Zvi Griliches, 1930–1999: A Critical Appreciation
Zvi Griliches was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, on September 12, 1930, and died on November 4, 1999, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The story of how he got from there to here is a long one with a harrowing beginning. It has been told by Griliches himself in a talk presented on the eve of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) at the Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel Foundation (Griliches, 1992) and in an interview given to Alan Krueger and Timothy Taylor about four months before his death (Krueger and Taylor, 2000). The beginning was harsh: in 1940, the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania and the other Baltic Republics. The Nazis occupied the country in 1941. Griliches and his family were con®ned to the Ghetto in Kaunas in August of that year. He managed to evade the periodic roundups for transport to the concentration camps until sometime during the summer of 1944. After that, he was moved, often by foot, from one camp to another until he was liberated from Dachau by the American advance in May, 1945. He lost all his immediate family, except for a sister, in the Holocaust. Eventually, Griliches made his way via a British internment camp on Cyprus to what was then Palestine. After working on a kibbutz, participating in the War of Independence, and despite his lack of formal education, Griliches managed to pass what we would call a high school equivalency exam and spent a year studying history and languages at the Hebrew University, 1950±51, before matriculating in the College of Agriculture at the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained a bachelor's degree, 1953, and a master's degree, 1954, both in agricultural economics. While most people's subsequent intellectual development, ideas and perspective in a social science such as economics would be expected to have been affected profoundly by the horri®c experiences through which Griliches lived in the decade before he emigrated to the United States, I ®nd remarkably little The Economic Journal, 111 ( June), F422±F448. # Royal Economic Society 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.