Ivan Reitman, who died Sunday at 75, was a baby boomer, but if you grew up watching any of his earliest comedic hits as a producer and director — "National Lampoon's Animal House," "Meatballs," "Stripes" or "Ghostbusters" — you'd be forgiven for assuming he was a generation younger. There wasn't an authority figure he couldn't be cynical about: parents, the United States Army, academia, rich people, hotel managers, and librarians, just to name a small handful. He thumbed his cinematic nose at all of them, becoming the leading cultural voice of Gen X nihilism during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Reitman's parents, Leslie and Clara, were Czechoslovakian Jews. They met in 1938, not long before Hitler invaded the country. Leslie barely avoided a trip to Auschwitz when a non-Jewish friend intervened on his behalf. Later, he joined the Czech underground, fighting the Nazis as a guerilla. Clara wasn't so lucky. Against the odds, though, she survived Auschwitz, reuniting with Leslie after the war to marry and start a family. Reitman was born, also in Czechoslovakia, in the aftermath of World War II.
