My Own Words

In their description of Ginsburg’s childhood, secondary education, college, and legal training, the biographers discuss several elements of Ginsburg’s life that played pivotal roles in shaping her as a person and in focusing her on significant causes. The premature deaths of family members—her sister when Ginsburg was one, her mother when she was 17, and her father when she was 35—left her as the only surviving member of her family of origin at an early age. The biographers describe Ginsburg’s awareness of perceived injustices: Unlike the young men in her synagogue, she could not participate in the Jewish ritual of adulthood, the bar mitzvah; her great uncle demolished the treasured bicycle of her uncle when he caught Celia’s brother riding it on the Sabbath. These injustices were not confined to her personal world. As her early essays reveal, she was well-aware of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe. Given that her father was a first-generation immigrant from Ukraine, where the Nazis ultimately killed 1.6 million Jews, and her mother’s parents immigrated from Poland, where the Nazis killed 3 million Jews, Ginsburg had a strong connection to the suffering and injustice experienced by Holocaust victims, a reality she wrote about while in her early teens.