A Very Special Young Man

• Author: Ronald K. Fierstein
• Profession: Lawyer on the team of litigators from the prestigious patent law firm of Fish & Neave
• Pages: 1-18

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CHAPTER 1

A VERY SPECIAL

YOUNG MAN

Life was getting progressively tougher for Avram Solomonovitch, his

wife, Ella, and their three sons. They lived near Kiev, in what is today

Ukraine.1 During the reign of Tsar Alexander III in the late nineteenth

century, violent anti-Jewish pogroms had led to a full assault by the Rus-

sian government against its Jewish people. It was the world of Sholem

Aleichem and Fiddler on the Roof. As conditions continued to deterio-

rate for the Jewish population in the early 1880s, Avram decided to take

advantage of a program that helped Russian Jews escape to America.2 It

was called the Jewish Colonization Association and had been organized

by a wealthy European banker, Maurice “Baron” Hirsch. With its help,

Avram and his young family sailed from Odessa to freedom. When they

arrived in New York City, they were processed at the Castle Garden immi-

gration facility, where Avram’s name was anglicized to Abraham Land.

The boys were renamed Samuel, Harry, and Louis.

After their arrival, the Lands were sent to an agricultural colony in

Colchester, Connecticut. It was part of Baron Hirsch’s organization. Abra-

ham worked on the farm as they all acclimated to their new country. By

the end of the decade, they had moved to New Jersey, where they became

naturalized citizens in 1888. Abraham got into the scrap metal business

and eventually moved the family back to Connecticut, settling in New

Haven. In the years after their arrival in America, Abraham and Ella had

five more children—two sons and three daughters. It was a large family,

but their father’s focus on education led all of the children into success-

ful lives. Two of the younger boys attended Yale and went on to become

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A Triumph of Genius

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lawyers. Two of the daughters became teachers. The others were success-

ful in business.

Harry, Abraham’s second oldest, had been born in Russia in 1880.

He followed his father into the scrap metal business. Just after the turn of

the century, Harry married Mattie Goldfaden, a fellow immigrant from

Russia whose family had settled in Cleveland. They settled in Bridge-

port, Connecticut, where, in 1904, their first child, a daughter they named

Helen, was born. Five years later, on May 7, 1909, Mattie gave birth to

their second child, a boy. He was named Edwin Herbert Land.

As a child, Helen apparently had a hard time pronouncing her younger

brother’s name and called him Din, a nickname that would be used by

his closest friends and colleagues throughout his life.3 The family moved

to Norwich, Connecticut, around 1919, where they settled in a Jewish

area. Eddie, as he was known around the neighborhood,4 joined the Boy

Scouts and was bar mitzvahed. Harry’s scrap metal business prospered.

He developed a valuable client in Electric Boat, a company that built sub-

marines for the U.S. Navy. Harry also invested heavily and successfully

in real estate, although much of the family fortune would later be lost in

the 1937 recession.5

In the early years of the twentieth century, most of the rest of the Land

family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where they remained close and

observant of their faith, gathering to celebrate Jewish holidays in groups

as large as forty cousins and uncles and aunts. Conspicuously absent from

these festivities were Harry and his family. A niece described them as being

“not unfriendly but cool and distant.” Mattie was “very, very aristocratic

[and] very well educated.” Whatever the reason, Harry’s aloofness seemed

eventually to infect Edwin, who by young adulthood had distanced himself

from his larger family, as well as from his Jewish ancestry. He told rela-

tives that he had given up the Jewish faith for business reasons. “I’m trying

to live down even the honorable part of my past,” he once told a journal-

ist.6 In later life, Edwin developed a penchant for privacy and secrecy and

was known to resist any and all attempts to have a biography written about

him.7 As noted by Victor McElheny, a journalist who covered, worked for,

and eventually managed to write a book about him, Land did his best to

“keep . . . his origins obscure . . . [and to] cultivate a mystery [leaving] few

clues to his boyhood.”8 At his father Harry’s funeral, a nephew asked Uncle

Edwin why he didn’t participate more in family gatherings. His answer was

“my work is my life.”9

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