Of Herb Brin" is available for special order.
 
Inquire about the special volume of the Western States Jewish History journal (vol.XXXIX #2, winter 2006), or go to their website. (If this fails, try: davidbrin@sbcglobal.net)
 
For 2007 and 2008, we expect to have copies available at $17.50 (which includes postage). Checks can be sent directly to Western States Jewish History, 22711 Cass Avenue, Woodland Hills, CA 91364
 
Meanwhile, keep up the fight for justice in your own corners of the world. It will take all of us.