Paul Berg has died | Hacker News Reader

Paul Berg has died

the-scientist.com

60 pointspseudolus9 comments

Important to note: Prof. Berg died on February 15 (https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2023/02/nobel-paul-be...). This article reads like an obituary, though I'm confused why it's so late.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35236192

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Berg

” Born to Jewish Russian immigrants in Brooklyn, New York on June 30, 1926, Berg developed a love for science during middle school…”

sigh The _vast_ majority of “Russian Jews” who came to the US prior to the 1960s were not from Russia at all, but from one of their colonized lands, ranging from Latvia to Romania to Poland. It seriously took me less two minutes online to find Professor Berg’s parents’ Ellis Island immigration record in 1923, which clearly lists both his parents as having been born in “Kiew” (Kyiv, Ukraine) which had been in an independent country until a few months before they left, and that they had been staying more recently in “Kishineff” (Chișinău, Moldova) prior to immigration, which was in the independent Kingdom of Romania at the time. I hate how these kinds of articles naively repeat the word “Russian” to overwrite the histories and nationalities of the independent people who live(d) in eastern Europe.

Come on, hn isn't a place for this historical revisionism and juggling with facts.

If his parents were born in Kiew (Kyiv), then when they were born, it was a part of Russian Empire, and not a country that gained short independence in 1917-21.

If his non-Anglo parents had been born in somewhere like Galway, Chennai, or Hong Kong in 1900, and had similarly come to the US in 1923, it is very unlikely that his New York Times obituary would read simply “born to British parents…” even if they had indeed lived as subjects under British colonial rule. They would more likely have been identified with the modern nationality (i.e. “born to Irish parents…”), or perhaps with an epithet acknowledging the colonialism, such as “British Raj”.

They probably spoke Yiddish and Russian not Ukrainian correct

Probably, yeah — just like the current president of Ukraine, whose native tongue is Russian. That happens a lot when local people have a foreign language forced upon them by an empire that literally sent people to the gulag for decades for secretly opening schools to teach their children in native languages.

Ukraine was part of Russia until the Russian Revolution in 1917.

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