Holocaust Survivor to Harvard Dean:: Memoirs of a Refugee’S Progress

By Michael Shinagel

Michael Shinagels inspiring memoir, Holocaust Survivor to Harvard Dean, traces the highlights of his remarkable career from childhood in Vienna, Austria, to his familys terrifying exodus from Hitlers Europe (19381941), refugee life and public school education in New York City (19411951), a false start in agriculture at Cornell University (19511952), service with the US Army in Korea (19521954), college on the G. I. Bill at Oberlin (19541957), doctoral studies on a national fellowship and academic administration at Harvard University (19571964), and a fifty-year academic career of teaching and administration at Cornell University (19641967), Union College (19671975), and Harvard University (19752013).

At his retirement in 2013, he was acclaimed as the longest-serving dean in Harvard history and as one of the transformative leaders of the university. The memoir shows how Shinagels entrepreneurial management style enabled him to innovate with new initiatives and new academic programs for the benefit of both the internal Harvard community and the external community of adult learners in Greater Boston. With the advent of distance education, the reach of the Harvard Extension School became global.

He spends his retirement years as a distinguished lecturer in Extension at Harvard, teaching graduate seminars on satire and the English and American novel, directing Extension masters theses in literature, and participating in professional development workshops on leadership and decision-making in the Division of Continuing Education. He continues to serve as a lecturer and study group leader on Harvard Alumni Travel Tours around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524509590

Book preview

COPYRIGHT © 2016 BY MICHAEL SHINAGEL.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER:   2016909854

   ISBN:   HARDCOVER   978-1-5245-0961-3

      SOFTCOVER   978-1-5245-0960-6

      EBOOK   978-1-5245-0959-0

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.

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Rev. date: 07/06/2016

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CONTENTS

I. Foreword

II. Vienna Years (1934–1938)

III. Exodus From Vienna (1938–1941)

IV. New York City Years (1941–1951)

V. Cornell University, School Of Agriculture (1951–1952)

VI. On The Road (1952)

VII. U.s. Army: Korea (1952–1954)

VIII. Return To College After Korea: Oberlin (1954–1957)

IX. Graduate Study At Harvard University (1957–1964)

X. Cornell University Again: English Faculty (1964–1967)

XI. Union College (Schenectady, New York) (1967–1975)

XII. Return To Harvard: Administration And Teaching (1975–2013)

XIII. Afterword (2016)

[Dedication page]

For my extended family, whoever and wherever they may be: Shalom.

"When at the first I took my Pen in hand,

This for to write; I did not understand

That I at all should make a little Book

In such a mode. …"

- John Bunyan

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

- Willa Cather

I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.

- Samuel Johnson

FOREWORD

When one retires––or is retired––at an advanced age in academe, one becomes aware that one is approaching, in the apt phrase of the literary critic Frank Kermode, a sense of an ending. The curtain on one’s life isn’t coming down just yet, but we sense that we are experiencing the final act. It is the time for a backward glance, a time to take stock and gain a proper perspective. This is the time that people write their memoirs.

Academics have spent their careers writing and lecturing, so it is perhaps easier for us to write our memoirs. We have always had an audience, be it our students or our peers. Others have more difficulty addressing an audience. Is it family? Is it friends? Is it the public? We must be clear on our sense of audience, and we must be comfortable in the voice in which we write.

I was officially retired from Harvard in the summer of 2013 in what happened to be the eightieth year of my age. Certainly it was at an advanced age, but at the time I felt vigorous and eager to continue in my decanal role. At my retirement event, I was informed that a search of the university records revealed that I had the honor of being the longest-serving dean in the history of Harvard, an imposing milestone on which to close out an academic career.

On the occasion of the centennial of the Harvard Extension School in 2009, I published my official history titled The Gates Unbarred. I had devoted a decade to researching and writing that history, and it was gratifying that it was favorably received in April 2010 by the University Continuing Education Association with the Phillip Frandson Award for Literature as the best book on continuing higher education published that year.

