The strongman

Abstract

Growing up on New York City's Lower East Side of the 1950s there were no other Breitbarts to be found, so it was not surprising that I would be drawn to the heroic legend of my famous ancestor and namesake, Siegmund (Zishe) Breitbart. My parents were survivors of the Holocaust, born in Turka, a small shtetl in Galicia, Poland, not far from the Lodz birthplace of the “greatest Jewish strongman—the modern Samson.” Being related to the famous Jewish “Iron King” was, for me, a proud link to a legacy of strength, courage, and defiance in an environment scarred by the profound losses and overwhelming grief of my generation of “children of survivors.” In 1994, I attended the International AIDS Congress in Berlin, and was the first Breitbart, to my knowledge, to visit Zishe's grave site in a small Jewish cemetery in the former East Berlin. Zishe Breitbart was a looming figure of strength in my subconscious.