Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (30 page)

The SS
Excalibur
was one of the four combination cargo-passenger vessels of the American Export Lines, capable of crossing the Atlantic in eight days. From the summer, when it was used to carry dignitaries like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, American ambassadors, and the Baron Eugene de Rothschild, it was retrofitted after the fall of France to take more second- and third-class passengers, replacing luxury with a
cargo of depression and relief. The idleness aboard allowed Hirschmann to take some further stock of his median state; it was a rough crossing, and he spent most of it seasick, along with the other 180 passengers. “I am not a very great sailor,” he moaned as the vessel approached New York. But he was never one to pass up an opportunity; fortunately, there was a small library aboard the ship, as well as several chess boards and a ping-pong table. Then he met a young Czech woman “with whom I spent most of the time I didn’t play chess or ping-pong.” As he approached the end of his Atlantic crossing, he concluded the letter to his mother in the same self-detached style of Montaigne: “Examining my sentiments yesterday, I noticed that they were already somewhat Americanized. Indeed, I shall enter this country with the will of getting to something, of showing that I have merited the extraordinary chain of lucky incidents which have led me here. Though I still love France, I am of course disappointed in many ways, and this makes my fourth—or is it the fifth?—emigration easier for me.”
⁵⁵

The disproportion in the world seems, comfortingly enough, to be only an arithmetical one.

  
FRANZ KAFKA

S
S
Excalibur
was scheduled to dock at Jersey City on the evening of Monday, January 13, 1941. Storms had battered the East Coast and delayed the vessel’s last leg from Bermuda. When it entered the mouth of the Hudson River on Tuesday morning, it was a frigid 13 degrees (F); the sky was a slate gray and was about to release its snow. The refugees shivered as they filed through the immigration offices at Elizabeth, New Jersey, and then scattered to their destinations. By the time Otto Albert Hirschmann handed over his documents—his Lithuanian passport and American visa—he had gotten used to the name Albert and was looking forward to reinventing himself on new soil. He asked that his entrance to the United States be registered as Albert Otto. The agent added his own embellishment, a common enough contribution to the Anglicization of new arrivals, by dropping the second
n
from the surname. When he offered to simplify it more by removing the
c
, that was a step too far; the newcomer balked. Hereafter, Otto Albert Hirschmann became Albert O. Hirschman.

Thus renamed, the twenty-five-year-old German refugee ventured into America. Stateless again, he reached out to his contacts or kin. Not knowing it, he owed an immense debt of gratitude to his cousin Oscar, who had been his advocate from New York and had ensured that the Rockefeller Foundation was on top of his case. The train from Elizabeth carried him to Penn Station, and from there Hirschman took the subway
to his cousin’s apartment on Park Terrace, at the very tip of Manhattan. There was also some business to wrap up. He cabled Fry in Marseilles to tell him that he’d safely reached New York and that he’d paid a visit to the Emergency Rescue Committee offices to defuse some of the tension between the headquarters and Fry over his recurring demands for more money and visas. No one had been able to explain the problems of the French side with such insight. When the meeting was over, Hirschman’s cable assured Fry “COMMITTEE FULL CONFIDENCE IN YOU. AVOIDANCE CLASH WELCOME. LOVE: OTTO ALBERT.”
¹

While Hirschman was grateful to his kin and shared what news he had of the family’s various fates in Europe, he was less keen to make of his New York kin the basis of a life in the New World. While joining the many German intellectuals who would have such a decisive effect on American pastimes like Hollywood and on American science, music, and philosophy, he was less anxious to do so
as
a German; as in his first departure to Paris, Hirschman did not heal the incision from his past by gazing backward, fixated on the “German question.” New York was filling with intellectuals with just this obsession. Rather, once more, exile provided grounds for reinvention. Hirschman did not dwell on the traumas he left behind—and was determinedly tight-lipped about it with others. Rather, he sought out new opportunities. In America, he could become the intellectual he’d dreamed of being in Europe.

