Fatherhood Quote by Leon Askin

The line lands like a punchline delivered with a straight face: a “great change” framed as a simple biographical turn, then revealed as a leap between two totalizing identities. Askin doesn’t overplay it. He lets the juxtaposition do the work, and that’s the point. “Used to be” suggests a phase, a political season; “became” suggests conversion, gravity, permanence. The sentence quietly maps how belief can migrate when the world makes one framework feel less safe than another.

Askin, an Austrian-born Jewish actor who lived through the century’s worst proofs that politics won’t always protect you, is almost certainly compressing a broader historical story into one familial pivot. Early 20th-century socialism promised fraternity across class and ethnicity, a modern escape hatch from parochial prejudice. For many Jews in Central Europe, left politics weren’t just ideology; they were an attempted passport into a fairer public life. Then history arrived: fascism, the collapse of liberal institutions, the lethal discovery that universalism can be revoked at the border, the ballot box, or the street.

The subtext isn’t “socialism bad, religion good,” but something thornier: when the social contract fractures, people retreat to identities that can’t be voted away. “Orthodox Jew” reads not merely as piety but as reclamation, boundary, survival. Askin’s actorly economy matters here. He’s not sermonizing; he’s staging the absurdity of a world where a father’s biggest “change” is swapping one comprehensive explanation of life for another because the surrounding society kept changing first.