Early Life
Holbrooke was born on April 24, 1941, in New York City, to Dan Holbrooke and Trudi Kearl (née Moos); his brother, Andrew, survives him. Holbrooke's mother, whose Jewish family fled Hamburg in 1933 for Buenos Aires before coming to New York, took him to Quaker meetings on Sundays. His mother, a potter, has stated: “I was an atheist, his father was an atheist... We never thought of giving Richard a Jewish upbringing. The Quaker meetings seemed interesting.”
Holbrooke’s father, a doctor who died of cancer when Richard was 15 years old, was born of Polish Jewish parents in Warsaw and took the name Holbrooke after migrating to the United States in 1939. The original family name was Goldbrajch.
After Scarsdale High School, Holbrooke earned a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University in 1962, attending on a full-tuition scholarship. He was later a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, leaving in 1970.
Read more about this topic: Richard Holbrooke
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“He was a man of Spartan habits, and at sixty was scrupulous about his diet at your table, excusing himself by saying that he must eat sparingly and fare hard, as became a soldier, or one who was fitting himself for difficult enterprises, a life of exposure.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)