Sadly, he is no longer alive. He passed away in 1987, when I was a freshman in college. It was a painful ending of his life. I have written about this. As has my brother Michael. As have some other people here and there. If you want to know more about that, well, here are some links to read.
- A day to think, to pause, to ponder. Posted by me February 7, 2013.
- My quest to free my father's publications
- David Dobbs in Wired Free Science, One Paper at a Time
- David Dobbs follow up "Jonathan Eisen frees (almost all) his father's papers."
- My page about this
- Mother Jones article about my brother Michael Eisen with a discussion of our father.
- My brother's post from February 8, 2013: My father, Aaron Swartz, and assigning blame for suicide
- My brother on scientific witchhunts: Yoshiki Sasai and the deadly consequences of science misconduct witchhunts
But that is not what I want to write about today. The pain of his suicide will be with me forever I am sure. But I want to focus on his life. And that I know remarkably little about. So it was with great interest that a few years ago his sister Arleen came to visit us in California. And as part of this visit she gave me my father's Bar Mitzvah Book.
I glanced at it and then it sat in a box for a while. I have never been religious and did not have a Bar Mitzvah myself. So it seemed foreign to me.
But then, when Arleen passed away relatively suddenly, I felt really disconnected form my father's history. And so one day I opened the book and leafed through it more carefully. And I became a bit obsessed with it. The book had dozens of pictures from the event. And cards and telegrams congratulating my father. And all sorts of notes and notations of various kinds. I barely recognized any of the people. Of course, this was from 1955 so that is not that surprising. But part of this is that I have never been that close to my father's family. I always got along with them, but just never saw them that often before my father died and even less afterwards. So the key to me was - how could I figure out just what was in the book. And more importantly to me, could I figure out who was at this event. This was one of the only tangible things I had to hold about my father's childhood. I did not know too many stories. I did not have many artifacts of any kind. And here was this major major event. And I literally had the book about it.
So today I am here to tell you, I have digs into this book. And stunningly, it not only told me about one event, it told me about my family. A lot. It did this because I was able to figure out who most of the people were at the Bar Mitzvah - and most of them were family. In addition, I have used some family tree databases such as Ancestry and My Heritage to track down information about these people and have been able to use this one book to basically figure out, I think quite accurately, many generations of my father's family tree.
