A Reminiscence
From Minneapolis to Montana to Massachusetts, the houses my family inhabited in the 1960s were loud with the chatter and squall of four small children. If you chanced to visit, you might have watched my twin brothers glue parts onto each other’s model airplanes or tear them apart in fury while our younger sister twirled to music and I sat with my legs curled on the island of our green armchair reading a book. Every so often my mother’s breathless voice darted hummingbird-fashion through the clamor. Once my father returned from the hospital, it would have taken you only a moment to recognize this author of grand entrances and ostentatious exits as the conductor of our family’s tone and tempo.
A decade later, with three children in high school and my mother beginning a master’s degree in communications (who could blame her?), the talk at our table had swelled into a three-ring circus of competing conversations and knock-down, drag-out arguments. My siblings and I scrabbled vociferously for the spotlight. But my father’s voice claimed center stage, rising to a teakettle pitch of incredulity as he exclaimed over some exceptional bureaucratic stupidity only to fall to the exaggeratedly low tones he used to chastise me—thrice over and at achingly slow speed—for deflecting his sermons with my flippant sardonic quips. (And still, the more deliberately he berated, the less I listened.)
Excitable and effusive, Dad could have stepped straight out of a Bellow novel. He was as lavish in grief as Tommy Wilhelm, as frantically openhearted as Herzog, as joyous as Ravelstein. Years after I left the family house and raised my own daughter, I needed only to pick up Henderson the Rain King to be returned to the cockamamie schemes of my childhood. After turning a few pages I was airlifted out of Africa to the Montana plains—a landscape that must have seemed no less strange to my midwestern-born parents. In this arid place back in 1964, my father had interrupted his fledgling scientific career in Minneapolis to serve a two-year stint as medical officer and captain in the air force. Once on base, he spent equal time attending patients and antagonizing his superiors. It took him little time to make a habit of defying their unofficial first commandment—“Rank has its privileges”—by sporting mismatched socks each morning and eating dinner with enlisted men rather than with his fellow officers. But he was not dressed down by the commander until he made a field trip to Congress while at a D.C. medical conference. Sen. Hubert Humphrey was “out” when Dad stepped into his office ready to complain about Glasgow’s poor morale, but my father enlisted the sympathy of the politician’s secretary, prescribing extensive dieting advice for her in the stentorian, teacherly voice he used to edify those in clinic anxious about their own conditions. When my family returned to Montana, Glasgow’s upstart physician was met with a reception colder than a winter at Glacier National Park. While we goggled at early airplanes suspended like mobiles in the cavernous interior of the National Air and Space Museum, a four-star general had been marching through Glasgow to conduct a congressional investigation of the base.
Each time I return to Humboldt’s rages and Herzog’s emotionalism, I relive my father’s arbitrary tempests and his embarrassingly teary moments. But I recognize his inexhaustible hopefulness in the panache with which Bellow’s people shrug off defeat, pick up the pieces, and claim victory. When I began André Aciman’s elegant memoir of an Alexandrian childhood cut short following the nationalization of the Suez Canal, I was startled to discover in the swaggering Turkish-born relative who monopolizes Out of Egypt’s opening chapter another figure much like Dad. Vili may strike many readers as flamboyant, but his dramatic posturing is eminently familiar to me. In the Mediterranean basin during World War II, Aciman’s uncle had located Roman antiques and sold them at ten times their cost. At the end of the war, he changed his name, converted to Christianity, foreswore all other nationalities, and settled in Surrey. In the pages of Aciman’s memoir, this character strides past the green lawns and well-kept gardens of the English countryside with no less complacency and vigor than any British-born figure clad in Harris Tweed.
My father took to camouflage with equal enthusiasm. While an undergraduate at Harvard, he changed his name to the generic American Mike, dispensing with Menachim Myron, an identity almost unpronounceable in Wisconsin. By the end of his freshman year, he had rejected the country ways he learned on his parents’ cherry and apple orchard for East Coast irony. As diligently as those nineteenth-century greenhorns before him who memorized the Pledge of Allegiance before they disembarked from Ellis Island, my American-born father forgot his Russian Jewish birthright. I grew up in a household rich in talk and tirade but cannot remember him once volunteering an anecdote about his past. He kept no pictures of himself as a college student, much less as a small boy. He never talked about the reading and writing he must have undertaken in preparation for his bar mitzvah, even when his granddaughter was composing her own drash. A year before Zoë’s bat mitzvah, he listened absently while she sang a prayer in her clear, pure voice as if he were hearing the chatter of an unknown tongue.
Dad was so eager to assimilate that he simply insisted on his own centrality. As soon as he arrived at Harvard, he settled into venerable Eliot House as if he owned its brick and wainscoting. Stumbling across an attractive armchair in the conference room, he requisitioned it for his dorm room without a second thought. The next day, students received a stiff note from the house master demanding the return of a five-hundred-dollar piece of furniture embossed with the college seal. At a black-tie dinner this resident fellow had hosted the evening before, a plastic chair had glared out like a neon sign for Pabst Blue Ribbon amid the elegant mahogany circling the table.