America would yield mixed results—and not a bit of frustration.

In the meantime, he was eager to learn more about the terms of his miraculous fellowship. A few days after his arrival in New York, Hirschman visited Kittredge at the Rockefeller Foundation. He was delighted to learn that his first stipend payment would be available by the end of the month. He would receive $120 per month for two years, and the fellowship would cover all his tuition at the University of California as well as travel costs getting there. A month later, Kittredge raised the monthly stipend by $50, so that Hirschman could remit funds to his mother, his dependent, in London.
²

Delighted at his good fortune, Hirschman also began the quest for opportunities beyond his two-year fellowship. Kittredge was only the first
of a series of contacts Hirschman would make. This was clearly becoming something of an aptitude, not to say instinct: dealing with dislocation with a flurry of efforts to meet new people and size up the landscape, leaving behind trails of acquaintances he might later pick up; in short, creating opportunities for himself that might later come in handy. He spent three weeks in New York, went to see Washington, and renewed contacts with some Germans who had relocated there. He returned briefly to New York, then set off for California.

The word
opportunistic
can carry the wrong connotations to describe what Hirschman was doing. He was not scoping the landscape preparing to mold to it by seizing the best of his chances. If this is what opportunistic means, it does not capture Hirschman at all. But if opportunism means creating chances, spinning good fortune, this is more appropriate. Some might say that Fortuna was on his side. Hirschman knew Machiavelli well enough to know that good fortune was also something to cultivate. Among other things, Hirschman had ideas for himself as well as ideas of himself, both of which had been gestating for years. None of these were going to bear fruit naturally. By the time he was bound for the West Coast, he had some fairly clear notions of what to do with the precious two years at his disposal. The Rockefeller Foundation budgeted for a second-class ticket to California. Hirschman preferred to make a bit of money by travelling third class and pocketing the difference. In addition, the foundation agreed to give him the kind of ticket that would allow him to get off and on board at will, so that the refugee could get to know the United States better and make contacts. Hirschman’s first destination was Chicago. He resurrected ties with Abba Lerner, under whom he had studied while at the LSE. An unorthodox thinker from an unusual background, Lerner was someone with whom Hirschman had a certain affinity; he was eager to get intellectual advice. Most important, he wanted to consult someone he admired about an idea he had been secretly harboring. Lerner was only too happy to oblige. Sitting in Trieste, Hirschman had examined Italian trade balances. He had also been watching German trade with Yugoslavia: Yugoslavia’s share of German trade was small, but Germany accounted for a large share of Yugoslavia’s. Then, in Paris, he followed the ill-fated attempts of the Intermarium
coalition to thwart Berlin’s commercial ambitions. What role did disparities between countries play in international economics? Did large countries display a preference to trade with small ones, or were they neutral? Was this—as he implied in his reports for Condliffe before the war—a predeterminant of conflict and war? By the time he caught up with Abba Lerner, his concerns had billowed: was there an effect between commercial trade and political power? As Lerner listened to these ideas, he nodded. He urged Hirschman to explore them.
³

This was a seal of approval enough for Hirschman, who boarded the train for California. The arrangement with the Rockefeller Foundation placed Hirschman in International House, a dormitory for foreigners, “a home for male and female students.” He was struck immediately by the Bay Area’s beauty, the hills, the huge bridges, and the lights. Coming from Europe’s darkness, the sparkling lights of the three cities clustered around the bay were an endless source of fascination. But most of all, what swept him away were the libraries, especially Doe Library, whose great stone edifice, magnificent windows, long desks, and reading lamps indulged Hirschman’s years of thirst. Its collection “is stupendously good and complete,” and the stacks were open. Hirschman spent endless hours wandering through them, running his fingers on the rippled spines of shelved books. Interestingly, he did not rush to read the latest. He made for the classics. There he discovered Adam Smith and Werner Sombart and set aside time for more Machiavelli. “Of books I have nothing with me except for Montaigne in the beautiful Pléiade edition,” he told Ursula.
⁴
Doe Library compensated for this sole, prized, possession.