With the publication of the history of the Harvard Extension School, I had fulfilled my goal of telling the story of that remarkable academic enterprise and my long tenure as dean in its evolution. Now in my retirement I didn’t have to focus on the institution so much when it came time to write my memoirs. I was free to examine my life and write a narrative of what it was like to be Michael Shinagel, warts and all. I surprised myself at my recall of events and anecdotes that I had long forgotten or stored away somewhere in my memory bank.

In any event, this memoir is in my voice, and what I relate is what I want to share with people who may be interested to know who I am. It has been an eventful life, and it tells a story. But the story still awaits a sense of an ending.

VIENNA YEARS

(1934–1938)

What are our earliest memories? James Joyce has his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begin with the baby Stephen Dedalus recalling his father telling him a story, his father’s hairy face, his father singing him a song, his mother putting an oilsheet on his bed when he wet it, and his mother had a nicer smell than his father. I, unfortunately, can summon up none of these sensory memories from my childhood.

What I know of my earliest years I learned from my parents, from my brother, or from family photo albums. I was born on April 21, 1934, to Jewish middle-class parents in Vienna, Austria. I had an older brother, Frederick, and my mother years later told me in passing that I was born only because my first-born brother, Erick, died stillborn, having strangled on his umbilical cord in the womb.

The marriage of my parents in Vienna was in 1928. My father, Emmanuel Schinagel, was born in Gorlice, a small town in what was originally part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now Poland. His family was poor, and he had to go to work after he finished grade school. My mother, Lilly Hillel, came from a poor but educated family in Leipnik, Czechoslovakia. Her father had a doctorate from Frankfurt University and served as rabbi for the local Jewish community. Her father died in 1928 while she was young and, after rejecting some local suitors, she was sent off to Vienna to live with an older sister, Augusta. There she met and wed my father, who had also gone to Vienna to pursue a business career in the clothing industry in 1917. My mother was working as a salesgirl in a milliner’s shop when my father first met her in the store.

By the time I was born my parents had achieved a secure middle-class lifestyle in a suburb of Vienna. In our apartment we had a live-in au pair maid/governess named Agnes, who lived in the bedroom shared with my brother and me. To my parents, the years in Vienna were the golden years, with a comfortable existence in one of Europe’s most culturally diverse and stimulating capitals.

I cannot conjure up any vivid memories of my early years in Vienna, from my birth in 1934 until our precipitous departure at the time of the Anschluss with Hitler’s Germany in 1938. From family photo albums I saw many pictures of vacations in the mountains and family gatherings. I also saw a memorable photo of me as a naked baby strapped to a toilet seat emitting a primal scream. My mother explained that in Vienna children were expected to be toilet-trained at an early age to justify that traumatic event depicted in the photo.

As I look back on those early years, I sense that I was not a very happy and well-adjusted child. My mother told me that when I was three the family would take a walk together on a Sunday and I was dressed up smartly in a sailor suit. While my parents and my brother walked on the sidewalk, I strutted in the street, and when my parents called me to join them on the sidewalk, I said, Kein Platz. (No room.)

Another incident occurred at home in Vienna, when I found a pair of scissors and cut up the dining room tablecloth that my mother had meticulously crocheted as part of her wedding dowry years before. This act prompted my mother to take me to a child psychiatrist in Vienna, a protégé of Alfred Adler, as I subsequently learned. Many years later, when I was in my forties, I asked my mother what the diagnosis of the psychiatrist in Vienna had been. She reported that he informed her that boys had both good and bad in their natures, and when I cut up the tablecloth my bad nature was operating. I remember that at the time I thought, So much for psychiatric enlightenment!

