So Much to Be Thankful For

Title: For All These Things: Memoirs

By: Rabbi Dr. Allen Schick

(418 pages)

Because he is a modest man, Rabbi Dr. Allen Schick never introduces himself as a rabbi, and rarely as a Ph.D.-holder whose expertise in public budgets has caused governments of cities, states, and nations to call on him to help them organize their finances and align their finances with their policies. Instead, he is just Allen, the Orthodox Jewish kid from Boro Park who taught at Tufts University for a few years, then worked at the Congressional Research Service, then at the Brookings Institution, and finally, for over thirty years, as a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

Because of Allen Schick’s reticence, you also wouldn’t know, if you just met him casually, that he and his twin brother, Marvin Schick, a professor at Hunter College and president of RJJ, refer to each other as “the other one.” He would probably not mention that they lost their father when they were just three years old. You wouldn’t know that his mother founded the famous Schick’s Bakery in Boro Park to support the family and that all of her children worked there when they were young. You probably would not learn that besides attending yeshiva at RJJ, he went to Brooklyn College at night, and then, after receiving smicha,he went to the Ph.D. program in political science at Yale.

But if you read his new book, For All These Things, A Memoir, you would learn all that and much more about the life of a frum Jew operating in multiple worlds and why he is thankful.

When Allen Schick was born in 1934, his Hungarian rabbi father and his mother lived in Manhattan, where his father was the rabbi of a shul on 34^th Street. The Depression of the 1930s brought hard times, which became even harder when, in 1938, his father died of peritonitis. Soon the family was destitute and homeless. To temporarily deal with her inability to support everyone, Mrs. Schick did something that was not uncommon in those days: She placed her twin sons in a Jewish orphanage until she could obtain a livelihood and support them herself. The twins returned to the family home in 1943, at age nine, when their mother had established the bakery and it was starting to produce a family income. The twins were soon enrolled in RJJ, and after high school continued learning in the Yeshiva’s semicha program while attending Brooklyn College at night.

Although he felt that he had obtained a good education at Brooklyn College, and he and “the other one” (twin brother Marvin) were honored by that institution many years later, more recently Allen Schick came to believe that Brooklyn College has become “a hostile campus that under the guise of academic freedom promotes virulent antisemitism. For this and other reasons, Brooklyn College no longer is an attractive option for frum boys and girls who want to be learners and earners.”

Schick also describes how the family bakery was both a business and a home, with the family living upstairs from the bakery. There was a colorful cast of characters in the neighborhood, some of whom Schick introduces. The ones with whom he was most impressed were clearly the most observant. There is also some discussion of what it was like running a family bakery and the difficulties of running a small business in Brooklyn in those days, including the “protection rackets” that needed to be paid off to avoid trouble.

When both twins applied to Ph.D. programs in political science, Allen went to Yale and Marvin to New York University, separating them for the first time in their lives. At Yale, he boarded with a frum family who lived near the campus. During those years, he met his wife, Miriam, and a year later they married. They had five children and raised them partly in the Boston area, in Brookline, Massachusetts (while he was working at Tufts) but mostly in the Silver Spring, Maryland area, while he was working at the Congressional Research Service, the Brookings Institution, and the University of Maryland. While in Brookline, Shick regularly attended the shiurim of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, whom he deeply respected and whose reputation and legacy he discusses in the book.

There is also some discussion of Schick’s adjustment to married life, his relationship with his in-laws, and the arrival of his own five children. Schick does gently criticize himself for having missed some of the events in his family’s life because of his work, but he also makes it clear that he did find time for his family and was very engaged with them. He provided very well for them because of his work publishing, speaking, and consulting on the subject about which he was one of the foremost authorities in the world: getting a government’s budget to align with its policies and goals.

As Schick describes each stage of his career, he also describes the institutions and systems in which he worked, and so the reader gets a picture of the universities, the “think tank,” and the government offices as well as some of the domestic and foreign governments and institutions that engaged him. He consulted for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, the State of Hawaii, New Zealand, and the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development, and Puerto Rico. He was in Iran during the early 1970s before the murderous Mullahs took over, went to Spain for the Office of Economic Development, to China to teach a three-week class under the auspices of the World Bank, to Chile and Peru in the early 1990s, and to post-Soviet Russia in the late 1990s on behalf of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. At other times, he traveled to Uruguay and Argentina. He has insightful comments, very much worth reading, about each of these places from the points of view of a loyal American, frum Jew, and expert on governmental finance.

This is not a “lives of the saints”-style book in which Shick portrays himself as always learning Torah so that the reader wonders when he had an opportunity to say hello to his wife and children. Neither is it a piece of puffery about his own importance, because Schick does not exaggerate at all and is open in sharing that his advice was often not followed. Nor is it an apologia or an attempt to justify what he has done with his life. This autobiography is worth reading because, properly understood, it is an attempt to show readers – which he hopes will include his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren – that he is thankful for all the opportunities he has had in life: to be a frum Jew, to learn in both the Jewish and the secular world, to have a wonderful wife and family, to have friends whom he values and who value him, and also to have interesting and meaningful work. Thus, the title – For All These Things. He is thankful for a very full life and all that it has brought him.

In 2024, Rabbi Dr. Schick and his wife came on aliyah. He is 92 years old and they live in Jerusalem. His wife Miriam is as gracious and kind as ever. Although he is physically less mobile than he once was, mentally he is completely alert, a fact that is indisputable not only from encounters with him but also from the lucidity and high quality of writing of this autobiography. He still learns Gemara and Torah, follows the general news, stays on top of the lives of his children and grandchildren, and still entertains the idea that there is more to do. Indeed, he still has many things to do and to be thankful for.