Hadassah Lieberman - Hadassah: An American Story

I am not unbiased about the author of this book.

On April 11, 1982, I drove from New Haven, Connecticut, to Riverdale, New York, to meet Hadassah, and I immediately fell in love with her. We were married less than a year later on March 20, 1983, in my hometown of Stamford, Connecticut. She has been my indispensable partner in life since that day. I can gratefully say I am even more in love with her than I was on the day we met.

Hadassah Freilich Lieberman is a gifted, good, and gracious person. She had an impressive professional life in the pharmaceutical industry until she married me, and, as we joke, I ruined her career. In fact, she continued to work part-time throughout my six years as Connecticuts attorney general and twenty-four years in the US Senatefirst at a Catholic hospital in New Haven, then at two health care consulting firms in Washington, DC, and the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure for Breast Cancer.

In the midst of all that, she blended our four children into one family. As Hadassah says, we are both parents of all four, even though neither of us is the biological parent of all of them. And now she is the devoted and loving Savta (Hebrew for Grandma) to our twelve grandchildren.

This book is Hadassahs extraordinary life story. It goes from her birth in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to parents who survived the Nazi Holocaust; to her childhood far away from Europe as the daughter ofa rabbi in a small New England city, Gardner, Massachusetts; to her professional career in the pharmaceutical industry; to becoming my partner in our private and public lives; to her emergence as a national figure in her own right during our 2000 vice-presidential campaign.

The arc of Hadassahs life is a miraculous journey from the horrors of the Holocaust to the heights of American society. It is a story of survival and strength, inspiration and hope, and it will remind you, the reader, of the blessings of freedom and opportunity America gives to its citizens.

For me, Hadassah has provided unwavering love and support and the best and most honest counsel I could want. I could not have achieved whatever I have without her. Living with Hadassah has taught me a lot about life, especially about being the child of survivors and an immigrant to America.

Growing up Jewish in America after World War II, I was certainly aware of the Holocaust, but all my family had left Europe for the United States and Israel before the war. Marrying Hadassah brought me into the lives of her parentsher father a survivor of Nazi slave labor camps in Hungary, her mother a survivor of the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps. As Hadassah describes them in the pages of this story, her parents were amazingly resilient. They pressed forward proudly after the war to build a life and family for themselves, first in Prague and then, after the Communists seized control of Czechoslovakia, in America. But they were forever scarred and shaped by the Holocaust, and so too was their daughter, and so too, through our marriage, was I.

Hadassah and her family brought me personally into the nightmarish Holocaust experience and all it teaches about human nature and the capacity of leaders and governments to do good and evil. It influenced my worldview and helped shape the policies I pursued in my public life, particularly in advancing the rule of law and human rights here at home and around the rest of the world, and supporting strong and realistic American foreign and defense policies.

I was born in America to parents who were also born in America, but all four of my grandparents were immigrants, and one of themmy mothers motherlived with us during most of my childhood and was like a third parent to me. In other words, I was not as personally distant from the immigrant experience as I was from the Holocaust experience before I met and married Hadassah. But, still, she and her parents were themselves immigrants, and that defined Hadassah and still does. She has great appreciation for the opportunities America gave her family, which native-born Americans too often dont have. But she also remembers the difficulties and challenges they confronted as immigrants and the ways in which she was expected to help her parents work their way into and through life in America. The fact that her parents were immigrants has been a great motivator for Hadassah to work hard to succeed and, as her father would say, to write your name in the sky. During our 2000 national campaign, she did in fact write her name in the sky. I will never forget that night at the Democratic National Convention when Hadassah introduced me to accept the vice-presidential nomination and the delegates were holding thousands of signs with one word on them: Hadassah. During the campaign, she reached out to immigrants all over America from all over the world, and they warmly responded to and embraced her as one of their own.

Hadassah and I will always do all that we can to welcome and support new immigrants as our families were welcomed and supported by those who came to America before us.

I am very proud that my wife has written her story in this book and grateful that the distinguished Brandeis University Press is publishing it.