By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO—I dropped by the office of Prof. Lawrence Baron in the new—it almost smells like a new car—Arts and Letters Building during his official office hours. One fellow was in there before me: Yale Strom, SDSU's artist-in-residence, who is teaching a course about klezmer music, a subject on which he is a foremost authority.

I heard snatches of their conversation before heading over to a four-chair nook by a large picture window located a few strides down a 5th floor hallway.  Strom was interested in the various procedures that a professor must follow—when this or that piece of paperwork must be filed—to keep the university authorities happy.  

A musician and documentary film maker, Strom had taught previously at New York University, but every university has its own rules and rituals. As Strom's special lectureship had been arranged by the Jewish Studies Program, Baron was a particularly good source to ask.  Before taking the graduate student advisor job, he had served for many years as the director of SDSU's Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies.

My question also dealt with procedures, and once disposed of, I had the opportunity to schmooze with Baron, who is the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History.  That endowed chair was named for the same man for which Nasatir Hall also was named, the longtime SDSU history professor, Abraham Nasatir.

Whenever I think of Nasatir, I find myself thinking of James Stewart, not because the professor looked anything like the movie actor, but because there was a time near the end of his life that had a certain tear-to- your-eye, lump-to-your-throat It's a Wonderful Life quality about it. In the movie, an angel showed the character played by Stewart what the world would have looked like without him.

The late Henry Schwartz, who himself was a wonderful historian, wrote a three-part series for the San Diego Jewish Times about Nasatir's life—a series which I shall hereafter paraphrase and hope to do justice to.  The series ran in 1987, thirteen years after Nasatir had retired, and you can read it in its entirety on this website, through an arrangement with the San Diego Jewish Times. (Scroll down the page to the 1987 entries.)

Nasatir had started teaching at San Diego State in 1927  when it was called San Diego Normal School, when its 350 students consisted mainly of aspiring teachers.  During Nasatir's 47 years as a professor, the school moved to its present site and its enrollment grew to 30,000.  Cumulatively Nasatir must have taught thousands of students during nearly a half century. 

Some students thought him to be gruff outside the classroom—all-business—but my guess is that he probably was quite shy.  At the age of 9, one of his hands had to be amputated after he mangled it in the chains of a truck he hit in a roller skating accident.  After that, he poured himself into his studies, finding that he excelled in history.  At UC-Berkeley he studied under Herbert Bolton, who pioneered studies of the Spanish colonial border lands that once neighbored the early U.S. Republic.  Nasatir took up the field and became a noted authority in his own right. 

Inside the classroom, Nasatir was a good storyteller who made history vivid, but once "off-stage" the scholar loved nothing better than to research.  As his wife, Ida, had grown up in San Francisco, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, they often went back to the Bay Area to visit her Hirsch family. On those trips, Abe used to love to return to the Berkeley campus, where he could research at its famous Bancroft Library. Nasatir took prodigious notes, and it may not be an exaggeration to say he spent the equivalent of a year's salary on photocopying. 

His campus office was stuffed with books and stacks of notes.  So, too, was his home in Normal Heights. Some privileged students were permitted to come to the Nasatir home on Saturdays to do their research, although, because it was Shabbat, Nasatir would never assist them in their work.  An outsider might think the floor-to-ceiling stacks of papers signified disorganization, but nothing was further from the truth.  Nasatir could tell you where anything was.  One Shabbat a student wondered whether a certain folio might be.  "In the closet?" he asked Nasatir, who didn't exactly answer but gave his head a little shake.  "The bureau?" Again a shake.  "Under the bed?" A smile.  That was exactly where it was.

The Nasatir home was above a canyon, and one summer day, police and firemen burst inside,  ordering Abe and Ida to leave at once..  Didn't they realize that a fire had leaped from the canyon brush to the back of their home?  There was no time to gather anything; they simply had to get out.  Ida and Abe, recently retired, stood on the street and watched their home burn down, and with it, the major portion of Nasatir's fabled research library.  His life's work.  All the books he had planned to write.  Perhaps a half-million sheets of research notes and photocopies.  Their personal effects.

Despite himself, and despite years of faithful practice of Orthodox Judaism in which he might have taken solace, Nasatir went into the deepest of depressions.  His whole academic life, what had it amounted to?  Charred papers.  Soot.  He was so depressed that he later admitted to Schwartz that he had considered suicide.  

The story of the fire at the old professor's house was carried over the news, and a spontaneous collection was taken up for the Nasatirs—until quite embarrassed, they put a stop to that.  But along with that outpouring came a flood of calls and letters from former students who told him how much they came to love history in his classroom, what an inspiration he had been to them, and how in many cases, he had set them upon their own careers as history teachers or professors.

Now that I am a student again, I can't help but think of this story whenever I schlep past Nasatir Hall.   The professor's legacy was not to be found in the ashes of his library. His real legacy was the legion of students that he had taught and inspired. He truly had led a "wonderful life."