Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (7 page)

Frank was not born until 1912, when Robert was eight – too late to be a childhood companion. When Robert was not yet four, however, in March 1908, Ella gave birth to her second son, Lewis Frank Oppenheimer, who lived for just forty-five days. His death was one of those unpleasant things that was never mentioned, and a main cause of the air of melancholy that seemed to pervade the Oppenheimer household. One of Robert’s friends described Ella as ‘a mournful person’, and one has the feeling that she never stopped mourning the death of her second son. Robert, naturally, had no memories of Lewis, but the ghost of his younger brother haunted the family, and therefore the apartment in which he grew up, in a way that was all the more pervasive because it was unacknowledged. After Lewis’s death, Ella, who was always an anxious mother, fretted terribly about any little illness that Robert caught. As Robert, who was never robust, either as a child or as a man, caught a large number of colds and other childhood illnesses, she fretted a great deal. She would only rarely allow him to play with other children, for fear of exposure to disease and infection. As a result, Robert grew up alone, his intellectual interests and abilities developing well beyond his years, but his social skills remaining stunted, thereby creating a sense of separation between himself and other people that, he said, he managed to overcome only in the spring of 1926 at the age of twenty-two.
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His parents did everything they could to stimulate Robert’s intellectual and artistic interests. ‘I think my father was one of the most tolerant and human of men,’ Oppenheimer later said. ‘His idea of what to do for people was to let them find out what they wanted.’ In the case of Robert, whose precocious intelligence was manifest from a very early age, this meant providing him with everything in which he showed any interest. When, at about the age of five, he declared an interest in ancient and modern buildings and expressed a desire to become an architect, his father gave him photographs and prints of the great buildings of the world, together with books on architecture. Responding to his mother’s expectations of him, Oppenheimer next declared that he wanted to be first a poet and then a painter, and received in turn volumes of poetry, his own easel and an abundance of brushes and paint. In deference to his mother’s wishes,
he took piano lessons but they were a great torture for him. The lessons stopped when Robert came down with some childhood illness or other and his mother asked him how he felt. ‘Just as I do when I have to take piano lessons,’ he replied, no doubt realising that the lessons would henceforth be cancelled.

The young Oppenheimer had everything a child could wish for – except the thing that most children wish for above all: the company of other children. So, though he acquired impeccable adult manners from an early age and was extremely (perhaps even unnaturally) well behaved, he never experienced the simple childhood pleasures of rambunctiousness and mischief that arise from playing with childhood companions. There was very little fun to be had in the ethically cultured, artistically refined and intellectually advanced Oppenheimer household. In place of fun there was a great deal of achievement, fuelled by expectations that were absurdly high and felt by Oppenheimer to be even higher than they actually were. He always felt as if he were letting his parents down, if not intellectually, then morally. ‘I repaid my parents’ confidence in me,’ he once remarked, ‘by developing an unpleasant ego which I am sure must have affronted both children and adults who were unfortunate enough to come into contact with me.’

In 1909, Ella’s mother, now elderly and ailing, moved into the Oppenheimer apartment. In the summer of that year, Robert, then aged five, was introduced to his father’s side of the family during a visit to Germany. It was then that he met Benjamin Oppenheimer, who, after watching Robert playing with some building blocks, presented him with an encyclopaedia of architecture – a strange gift for a five-year-old, and one that is hard to square with Robert’s recollection of Benjamin as an illiterate peasant. Benjamin’s other gift was to have a deep influence on the young Robert: a box of rocks, each labelled with its Latin and German names, obviously designed to be the starting point for a collection of minerals. Robert took the bait. Collecting and studying minerals became, and remained throughout his childhood, his main hobby.

What little contact Robert had with other children was restricted to those he met through the Ethical Culture Society. Every Sunday the Society held a meeting that had something of the character of a weekly religious service, except that there were no prayers. At these meetings organ music was played and Felix Adler or a guest speaker would give a lecture, usually of a sermon-like nature. Julius and Ella, naturally, were regular attenders and, while they were at the meeting, Robert would attend the Sunday School, one of the rare occasions at which he was able to mix with other children. Until 1910, these meetings (attendance at which would sometimes reach a thousand) were held in Carnegie Hall, but in October 1910 the Society proudly opened its new, specially commissioned
building at 2 West 64th Street, on the corner with Central Park West. At the dedication of the new building, with his parents in the audience, Robert, then aged six, joined the other children from the Society’s Sunday School in a presentation on ethical behaviour, which was followed by communal singing led by the children.

When Robert started school in September 1911, at the relatively late age of seven (he entered in the second grade), he would already have known many of the children with whom he would be taught, since the school chosen by his parents was, inevitably, the Ethical Culture School, located at 33 Central Park West (just round the corner from the new Society hall). Since the very beginning of the Ethical Culture Society, Adler had seen education as one of its principal activities, and in 1878 he set up a free kindergarten for working-class children. This proved to be very successful and three years later it was expanded into a tuition-free elementary school called the Workingman’s School, which, Adler announced in his opening address, aimed to provide working-class children with ‘a broad and generous education, such as the children of the richest might be glad in some respect to share with them’.

As it turned out, the rich were glad to share the excellent education offered by the school, and, indeed, were prepared to pay for the privilege. So in 1890 the school (which had run into grave financial difficulties) started admitting fee-paying students, drawn mainly from the affluent families of the Ethical Culture Society who, because of anti-Semitic prejudice, were finding it impossible to place their children in the best private schools. Within a few years of the introduction of fee-paying students the school changed its character completely, replacing its original mission of providing a model education for the poor with the rather different aim of educating and training future leaders of society in the ideals of the Ethical Culture movement. By the time it moved into its Central Park West building in 1902, only 10 per cent of its students were working-class children on scholarships. Most of the other 90 per cent were the children of Ethical Culture Society members, attracted not only by an education informed by the ideals of the Ethical Culture movement, but also by the quality of education on offer at the school, which by then was widely recognised as one of the best private schools in the country. Having by this time added a high school to the original elementary school, the Ethical Culture School was seen – by an increasing number of middle-class gentiles as well as by the German Jewish community – as an ideal preparation for admission to the top universities in the country.

