Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (3 page)

Mariette's family had demanded that Johnny convert to Catholicism before the wedding, as they themselves had done some years earlier, and he readily complied. Such conversions were common among the assimilated Jewish haute bourgeoisie of Budapest during the years of the anti-Semitic Horthy regime. For many in this group, whose ties to their ancestral religion ranged between loose and nonexistent, this attempt to cling to their assimilated status was a natural one, even though it was doomed to failure; the regime's definition of
Jewish
was clearly ethnic rather than religious.

These efforts to repudiate or conceal Jewish origins—echoing the response of the converted Jews to the vicious anti-Semitism of fifteenth-century Spain—followed my parents, and many other Central Europeans as well, to the United States. My father was entirely pragmatic about the matter; no one as well known as he was could hope to conceal his origins. In addition, many of his friends and colleagues were secular Jewish intellectuals like himself, their attachment to their ancestral roots consisting mainly of a large store of Jewish jokes, sometimes directed at the
goyim
(non-Jews) and sometimes at themselves. One of my father's best-known lines was, “It takes a Hungarian to go into a revolving door behind you and come out first.” One of his friends recalled that they used to amuse themselves in boring lectures by holding up a finger for the other to see every time the speaker said something that labeled him a
nebbish
, a Yiddish term of condescension.

My mother's attitude was quite different, and she brought it with her across the ocean. Throughout my childhood and, even more, my adolescence, she impressed on me constantly the importance of concealing my Jewish ancestry, convincing me that it was some sort of shameful
secret. The threat she felt was not to her life or her legal rights, but rather to her social acceptability, her fear of being regarded as an outsider. At a time when many clubs and other social organizations banned Jews, and private schools and Ivy League universities had unacknowledged but widely recognized quotas, this was not an idle concern. She bonded with America almost from the instant she set foot on its soil, and in her mind being 100 percent American did not include minority status.

Over the years, I have been constantly surprised and puzzled at how widespread this attitude was, not only among Central Europeans who emigrated to the United States before and after World War II but also among their American-born or American-raised offspring. Public figures such as former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Senator George Allen have described their parents' efforts to conceal their Jewish origins from them, and questions about whether and when they actually knew the facts have become grist for the political and media mills.

I myself lied to my father's biographer, Norman Macrae, about my mother's ethnic origins—fortunately, I was neither a member of the president's cabinet nor running for public office. Although I felt craven at telling an outright lie that disavowed half of my ancestry, this feeling was outweighed by an intense need to avoid becoming alienated from my mother during what I foresaw might be the last year of her life. I knew she would never forgive me for outing the carefully hidden secret that had become such an important part of her self-identity.

My choice of what I saw as the lesser of two evils was confirmed by the Hungarian American author Kati Marton, whose book
The Great Escape
tells the story of my father and eight other Hungarian Jews who reached the pinnacle of success in their fields after emigrating to the United States. In the course of interviewing me for that book, she confided that, in terms of her relations with her own parents, she wished she had made the same decision I had. In her book
Enemies of the People
, Marton tells how she learned of her own Jewish ancestry, quite by accident, at the age of thirty. When her father learned that she had discovered his secret, she wrote, “It put a strain on our relationship for the next 25 years.”
⁴

At a 2006 family gathering of some forty-five descendants of a common ancestor brought together from all over Europe and the United States by an enterprising cousin for an all-day celebration in Budapest, I
asked several American members of my children's generation what their experiences had been regarding the “Jewish question.” Each of them responded that his or her parents had shrouded the issue in silence or mystery. Some of the families were devout Catholics; others were Protestants of varying denominations and degrees of religious commitment. All of the relatives I talked to—including myself and my daughter—had non-Jewish spouses. Among my generation, I appeared to be the only one who had chosen to tell my children about their Jewish background, emphasizing pride in that intellectual heritage rather than embarrassment or insecurity about their association with an oft-despised minority. And my daughter has made sure that her own children are just as knowledgeable about, and proud of, the Hungarian Jewish side of their ancestry as they are about my husband Bob's Mayflower American one.

Having put an ocean between themselves and the more overt anti-Semitism they had left behind, my parents arrived in Princeton filled with enthusiasm for life in the United States—fortunately, their multilingual upbringing had included the study of English—along with considerable naïveté regarding social customs and everyday behavior in the New World. This ignorance of the social mores of their new homeland led them to show up at Princeton dinner parties shockingly late and wildly overdressed, as had been the custom in their European circles. With one foot in their new world and one in the old, they spent roughly a third of each of the years 1930-32 in Princeton; a third in Berlin, with my father teaching an academic term in each place; and the third on vacation in Budapest, back in the arms of their families. This peripatetic existence was complicated by the fact that my mother's response to the weeklong ocean voyage—the only way of crossing the Atlantic at the time—was seasickness so severe that one ship's doctor feared that she might die of dehydration before they reached land.

While my father carried his busy and productive life as a member of the global mathematical elite to a new venue, my mother made the shift from protected young girl to mistress of a household in her own way. She expanded her belle of the ball persona to incorporate that of social hostess, holding evening open houses for my father's colleagues and students in their Princeton apartment. When it became clear to her that, in a country where chauffeurs were not a staple of academic life, a driver's
license was essential, she took the advice of a friend who told her that the best way to acquire one was to offer the person in charge of the test drive a cigarette from a case containing a five-dollar bill—a substantial sum in 1931. The bribe worked, and my father apparently followed her example.

