Eulogy of Otto Feinstein

by Eric Bockstael, Associate Professor of Humanities, Interdisciplinary Studies Department, College of Urban, Labor and Metropolitan Affairs, Wayne State University, at the Memorial Service, January 2004.

Dear Sarah and Tasha Feinstein, George and Harriet Blank, Charlene, Tom, Patrick and Eleanor Carey, Dear family of Otto's.

Dear friends and colleagues.

Ladies and Gentleman.

There is some question as to whether Otto would have wanted a memorial. In one sense, I think not, for the simple reason that he would have to miss it. If he were here today, he would look out at this assembly and say, "Can you imagine how many personal and institutional contacts are possible just starting with the people in this room?" and he'd begin planning another complex, interactive project and action.

Otto was my friend. We met in September 1965 in the anti-war movement. We said good-bye last December in his apartment here on Campus as we finished reviewing the plan of action of his and our International Institute's latest project: "The Intercontinental Master's Program in Civic and Adult Literacy." For nearly forty years we worked together, talked, walked, ate, agreed, and disagreed, laughed, a lot, mostly because of his extraordinary humor and many stories, and dreamed about and worked for a better world, acted together with all of you and many others in Detroit and elsewhere. As I said goodbye, he returned, with a smile, to his triple chocolate mousse. Nothing gave him or onlookers such an example of pure pleasure over the years as his enjoyment of a good desert, and we all remember that well.

Nearly four decades ago, as I was wondering where I belonged - Europe or America - Otto said: "Eric a place is made by the people you know in that place. Take it from me, I know, refugee that I am."

And of course Otto was right. And today, Detroit is at once a cold and lonely place, because Otto is no longer here with us, and a place of warm friendships and personal histories, a place where I and many of us now belong because of Otto, his extraordinary capacity of bringing people together around the most critical problems facing us in this city, in this region, and in this world.

In the mid- and late seventies this very lecture hall filled to capacity on Friday nights and weekends because of Otto's greatest institutional achievement: the University Studies/Weekend College Program, which at that time brought together over three thousand adult working men and women pursuing their college education. As Otto put it at the time:  "The University must learn to understand that not only are there a variety of ways to learn, but there are also a variety of people to reach." The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, recognized this program in 1977, as the most innovative adult education program in the world. It. continues today as the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, in the College of Urban , Labor and Metropolitan Affairs. As one of my colleagues put it the other day: "His heart was with our program long after he left it; he delighted in seeing it thrive." In 1990 our College honored Otto by creating the Otto Feinstein Excellence in Senior Writing Award. As Roz Schindler, director at the time and present here today, recalled the other day: "Otto was thrilled to be present when this Writing Award was given for the first time. In his remarks that day Otto said that his wife Nikki would be shocked that a student writing award would be named after him because his own writing always needed significant editing.” Nikki served as his editor.

Just 10 weeks and two days ago, on November 15, Otto, with his colleagues and students, brought again together, in this hall, hundreds of high school and college students to debate and vote their political agenda for America's future, for the America of November 2004. This is another of Otto's enduring legacies - the Youth/Urban Agenda and the International School-to-School Project with which many of you are familiar, and in which many of you are participating.

His experience of and fight against Nazism and fascism is really what drove Otto. His father's careful planning saved the family from the Nazis. Abraham, his father, Bella, his mother, and the two boys, Alfred, and Otto, escaped from Austria shortly after the Anschluss. As a kid in New York he couldn't understand why the adults didn't fight the Nazis earlier.  He certainly wanted to. He told us many times that it is that experience and impatience with the adults of the time that brought him to start the school-to-school project and the youth/urban agenda, to give kids a voice, to prepare them to act politically in their respective societies. Kids, he said, are not the generation X, the social and political lazybones, and idlers. It is the institutions not responding to nor creating opportunities for kids that are the generation x, the slackers.

As Sarah and Tasha know because they were with their father these last few weeks, Otto, even as his strength was waning, kept working on the various projects, taking notes on his familiar yellow legal pad. His concern was that he could not leave his many projects for very long.

And now that he is gone, will these projects survive?  The paradox is how to be uniquely creative but, at the same time, not indispensable. That is really the challenge we in this room who admired Otto and worked with him face today.

In the words of Walter Reuther: "There is no greater calling than to serve your fellow man. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well."

Otto, my friend, you did it well indeed.

For us here today, the best way to remember and honor Otto is to carry on his and our unfinished business.