Despite the growing number of gentiles among its students, the school in Oppenheimer’s day was still widely viewed as a place for the education of Jewish children. The children themselves, however, came largely from families who, like the Oppenheimers, were assimilated to such an extent
that their identity as Jewish was no longer entirely clear. One of Oppenheimer’s classmates, asked years later for her recollections of him, agreed that Oppenheimer felt uneasy about his Jewishness, but added: ‘We all did.’ In its publicity material, the school emphasised its role in
American
culture, particularly in American democracy. ‘The school is to be a nursery of “re-formers”’, its catalogue announced, with the aim of training people who would provide the leadership required to reform society so that it answered to the needs of, and expressed ‘the ideal aspirations of’, American democracy.

The school, then, saw itself as shaping the minds of those who would in later life lead America, whether in politics, business, science or the arts. One might regard this as the application to the entire country of Adler’s version of the moral law: ‘Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature of the other.’ The school would help America to realise its potential and become itself. Then, with its leaders trained in the ideals of Ethical Culture, America would at last fulfil the hopes of the German Jews who had gone there in the 1840s, expecting to find the embodiment of Enlightenment ideals. Even before he founded the Ethical Culture Society, when he was still a professor at Cornell, Adler had developed an exalted view of American democracy, which, in tracing a direct line between the Jewish prophetic tradition and the American democratic ideal, attributed to the latter a religious significance. In his first set of Sunday-morning lectures, he declared: ‘To larger truths America is dedicated.’ America could, he argued, provide both political and spiritual liberty and so break the ‘spiritual fetters that load thy sons and daughters!’ ‘All over this land,’ he announced, ‘thousands are searching and struggling for the better, they know not what.’ It was his role, the role of the Ethical Culture Society and of the students trained in its school, to teach those thousands what, exactly, they were searching for and thereby to define and exemplify what Adler was fond of calling the ‘American ideal’.

Adler’s role as the spokesman for the spiritual importance of Americanisation received recognition and support at the highest level when, in 1908, he was appointed by President Roosevelt himself as Theodore Roosevelt Professor at the University of Berlin, where he gave a series of lectures on ‘The Foundation for Friendly Relations Between Germany and America’. In a book that was published some years later, he argued that America represented a ‘New Ideal’. ‘The American ideal,’ he declared, ‘is that of the uncommon quality latent in the common man.’

This was something that was to become a central part of Oppenheimer’s world view. If Oppenheimer seemed to later observers strangely untouched, for the most part, by the values of the Ethical Culture Society, with respect to America and what it represented, he was at one with Adler. His greatest
love was possibly that which he felt for his country. In his mind at least, the answer to the question about the nature of his identity was simple: he was not German and he was not Jewish, but he was, and was proud to be, American.

In this respect, Oppenheimer was a typical product of the Ethical Culture movement. Besides the patriotic focus in its publicity material, the Ethical Culture School did its best, on every available occasion, to present itself to parents and pupils as first and foremost an
American
school. Four times a year it held festivals in which the pupils would perform plays in front of the parents. These festivals did not include Hanukkah, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah or Passover, but rather Thanksgiving, Christmas, Patriots’ Day and a May festival. The first of these that Oppenheimer took part in was the Christmas Festival of 1911, in which the pupils of his year (the second grade) presented a play that drew on elements of Viking mythology – Fire Spirits, Frost Giants, Ice Spirits, and so on – to present the triumph of life over death. It ended with a rousing chorus of ‘Noël, Noël’.

During Oppenheimer’s first year at school he and his family moved into a new home. The apartment at West 94th Street was sold, and the family relocated to a much grander apartment that took up the whole eleventh floor at 155 Riverside Drive, a prestigious red-brick block on the Upper West Side right next to Riverside Park, with views of the Hudson River. In recent years 155 Riverside Drive has become famous as the home of the characters in the popular television situation comedy
Will & Grace
, who live on the ninth floor. The scriptwriters no doubt chose Riverside Drive for the same reasons as the Oppenheimer family: it is an impressive address, signalling elegance, wealth and membership of Manhattan’s educational and artistic elite. In 1912, it was where some prominent members of the fabulously wealthy Guggenheim family lived, including Benjamin Guggenheim, who, in April of that year, as a first-class passenger on board the fateful maiden voyage of the
Titanic
, famously insisted on facing death ‘like a gentleman’. Also living at Riverside Drive when the Oppenheimers moved there was Benjamin Guggenheim’s brother, William, notable for publishing an autobiography in the guise of a biography in which he said of himself that anyone who saw his ‘light complexion’ and the cast of his features ‘would not have surmised his Semitic ancestry’.

When they moved into this large and prestigious apartment the Oppenheimers took with them their impressive collection of paintings, as well as Ella’s mother and Robert’s governess. Ella was pregnant at the time and, on 14 August 1912, Francis Oppenheimer was born. Frank (as he was always known) was too young to be a a playmate for Robert, but as they grew up they would become close, and Robert’s correspondence
with his younger brother reveals an intimacy that Oppenheimer was to share with very few people.

Certainly, Oppenheimer had few (if any) close friends at school. He once remarked in later life that it was characteristic that he could not remember any of his classmates. They remembered him, of course. Particularly vivid are the memories of Jane Didisheim (later Jane Kayser), who, fifty years after knowing Robert at school, could recall him in telling detail: