Life
Kosminski was born in the Polish town of Kłodawa, which was then in the Russian Empire. His parents were Abram Jozef Kozminski, a tailor, and his wife Golda née Lubnowska. In 1882, at the age of 17, he emigrated to England, and embarked on a career as a barber in the Whitechapel district of the East End of London. Whitechapel was an impoverished slum that had become home to many Jewish refugees who were fleeing pogroms and economic hardship in eastern Europe and Tsarist Russia. His sisters, brother and widowed mother also left Russia and lived in Whitechapel.
On two occasions in July 1890 and February 1891, Kosminski was placed in Mile End Old Town workhouse because of his insane behaviour. On the second occasion, he was discharged to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, where he remained for the next three years until he was admitted on 19 April 1894 to Leavesden Asylum. Case notes indicate that Kosminski had been ill since at least 1885. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people that drove him to pick up and eat food dropped as litter, and a refusal to wash or bathe. The cause of his insanity was recorded as "self-abuse", which is thought to be a euphemism for masturbation. His poor diet seems to have kept him in an emaciated state for years; his low weight was recorded in the asylum case notes. By February 1919, he weighed just 96 pounds (44 kg). He died the following month.
Read more about this topic: Aaron Kosminski
Famous quotes containing the word life:
““You are old, Father William,” the young man cried,
“And life must be hastening away;
You are cheerful, and love to converse upon death:
Now tell me the reason, I pray.”
“I am cheerful, young man,” Father William replied;
“Let the cause thy attention engage;
In the days of my youth I remembered my God,
And He hath not forgotten my age.””
—Robert Southey (1774–1843)
“But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I don’t like your miserable lonely single “front name.” It is so limited, so meagre; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)