When I started writing this book about Jewish American achievement in the twentieth century, I set out to counter the assumption that Jewish history chronicles only tragedy. I wanted to explore systematically what I knew in my heart to be true: that life in the United States for Jews has been characterized less by anguish than by tremendous drive and innovation. Stargazing in the Atomic Age takes the nadir of modern Jewish experience—the Holocaust—as its starting point, but it is far from elegiac. Part reflection and part critique, part intellectual history and part personal narrative, it celebrates artists and scientists who confronted the war years with exceptional energy. From the outset, as I cast around for illustration of accomplishment, I found it difficult not to locate examples but to limit their number. Everywhere I turned I was met by writers like Saul Bellow, who in Humboldt’s Gift chastises Americans “spared the holocausts and nights of terror” and urges “with our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind”; by musicians like Aaron Copland, who insisted in his 1952 Norton lectures at Harvard, “I must believe in the ultimate good of the world and of life as I live it in order to create a work of art”; and by scientists like Richard Feynman, who worked in Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project during the war, only to counsel a 1963 audience at the University of Washington: “It is better to say something and not be sure than not to say anything at all.”
Throughout my grade school years, my father chided my liberal use of sarcastic speech with a different remonstration (“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”). Nonetheless, the household in which I grew up vibrated with the kind of speechified “somethings” Feynman fizzed with and that are the stock-in-trade of Bellow’s high-spirited characters. My father, a medical researcher whose grandparents immigrated from Russia in the 1890s (the same decade George Gershwin’s parents stepped upon U.S. shores), relished upending the ideas his peers assumed were inviolable in respiratory physiology. His eldest child, I was raised to take nothing for granted. Still, I was well into a draft of this book when I realized its characters shared my father’s penchant for provocation. Seeking the most dazzling examples of contributions to science and the arts, I had unerringly chosen the work of men whose sensibilities conformed to the infuriating, enlivening, and inspiring milieu within which I had grown up.
And men these physicists, artists, composers, mathematicians, and writers turned out to be. In writing about Jewish innovation in America, I had created a collective biography of a paternal generation I knew firsthand. Few of its characters shared my father’s predilection for fly-by-night schemes. But their vitality was the same élan that animated my family life, their lively (if sometimes self-absorbed) expressions of feeling the tones that had furthered the talk at our dinner table. Preferring challenging questions over practiced answers, they pushed against what was axiomatic in their fields as eagerly as they traveled in thought beyond the borders of these disciplines.
Most of the characters who walk through these pages are household names. My intent, however, has been to approach them from new angles. By defamiliarizing these icons through juxtaposition and unsettling our collective assumptions about them—what they did and what we think their contributions might “stand for”—I hope to reveal their personalities as more complex and their approaches as more intriguing. Consider Rothko’s late canvases in light of the spare prose of Genesis. Hear echoes of the metaphysics of Maimonides in Einsteinian physics. Discover Montaigne’s sixteenth-century concerns on death and dying voiced in altered key in the reveries of Bellow’s characters, whose exuberant myopia does not prevent them from being ravished by the world’s quotidian beauties.
Why assume that a familiarity with disaster invites despair to settle in for centuries? When Jerusalem’s First Temple was left a pile of charred stones and its congregation found themselves among the hanging gardens of Babylon, the newly exiled did more than weep: they prospered, developing the Talmud over the course of the first millennium. Alexandria, Spain, Berlin, and New York: after every scattering, another golden age. The twentieth-century intellectuals featured in this book offer evidence of this pattern. Despite the political chaos through which they traveled, they hazarded connections, reaching toward the unknown as surely as Michelangelo’s Adam extends his fingers across the vaulted Sistine Chapel. Frequently, absorbed in their work, they transformed “awful” into “awe.”
Of course they understood the yearning for lost places. Some could not help but register nostalgia in the rueful cadences of their own accented speech. But like Grace Paley, Bronx-born daughter of Russian immigrants who reminds readers in “The Immigrant Story” that “rosiness is not a worse windowpane than gloomy grey when viewing the world,” the generation who came of age during World War II understood that asking questions offers a fail-safe way to shake off melancholy. Deeply curious about the world despite its human tragedies, they did not so much resist the pull of the past as wrestle themselves away from it by setting themselves problems to solve.
Intellectual ferment sustains those who produce it. But the energy any creative act releases affirms life for the rest of us. Global political unrest, unparalleled natural disasters hurried along by Earth’s rising temperatures, systemic extinction of chains of species—yes, these are our conditions of being. How else can we face the terror of our situation but by remaining open—now and in the future—to its possibilities? It would be foolish to echo Dustin Hoffman’s character in Barry Levinson’s prescient Wag the Dog and crow, “This is nothing!” But reminding ourselves how excitement over ideas sustained the artists and scientists of the previous century even as they stared straight ahead at the apocalypse might rally us. In the midst of a newly divisive era, the confidence with which these thinkers elaborated modes of understanding that defied partisanship and parochialism seems a remarkable kind of faith. Their staunchness, their refusal to give in to despair, their pleasure and astonishment in achievement—this strength of mind can be ours as well.