This book has been made possible by my father Michael Goldman’s unbounded joy for his work as a scientist and his perhaps too unreserved confidence in my own capabilities as a researcher and writer. If he taught me to drive a car with a clutch in a parking lot with a degree of caution while advancing my twin brothers to roadways more quickly when it was their turn to be schooled, he never hesitated in pronouncing me ready to take on whatever intellectual challenge came my way. This confidence—misplaced or not—seems as great a gift to me in retrospect as it did when I was a sarcastic teenager. Just as importantly, my mother, Barbara Goldman, early shaped and encouraged my habits of reading across disciplines by offering me books from astronomy to art history that threw the world open while simultaneously always managing to speak urgently and directly to my interests. Her exquisite taste in books has remained a central influence. These days my writing occupies the end tables in her Portland living room. Her excitement when I tell her of a new publication is in itself sufficient reward for the work. My brother Charles, upon whom I foisted the more autobiographical portions of these essays in draft, forbore with great patience to correct what must seem to him to be my faulty memories of events. My sister, Susie, by offering her own point of view on the same sections, helped foster the kind of perspectival triangulation upon which storytelling (and science) thrive. My late brother, David—a soft-spoken but garrulous storyteller—did not live to see this book begun but even as a young man always supported my endeavors.
Many thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities for providing a grant that helped sustain this project in its early stages and a We the People award that helped honor it.
My thanks also go to the Georgia Review, where earlier versions of “Stargazing in the Atomic Age,” “Listening to Gershwin,” and “Questions of Transport” first appeared; to the Michigan Quarterly Review, which published an earlier version of “In Praise of Bellow”; and to the Southwest Review, in whose pages an earlier version of “Leaving Russia: The Soulful Modernism of Chagall and Rothko” was published as “Soulful Modernism.”
Longtime friends and colleagues Gillian Conoley, Kim Hester-Williams, Sherril Jaffe, Noelle Oxenhandler, and Greta Vollmer read portions of this book at its most nascent. Their early support of the project, and constant support of me, has been immensely sustaining. Brantley Bryant generously commented on “Questions of Transport,” and Mike Ezra offered the same attention to “Wonderful World.” Rabbi Alan Lew—if only he were still walking among us—reviewed the discussion of Talmudic study in “Stargazing in the Atomic Age” with his inimitable generosity. Miquel Salmeron, friend and physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, vetted this essay and kindly prevented me from making any serious misrepresentations of his field. Aliette Mandelbrot, Benoit Mandelbrot’s widow, provided similar service with respect to “Wonderful World: The Fractal Geometry of Benoit Mandelbrot.” My thanks also go to Lynne Morrow, music director of Pacific Voices and the Oakland Symphony Chorus as well as my colleague at Sonoma State, who championed “Listening to Gershwin” from the outset and who introduced me to the extraordinary repertoire of the Oakland Symphony.
Having taught three (and, for a time, four courses a semester) at the same institution for over two decades, I have been fortunate to encounter a great many gifted student writers and critics. Would that I had noted from the outset of my teaching life at SSU these extraordinary people. Because I can no longer name them all, I will simply offer my appreciation to them as a group, registering fully what an honor it was to work with each and every individual.
Jesse Kercheval, as gifted a teacher as she is a writer, read “Listening to Gershwin” in draft and offered valuable advice. I am grateful as well to Patrick Madden for taking the time between writing and teaching to champion “Stargazing in the Atomic Age” and to offer encouragement during this book’s earlier stages. I have taken heart more than once from Jonis Agee’s wise suggestions as well as her encouragement and support of my writing generally. I deeply appreciate the intellectual camaraderie provided by Penny Wright and Ellen Siegelman—and of course by Mitzi McCloskey, who brought us together. Mitzi, I can still hear your gravelly, delighted laugh.
In addition to the longtime friends with whom I have worked at Sonoma State, I have been fortunate to have the support of family and friends whose collective care provided me with metaphorical (and sometimes literal) shelter. Thank you, Sandy Bulmash, Yanie Chaumette, Charles and Julie Goldman, Elke Jones, Margie and Butch and Jenny LeRoy, Manjari and Mike Lewis, Pam Mohr, Kim Overton and Carl Johnson, Chessie Rochberg, Bill and Betty Parsons, Connie Philipp, Renee Talmon, and new writing colleague Kathleen Winter. I continue to be inspired by Katy DiNatale, Maryam Majeed, Amrita Sengupta, and Nancy Sloan: brillant, kind, and courageous young women all.
I am grateful to Willard Spiegelman and Terri Lewers at the Southwest Review and Laurence Goldstein and Vicki Lawrence at the Michigan Quarterly Review for their editorial work on earlier versions of “Leaving Russia “ and “In Praise of Bellow.”
A multitude of thanks to the University of Georgia Press for all of their work seeing this book into print, and, in particular, to Walter Biggins and Beth Snead for taking on the project and to Jon Davies and Steven Wallace for seeing it through with aplomb during the pandemic. My gratitude goes as well to Susan Harris for excellent copyediting and to the very talented designer Erin Kirk for her beautiful cover design.
I owe an enormous debt to the entire staff at the Georgia Review—surely the most conscientious, perspicacious, and considerate of quarterly rosters—and in particular to Doug Carson and former managing editor Mindy Wilson for their work on “Stargazing in the Atomic Age” and “Listening to Gershwin.” It has been an equal pleasure, more recently, to work with C. J. Bartunek. Likewise, it has been a very great blessing to work with now former editor Stephen Corey, whose questions and commentary always called attention to precisely those sentences whose imperfections, once improved, turned out to be key to the development of the essays of which they are a part. Thank you, Stephen, for championing my work from its earliest period and for the many hours you have put into these pages.
And finally, there is Zoë: brilliant scholar, gorgeous writer, sweetest of daughters. Thank you for being not only the best of company but for showing me that the “ideal reader”—in at least one case—need not remain a Platonic concept.