In 1930, when Eric C. Kast was 14 years old, a fellow student at his school in Austria asked him, “Are you a Jew?” Kast hesitated, then said, “I, uh, don’t think so.”
So the youth went searching for foundations to build his life on. When his mother joined the Catholic Church in 1935, Kast became a convert, too. When a family friend, the editor of a Viennese socialist newspaper, spoke movingly of the plight of the poor, Kast began studying the writings of Karl Marx. He became an active member of socialist youth organizations and Marxist study groups. He stirred a ruckus at his school by speaking out for improved benefits for the low-paid snow shovelers and maintenance men. “I nearly got thrown out,” he laughs. “I wanted the administration to do something about social inequity. They just saw me as a troublemaker.”
Sorrowfully, Kast packed up, bade farewell to his parents and friends, and left his homeland–probably, he thought, forever. “I can still remember standing at the railing of the boat and watching the European coastline disappear over the horizon,” he says. “I can tell you I wept bitterly.” A few months later, Jews in Germany and Austria endured the infamous Kristallnacht. Jewish-owned businesses were broken into and looted, homes were vandalized and ransacked, and some unlucky Jewish citizens, caught in the open, were murdered. That night, of course, marked the beginning of the horrors.
It is 7 PM on a summer evening, and 31 patients are waiting at Saint Basil’s Health Service-Free People’s Clinic on West Garfield Boulevard. Most are black and elderly, although several mothers with babies and a few young men are sitting around. No wall or other demarcation separates the reception area from the inner sanctum where doctors and nurses reign. As a result, the five doctors, two dentists, and assorted lay volunteers on duty this evening mingle freely with waiting patients as they usher people in and out of examining rooms. The receptionist is a young college student from the neighborhood.
Another 30-year-old internist, Dr. Lori Soglin, who works at Near North Health Services, has also been a weekly regular for two years. “I’ll tell you why I come,” she says. “It’s because there’s a complete separation of service from payment. Working here is the favorite thing I do, medically, all week. And there’s a real community spirit. The people in the neighborhood, the patients themselves, chip in with their time to keep the place going.”
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The health care in New City and surrounding communities is “catastrophic,” according to Rudy Harper, executive director of the Organization of New City, which has been campaigning for improved medical attention to the area since 1975. “We’ve made some progress,” he says, “but what we still desperately need and haven’t got is more full-service facilities.”