In Berkeley he became a curio, a condition that made him squirm. At International House, Sunday dinners featured tablecloths and candles; it was a special occasion at which those in attendance were supposed to participate in enlightened discussion. At one of Albert’s first attendances, someone asked him to talk about the situation in Europe; soon there was a chorus of calls “to talk about your personal experiences.” The newcomer sat there, with his handkerchief twisted in his fingers, nervously waiting for the calls to pass. “Everybody wanted me to tell my story.… They wanted to get out a notebook and began to write down things, you know,”he told an interviewer in 1985. “I moved out of International House right away because I couldn’t stand being considered as sort of a wonder of the world or something like that. I just wanted to be myself and … not to have too many contacts.” California was isolated from the tragedies in Europe. Here was a young man who was not just a direct witness, but a protagonist! “There was so much, too much, wide-eyed wonder about how it was all possible,” he recalled. Rumors swirled about the new arrival. He had come from a world of intrigue and plotting and arrived in academic paradise. He wanted to read; others wanted him to talk.
⁵

Albert and Sarah at International House, Berkeley, 1941.

Not long after his arrival at International House, Albert queued up for lunch one day at the cafeteria. He filled his plate with stuffed peppers and went to join a friend who was sitting with a student of literature and philosophy. Her name was Sarah Chapiro. Petite, beautiful, smart, and with a
bright, magnetic smile, she immediately captivated Albert. Her charm and intelligence would have been enough to catch his attention. But she was French, Russian, vaguely but irrelevantly Jewish, displaced like him. From that day forward, they were mates, bonded in this new land.

Sarah Chapiro, like Hirschman, had washed up in California an émigré from the same clash that had torn Europe since the First World War. Her route to Berkeley, where she arrived in the fall of 1940, was not quite as winding, but it was not quite American. A transfer student from Cornell, where she had spent a semester studying French literature and philosophy, she was beginning to learn some rudiments of English. While in Ithaca, she learned of Paris’s fall to the Nazis. She wept. Other students asked her why? “It’s only a city,” they consoled. But it was when she watched half of her classmates—a nontrivial portion of the Cornell football team—struggle through their courses that Sarah realized this sojourn was not going to work. She decided to leave the snow drifts of upper New York State for California, in part to be closer to her family, which had resettled in Los Angeles, and in part because she wanted to be in a larger and more diverse setting. Her extended family of well-to-do Jewish merchants had left Kovno, Lithuania, in 1925 when Sarah was four years old, settling in Paris, where she grew up in the lap of the sixteenth arrondissement. Like the Hirschmanns, the Chapiros were completely assimilated into a secular, bourgeois culture. They were part of the affluent Russians fleeing the revolution. Being an only child, there was no shortage of comforts. In the summer, the family went to beach resorts on the Baltic or in Belgium. In winter it was skiing in the Alps. Sarah’s parents put a premium on her education. At first she had nannies. When Sarah contracted scarlet fever, her parents hired a nurse, Ekaterina Lioubimovna, a highly educated White Russian who became her closest companion growing up and would supervise her activities and studies. There were also the special tutors, like the Russian literary critic who guided young Sarah though Russian classics and had a great influence on her. When it came to school, Sarah was enrolled in the Lycée Molière, not far from her flat: an institution made famous because it was there that Simone de Beauvoir, not yet the famous author she would become, taught philosophy. Sarah had the
good fortune to be one of her few prized pupils. Exciting and charismatic, she rubbed off on Sarah; de Beauvoir bequeathed a lifelong interest in philosophy and existentialism, an influence that would later rub off on Sarah’s husband. Sarah was not, however, among those enmeshed in the complex personal labyrinth that de Beauvoir spun around herself. Needless to say, these compound influences widened the generational gulf between an exploratory daughter and her more conservative parents.