Childhood
Paul Burlin was born Isadore Berlin to Jacob and Julia Berlin in 1886. The family name was originally Berlinsky. His father was from London. His mother from a small city in Northern Germany near the Polish border. Paul grew up in New York City and London, the oldest of three children. His sister, Carrie, was born in 1890, his brother, David, in 1895. Paul disliked the name Isadore, and stopped using it as soon as he could, when he left home at 16. He found it too painful to discuss his early years, and he refused to do so. Once on his own, he changed his name to Harry Paul Burlin. By 1911, Harry had become H. and by 1915 it was gone altogether. Paul had completely separated from his family and his past, and continued to be forward thinking his whole life.
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Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“Ah happy hills! ah pleasing shade!
Ah fields beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood stray’d,”
—Thomas Gray (1716–1771)
“We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)