Many years later, when I was a father with children, I learned from my brother something that helped me to understand my anger and unhappiness as a child in Vienna. A family relative told my brother that my mother in Vienna teased my father that he may not have been the one who sired me. She no doubt wanted to dramatize herself and make my father jealous and more attentive. But the effect obviously had its deleterious results in the father-son relationship we never fully developed in our lives. I can see now that I had a father in name, but not in practice, a loss that I profoundly regret. The Vienna years of my childhood remain a blank slate in my memory because I repressed a great deal due to family issues and to Hitler’s growing presence in our lives. As Jews, our future in Vienna looked more and more threatened and insecure. Finally, on May 8, 1938, my father arranged, without notifying my mother, our permanent departure from our home in Vienna to Prague by train and eventually to my mother’s family home in Leipnik, Czechoslovakia.

EXODUS FROM VIENNA (1938–1941)

My father’s prescience about Hitler and the Nazis enabled us to flee from Vienna as a family shortly after the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938 and well before the catastrophic Kristallnacht of November 1938. Early in June 1938, my father traveled from Prague to Brussels to stay with his younger brother Julius and to prepare for our immigration to the United States. By September of 1938, he sent for his wife and children to join him in Brussels, and we flew from Prague on a Sabena flight. I have a vague recollection of the flight because it was my first ride in an airplane and I got airsick. I ran up and down the aisle shouting that I wanted to get off the plane, thinking that the fluffy cumulus clouds looked inviting for a soft landing. My father was waiting to meet us at the airport in Brussels.

We moved into an apartment in Brussels, and my brother was enrolled in the local elementary school. My uncle Julius was supportive of us until he left for the United States in 1939. We were scheduled to take passage to the United States from Le-Havre on May 12, 1940, but, unfortunately, the Nazis invaded the lowlands on May 10, and all adult male aliens were commanded to report to the police in Brussels on May 11. My father reported as instructed and then disappeared. We missed our departure date, and we suddenly were without our father in a war zone. Understandably, my mother was distraught.

My mother had a distant cousin in Antwerp, and she decided to move us there. While in Antwerp we had a photo taken in the local park and sent it to my father through the International Red Cross. Miraculously, the card reached my father in September 1940 at a detention camp in St. Cyprien near Perpignon, France. The camp was built during the Spanish Civil War to house refugees who fled to France. Now it was in service to house refugees from Eastern Europe. My mother applied to the Nazis in Antwerp for permission to travel to France to be reunited with our father and they acceded. We traveled south to the camp at St. Cyprien and I recall huts on the beach with lots of barbed wire and Vichy French guards posted at their stations. Eventually we located the right barracks and there behind the barbed wire wearing shorts was my father. I was given a chocolate bar to throw over the fence to my father before we went back to the bus on the outskirts of the camp. The time was the end of September. We had located our father, but we were not united as a family.

We took a train to Marseilles and found a tiny one-room apartment in the red-light district, where we lived as best we could. My brother Fred was sent to school, and I was left at home with my mother, who was undergoing a nervous breakdown. One day, when we were walking along the street near our apartment, my mother suddenly broke into tears and lay down on the ground saying she couldn’t go on. My brother gently spoke to her and said we needed her and she had to go on. She recovered enough to get home with us, but emotionally she was desperate. She prevailed on my brother to write a letter in French to the detention camp commander pleading that he release our father for a compassionate home leave. The letter was successful, and our father came home to us to take charge of the family and to start the immigration process for us to go to the United States. My brother was sent to a Quaker camp for the children of Spanish refugees for a month or so in the winter. I stayed at home. How my parents managed in our one-room apartment during this time, I have no idea. All I know is that we managed to survive, and that is the ultimate achievement.

My father rarely talked about his time in the detention camp or our exodus from Vienna, but once he shared with me his ordeal in the cattle car crowded with other refugees from Brussels to Marseilles. The trip took four days, but there were no toilet facilities and no food or water provided. The only relief my father said he experienced was when it rained and he could extend his fingers outside the cattle car to wet them and then wet his lips with the rainwater. When the train finally reached its destination, some of the refugees had died. My father fortunately survived.

The uncertainty of our circumstances and the anxiety about my father caused my mother to succumb to a nervous breakdown. While my brother was in school, I was