“Toujours, l’audace,” Aciman writes of Vili. My father was equally undaunted, but he grew up among strangers rather than amid excitable relatives in cosmopolitan Alexandria. The lone Jewish boy in Sturgeon Bay, Dad attended school alongside children who spoke with stolid restraint in the careful, tuneful accents of their Scandinavian forebears. While my father and his sisters made their way through the quiet streets of this slow-moving town, André Aciman strolled along the Corniche, Alexandria’s coastal highway, sipping a cooling drink made from rose water and nibbling on the fried sweet dough that marks the end of Ramadan—this in defiance of the Passover injunction against leavening.
Still, Vili and Michael are cousins cut from the same cloth, unabashed parvenus whose adoption of foreign custom never threatens their Jewish spirit. Both highlight a survival instinct in a culture that favors chameleons more than martyrs—changelings, that is, who pass to extricate themselves from a difficult spot or to obtain a better situation. Taking the train from Green Bay to begin college, my father must have known he was moving from a Midwest as far removed from Boston as the Middle East is from London. Still, he trespassed the Puritan halls of the university with arrogant aplomb. Later, during his years on the faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health, he thumbed his nose at the class pretensions of the Cambridge elite with no less glee, joking with colleagues who worked elsewhere that Harvard lopped 20 percent off the salaries it doled out “for prestige.” With my mother and the four of us children in tow, he continued traversing the country. During a sabbatical year we spent in an apartment alongside London’s Hampstead Heath, he delighted in mimicking the inflections of the British, imitating their disingenuous apologies and cheerily expectant commands—if with more fanfare than accuracy.
It would be child’s play for me to fashion Dad as the last in a string of beleaguered Jewish wanderers destined for a lifetime of looking through windows. But this sad state of affairs was far from the truth. He might have been unsuccessful at permanent stays, but my father was never the melancholic exile of conventional histories. Irremediably energetic and chronically hostile to despair, he continued to cut a picaresque figure wherever he traveled. He took up research positions in Cleveland and Phoenix, breezed through Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, and careened from Paris to Amarillo, puzzling over the way human lungs work all the while. In 2010, on a birthday visit to my daughter, he quieted Zoë’s fears about her asthma by explaining the mechanics of breathing to her with the same patient intelligence he had once dispensed diet tips to Senator Humphrey’s secretary. Then, never one to waste a good research subject, he handed his granddaughter the mouthpiece of his equipment so that he could obtain more data for an ongoing study.
Many scientists scale back their efforts in the lab as they age, assuming their most brilliant work lies behind them. Not Dad: he wrote as many grants in his late sixties and early seventies as he finished the decade before. During the spring of 2010, when he was seventy-three, he arrived at what he felt was his most groundbreaking discovery. As he typed away on his computer in my dining room during what would be his last visit, he called me to his side. Pointing to a tangle of colored lines he had graphed on the shimmering screen, he announced, in a voice slightly mellower but no less excited than the forty-years-younger timbre I had listened to as a child, that he had solved a problem that would make his name. Three weeks later, after hiking up the hill in back of his Los Angeles home with a colleague and during whose duration Dad had predictably spent discussing his forthcoming paper, his heart stopped and the inhalations and exhalations of his own lungs ceased.
Some would call this spectacular bad timing. I wave away pathos, preferring to retell stories of his peregrinations and pitfalls in the conquering major key of C. The father who screamed himself hoarse in the family car in five minutes flat and who sardined his four children in a camper designed for two on a three-week tour of Scotland was the same man who navigated the taxi-clotted metropolis of London without a single wrong turn, despite a night’s missed sleep and a steering wheel placed on what even my nine-year-old sister knew was the wrong side of the car. A fish out of water, he was perpetually convinced the absence of other swimmers advertised their lack of staying power rather than his own confusion. He took up each new research appointment with the fervor of a man beginning his honeymoon and, chronically hostile to despair, faced every obstacle with unshakeable confidence in its eventual obliteration.
A similar dauntlessness prompted Chagall to travel to Paris to learn an art forbidden by family and faith and provoked Einstein to stretch space in pursuit of new physical laws. A like ironic temperament goaded Feynman to perfect his safecracking techniques in the heart of the high-security complex of wartime Los Alamos. I admire such defiance of difficulty. Older now, I understand that a willful refusal to give up is as much triumph as most of us are likely to achieve. There is something glamorously insolent in choosing to face each wave with the same eagerness as the current dragging you toward your starting place. We think people hopeless when we call them incorrigible, but aren’t there at least some instances when we should applaud their irrepressible curiosity? My father never looked back. Instead, translating unspoken grief into forward motion as did the artists and scientists in these pages, he hurried onward—panting, sometimes wheezing, but always calling with insistent, unmitigated perseverance for confirmation.