Accordingly, they both remained appallingly bad, albeit licensed, drivers until the end of their days. My father's car-totaling accidents were a more or less annual event, and when once asked why he habitually drove a very unacademic Cadillac, he replied “because no one will sell me a tank.” Many decades later, in Washington, DC, my husband narrowly avoided having his own car struck by a vehicle that barreled at full speed through a stop sign. As it passed him, he recognized his mother-in-law at the wheel, with both of our young children as passengers. From that day forward, the children were strictly forbidden ever to ride alone with their grandmother until they were old enough to take the wheel themselves.

My father's professional life in the United States became full time in 1933, when he was appointed at the age of twenty-nine as one of the five original members of the faculty of the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, along with three much older but also very distinguished mathematicians and, of course, Albert Einstein. The faculty of the institute did not—and still does not—have teaching obligations; the aim of its founding benefactors was to provide a pleasant, secure environment in which the world's leading mathematical minds could spend all their time thinking and writing (gradually, the institute expanded to incorporate a number of other academic disciplines as well) without the interference of other commitments.

Given what was happening in Germany, the institute appointment came just in time. In April 1933, the Nazi government passed laws mandating the firing of all civil servants (a category that included university professors) “descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents.”
⁵
Although my parents continued to visit their families in Hungary every year until 1939, they made their transits across Germany as quickly as train schedules allowed. My father began his tenure at the IAS in the fall of 1933; shortly thereafter, both he and my mother applied for US citizenship. Their lives as Americans had truly begun.

While Europe was, in my father's words, “relapsing into the dark ages,”
⁶
my parents were able to continue their gilded lives in their
adopted country. The institute's professorial salary of ten thousand dollars per year was, during the Great Depression, more than adequate to support a lifestyle that included a series of luxurious rented homes on Library Place, Princeton's most elegant neighborhood, several servants, and my mother's Paris wardrobe. The von Neumanns soon became locally famous for their parties, at which resident and visiting geniuses imbibed large quantities of alcohol and generally let their hair down. My mother told a tale of one particularly exuberant evening at the end of which she and my father threw the dishes out the window rather than clean up.

These gatherings were not entirely frivolous, however. A growing number of scientists fleeing Hitler's expanding reach obtained temporary appointments at the institute, and the von Neumann parties, to which many of the world's most brilliant scientific minds gravitated, provided networking opportunities for these displaced scholars seeking permanent jobs.
⁷
The plight of many of his fellow European intellectuals underscored both my father's conviction about the scale of the disaster that was occurring in Europe—even though he didn't fully foresee the horrors of the “final solution”—and his goal of seeing his adopted country become the savior of civilization.

My father's assistance to Jewish intellectuals whose lives and livelihoods were threatened wasn't confined to helping them once they had reached the safety of the United States. Among his papers are a letter to Abraham Flexner, director of the institute at the time, pleading with him to intercede with the State Department (which was rife with anti-Semitism) to grant a visa to Kurt Gödel, a non-Jew who had nonetheless been deprived of his job by the Nazis, as well as letters to colleagues at various American universities, discussing the possibilities for jobs for refugee mathematicians and physicists. To save one of them, André Weil, von Neumann appealed directly to the French ambassador (representing the collaborationist Vichy government) to the United States. His mission was successful, and Weil ultimately spent many years on the faculty of the IAS. By helping in various ways to facilitate the ingathering of many of the world's finest minds, my father was making his own contribution both to the literal and economic survival of scientific colleagues and to the intellectual treasure that propelled the United States to the forefront of scientific discovery in the second half of the twentieth century.

My parents' social life was anchored in their relationships with my father's colleagues at the institute. These included Einstein, the only other European among the institute's original five professors. In those days Einstein was quite a social being, most unlike the recluse he became after his wife's death in 1936. My mother told of the excursion she took with the Einsteins while my father was out of town, to a concert in Newark, some forty miles from Princeton, when she was very pregnant with me. Apparently Einstein got bored with the music and nudged his wife, saying “Come on, Elsa, let's go.” And leave they did, quite forgetting my mother, who had to take a milk train home. She awoke the next morning to find a large bouquet of roses from Einstein, along with a note of abject apology.

My own earliest memories of Einstein are of a much more reticent personality. By then his wife Elsa was dead and he had pretty much retreated from social encounters. He was visible mainly at a distance during the afternoon teas that took place daily in the institute's Fuld Hall, and his fame rested not only on his brilliance but also on his eccentricity, symbolized by his wild hair and the fact that he didn't wear socks. He had one close friend among his colleagues, Kurt Gödel, with whom he walked daily to and from the institute, deep in conversation as they went.

Gödel, an Austrian who spent long periods at the institute during the 1930s and moved to the United States permanently in 1939, had made his own major contribution to mathematics in his “incompleteness theorems.” In them, he showed that no set of axioms (basic propositions) underlying a mathematical system could provide the basis for proving all the true statements within that system, that an attempt would always be stymied by a paradox of the sort inherent in the statement “I never tell the truth.” He was also a close friend of my father's, even though his incompleteness theorems had demonstrated that von Neumann's own early effort to ground all mathematical statements in a set of fundamental axioms—the subject of his doctoral dissertation—was doomed to fail. Sadly, Gödel, who was subject to bouts of severe depression, became convinced toward the end of his life, long after Einstein and von Neumann were dead, that someone was trying to poison him. He refused to eat and died of starvation.