The American West in 2000: Essays in Honor of Gerald D. Nash

Autobiography: Roads to the West

Like many historians of the American West, I was not born in the region but came to it from somewhere else. Probably my road to becoming a western historian was longer and more indirect than that of many others. For the last forty years, however, more than one-half of my adult life, I became an adopted New Mexican,which gave me a vantage point for viewing the western experience in the twentieth century. My journey began in Germany.Without question, the accidents of birth provided me with particular perspectives.In my own case,I have always eschewed narrow provincialism and maintained a global view.Moreover,I have always harbored a passionate belief in human rights and the functions of historians to illuminate those rights. Undoubtedly such beliefs influenced my work as a historian. My life began in Berlin, Germany, where I was born in  into a Jewish middle-class family. My father was a businessman engaged in the lumber trade. Our family had deep roots in Germany. The original family name at one time was Nashon, an ancient Hebrew name already noted in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Over the centuries it had been Germanized to Nachschoen. With the dissolution of the ghettos in early-nineteenth-century Europe most Jews were forced to adopt new names,but apparently the Nashons were able to retain the German version of their original Hebrew name.My youth coincided with the rise of Hitler and Nazism. I spent the first nine years of my life in Nazi Germany.We lived in Berlin,the last few years near the Rathaus Schoeneberg.That was made famous by President John F.Kennedy in  when in a speech in front of the Rathaus,he proclaimed, “I am a Berliner.” My family left Germany in October , and after a stay in Palestine we came to the United States in March . Our arrival in America required many adjustments. My father decided to shorten our name since the German version was hard to pronounce for English speakers.As he searched for some kind of livelihood he decided to remain in New Autobiography: Roads to the West Gerald D. Nash   York City, at least in the immediate future.This was still the era of the depression , and jobs were hard to find, especially for a foreigner. Once my father did have a serious inquiry from the Duke City Lumber Company in a seemingly faraway place,Albuquerque, New Mexico.We pored over maps on the kitchen table to find the location of this distant town. But this job, and no others, materialized in . Everything was so different in the United States. In Germany my father had often bought timber from noblemen. I still remember accompanying him on some of these trips,waiting outside their castles in the car.In such surroundings a child’s imagination ran wild with images of castles,nobles,dukes, and royal forests, just as in fairy tales.Well, in America there were no dukes or medieval castles. It was a very different world. We settled in a small apartment in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood that quickly became an enclave of German-Jewish refugees in the s.I entered the local public school in the third grade.Mine had been a somewhat irregular peripatetic educational experience until then. Moreover, I was completely ignorant of the English language.The school officials were extremely gracious and assigned me a fellow student to guide me into the new language and culture. My parents and I were profoundly grateful.What other country on earth would make such efforts? My parents attended night school to improve their English while I,like most children,learned it in about a year or so.Bilingual programs were unknown at the time. Between  and  our savings were rapidly depleted, and my father’s search for a sales position in the lumber industry was futile. Given these circumstances ,my father decided what we needed most was a roof over our heads. One could skimp on other necessities like food. So in  he made the decision to lease a town house that had just been subdivided into studio apartments. We moved to the new address,  West rd Street in Manhattan, a rather upscale neighborhood near Riverside Drive.The address is noteworthy because this was the house that George Gershwin had just recently built for himself, his parents, and his brother Ira. George Gershwin died in , and the estate sold the house, which was...