Any facet of Josef Eisinger’s remarkably wide-ranging century of life would be enough to shape the entire identity of another person. If you were to ask how his experience has intersected with history, for example, he might tell you about escaping the Nazis’ reign of terror in his native Austria by fleeing to Britain by himself as a teenager, or about the years he spent being shuffled between internment camps in Canada before he’d even graduated from high school. If you were to ask about his professional accomplishments, he might tell you about his journey from physicist to molecular biologist to historian, or about being awarded two Guggenheim fellowships, or about how his research into lead poisoning sparked the creation of new federal policy.
And if you asked him what has brought him joy, he might volunteer information about his kids and grandkids, his lifelong love of painting, or how playing music gave him his ticket out of the internment camps and helped him meet his wife. “I’m always surprised that people have such a hard time finding something that really excites them, because I never had that problem,” he says, sitting on a couch in front of a wall full of his paintings at home in Manhattan’s West Village. “My problem is too many things.
” By the time Eisinger was in his early 20s, he had already been a farmworker, dishwasher, lumberjack, gold prospector, and soldier. Even after he studied physics, first at the University of Toronto for his undergrad.