Roots Lost-Roots Found

This is a memoir describing my life from my early years in Vienna, the city where I was born.

At age 13, my life was forcefully disrupted by the Anschluss or Annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938. As Jews, our family had to flee and was separated and displaced. My sister, Herta, was the first member of the family to leave Vienna; she emigrated to Kenya in East Africa where we had an uncle who found her a job. This gave her permanent residency in this British colony. My parents and I left Vienna in November 1938 and January 1939 for Shanghai’s International Settlement, which at the time had no limitations on immigration and, as a result, served as a refuge for about 20,000 Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria and Poland.

I lived in Shanghai with my parents throughout WWII and under Japanese military occupation after Pearl Harbor. I graduated from a United States Episcopalian missionary-founded college, St. John’s University, in chemistry in 1947.

After the end of WWII in 1948, I left Shanghai for Berkeley where I completed my studies at the University of California with a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1951. In 1952 I went to live in Haifa, Israel, where I joined the faculty of the Israel Institute of Technology, also known as Technion. At Technion I rose through the ranks to a full professorship.

In 1965 I left Israel and moved to Los Angeles where I joined the faculty of the University of Southern California (USC) Chemistry Department in Los Angeles. I retired from the USC Chemistry Department in 1992 but returned in 1994 to take up the position of Director of the East Asian Studies Center and I retired from this position in December 2000. The East Asian Studies Center is not a department, but it is a collection of faculty specializing in Chinese, Japanese and Korean language and culture. It was my responsibility and challenge to obtain funding in support of the faculty members’ and graduate students’ scholarly activities. The funding came from the United States government Department of Education and private sources.

In 2007 I moved with my wife, Eileen, to the retirement community of Rossmoor in Walnut Creek, CA. Eileen died of peritoneal malignancy in December 2010. I have continued to live in Rossmoor and participate in various activities in this community. —Otto Schnepp