Barry Goldsmith’s harrowing journey ends with death from COVID-19 at 82
Tsvi Hirsch Goldschmidt planned to escape alone from the Jewish ghetto in Iwje, Poland, on New Year’s Eve 1942. News was spreading that the Nazis, who had forced the city’s Jews into the ghetto a year earlier, were planning to liquidate it. But then his youngest son, Dov Baer, began to cry.
He picked him up and ran into the forest, leaving his wife and two older children, Pesach and Chaya Pesha, behind. They were ultimately murdered.
That one heartbreaking decision made possible a life, Dov’s, that encompassed much of the modern American experience, from immigration and the promise of postwar abundance, through the tumult of the 1960s, to the search for meaning in a secular society — and finally, in the early 21st century, to the ravages of a pandemic. It was a life of struggle that ended with a modicum of solace.
Dov Baer Goldschmidt, who became Barry Goldsmith after he arrived in the United States in 1950, died on Dec. 6 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was 82. The cause was complications of COVID-19, his daughter Gwen Goldsmith said.
He was born on May 1, 1938, in Iwje, a town in what was then eastern Poland and is now western Belarus. His father, who later changed his name to Harry Goldsmith, was a bricklayer; his mother, Golda ( Volpianski) Goldschmidt, was a homemaker.
Germany invaded the region in 1941, forcing the approximately 3,000 Jews of Iwje into a ghetto. Beginning in early 1942, German soldiers rounded up and murdered thousands. The final liquidation of Iwje was to begin at the new year.
Barry Goldsmith’s memory of the time was uneven, and often filtered through conversations with his father, who said that he only brought him on his escape because he had been small enough to carry.
After the war, the Goldschmidts joined tens of thousands of other Holocaust survivors in making their way to Italy, where Western forces had set up displaced persons camps. The pair spent several years living outside Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer residence near Rome, where Goldsmith learned Italian from the nuns who ran the camp.
Many at the camp hoped to move to Palestine, and to prepare them, representatives of the Jewish Agency for Israel operated a “hachsharot,” a form of training station, where the refugees learned farming and other skills.
Goldsmith never said whether he and his father had intended to join the move to Palestine. In 1950 they sailed to New York, where they settled in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.
Barry Goldsmith quickly blossomed into what his first wife, Lois ( Kessler)
Goldsmith, called “a perfectly American Jewish boy.” He spent weekends at the beach. He played soccer at Thomas Jefferson High School, which educated generations of Jewish immigrants and their children, including actor Danny Kaye, director Paul Mazursky and Lloyd Blankfein, the investment banker and former chairman of Goldman Sachs.Goldsmith began a rapid ascent in the world of New York corporate architecture. He joined the firm Oppenheimer, Brady and Associates, which had just won a contract to build Independence Plaza, a trio of 39-story apartment towers in what is now luxurious Tribeca but was then grungy downtown Manhattan. Goldsmith, who turned 30 in 1968, was made the lead designer.
The gargantuan complex embodied all the contradictions of postwar urban architecture. Complete with shopping and office space, Goldsmith’s towers were a city within a city, subsidized to keep middle- class New Yorkers from fleeing for the suburbs. But their construction required the demolition of several dozen acres of New York history, and their fortresslike street front turned a back on the city they were intended to help save.
Independence Plaza was completed in 1975, but Goldsmith had since been hired by the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to work on Westway, a plan to bury much of the West Side Highway in Manhattan.