Pearl Gluck Nathan (1913-2017), Joan’s mother, was born in New York City. Nathan’s grandparents on her mother’s side, Martha and Henry Gluck, immigrated from Slovakia and Poland in the late 1870s, and like thousands before them, first settled on the Lower East Side of New York City, where they operated a dress and millinery shop on Madison Avenue. A great aunt perished in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He returned to Germany and convinced his parents to join him in America in the early 1930s. Ernest Nathan (1905-1991), Joan’s father, was a native of Augsburg, Germany, who immigrated to Warwick, Rhode Island, in 1929 as a young chemical engineer aware of “what the rising tide of nationalism would mean for Jews in Germany” (Carman). Born in Providence, Rhode Island, on January 26, 1943, Joan Nathan was raised in the quintessential American Jewish experience of an upper-middle-class family negotiating assimilation, modernity, and the pull of ancestral ties to Europe.
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