Irvin D. Yalom Washington, D.C., June 13, 1931, of parents who immigrated from Russia (from a small village named Celtz near the Polish border) shortly after the first world war. Home was the inner city of Washington—a small apartment atop his parents’ grocery store on First and Seaton Street. During his childhood, Washington was a segregated city, and he lived in the midst of a poor, black neighborhood. Life on the streets was often perilous. Indoor reading was his refuge and, twice a week, he made the hazardous bicycle trek to the central library at seventh and K streets to stock up on supplies.
No counseling or direction was available: his parents had virtually no secular education, never read books and were entirely consumed in the struggle for economic survival. His book choices were capricious, directed in part by the library architecture; the large, centrally placed bookcase on biography caught his attention early, and he spent an entire year going through that bookcase from A (John Adams) to Z (Zoroaster). But it was mainly in fiction where he found a refuge, an alternate, more satisfying world, a source of inspiration and wisdom. Sometime early in life he developed the notion—one which he has never relinquished—that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.
To the ghetto mentality of his day, career choices for young men were limited or perceived as limited. All of his peers either went into medical school or into business with their fathers. Medical school seemed closer to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and he entered upon his medical training already having decided to go into psychiatry. Psychiatry proved (and proves to this day) endlessly intriguing, and he has approached all of his patients with a sense of wonderment at the story.......
