The Mathematician’s Shiva (14 page)

I didn’t have to implore my mother’s rabbi to say kind words. My mother opened her heart not to most, certainly, but to many. The local community knew the stories of her generosity and commitment to charity. The rabbi was doing his job, assuring all that my mother’s life on this planet was filled with acts of giving. My job would be different. There would be no tears in public, or at least not on the
bima
. I recited the words, those of my grandfather that guided me whenever I had to find the fortitude to play the part of the public face of my family. “
Shtark zich, shtark zich
,” I said over and over again in my mind. Stand tall. I swear I could feel the spirit of both my grandfather and mother in the hall strengthening me. I looked at the memorial lights on the brass plaques lining the birch-paneled walls as I walked up to the
bima
.

My voice boomed, like my mother’s did. Those who knew my mother and had an ear for detail surely could hear the resemblance. A few days in Wisconsin with my family and too many Soviet bloc mathematicians had brought back roundness to my vowels. My tongue had instinctively moved back a fraction, ready at any moment to pronounce with some facility, if not fluidity, all those Russian sounds. I thanked everyone for coming, for helping my family in their time of grief, even though the presence of all these people was no solace at all.

“My mother had many mentors,” I said. “Kolmogorov of course was one. There were also people from history whose works she read and who greatly influenced her. At the top of the list was Sophie Kowalevski, a nineteenth-century Russian mathematician, who like my mother practiced her profession outside her motherland.

“Kowalevski was not as much an intellectual guide for my mother as she was a beacon for how to live, how to pursue a meaningful life despite obstacles. It was Kowalevski’s example that gave my mother the strength to leave the known world of Russia for something new, a potentially fruitful life in the West.

“All of you know of my mother’s mathematical talent. Most of you, however, likely have little idea that she was a writer as well. Again, it was Kowalevski—who wrote a novel and a memoir in addition to her mathematical work—who inspired her. ‘The mind changes as you get older,’ she said to me. ‘It is a different machine entirely than it is when it’s young, with a different purpose.’

“My mother wrote a memoir of her childhood. She didn’t know what she would do with it. It was of a lost world, she said. I don’t think she ever intended this memoir to be published formally. Rather, it was a family document, a record of a vanished time and place that could be handed down from generation to generation. She wrote short stories based on that time as well, some of which have been published. Unlike her stories, she wrote her memoir in her childhood language of Polish, a language that I don’t know well. She said that she received much pleasure writing in her mother tongue. She would send me chapters, and I would struggle through them, but I could sense how much she enjoyed writing each word. It was well worth the effort to read them. I learned about a side of my mother that I couldn’t possibly know otherwise.

“When my mother was ten years old, she was living along the Barents Sea. It was a life of deprivation, perhaps made slightly more tolerable by the knowledge that the chances of survival were reasonable, something that could not be said for those who stayed in her hometown during the war.

“This unlikely place was where she received her first formal education in mathematics. Up until that time, she had been self-taught. Her skills were already prodigious, but in the miners’ camp in the Arctic where they lived, she learned the formal language of mathematics. She learned its history. She knew then and there that she would be a part of this mathematical world for the rest of her life.

“She wrote in her memoirs, ‘The war, despite all its horror for me, for my family, and for tens of millions of others, gave me an intellectual life, something I would not possibly have possessed had Hitler never lived. That was not, however, its most important gift. Before the war, I was a terribly spoiled, self-centered child. Perhaps this was a normal passing phase, but I think not. Had I not lived through the cold, the misery, the death, and the deprivation, I would have taken my life and those around me for granted for all of my days. I truly believe this. The war made me, forced me, to become human, to value life, to value love, and to strive to live every day with meaning.’

“My mother did live every day with meaning. I, like her, have had many mentors. But none have been more important to me than my mother. She was able to accomplish so much not simply because she was smart. Everything she did, she did fully and passionately, from the lofty task of making the kind of intellectual discoveries almost all would find daunting, to what some might view as the more quotidian tasks of being a good mother, wife, daughter, aunt, and friend. She will always be my guiding light. I know she will always be the guiding light of many in this room. Like her mentors Kolmogorov and Kowalevski, I am certain that she will influence lives well past our own.

“I am thankful for many things. I have led a fortunate life in many ways. First and foremost, though, I am thankful to have had a mother who taught me, patiently and with tenderness and love, how to live in this world. I have been privileged to have Rachela Karnokovitch as a mother. If anyone was an example of the miraculous gift of life and what the creative spirit can do, it was her.”

I returned to my seat and took the scene in. I looked at the cut flowers so artfully arranged, not the standard bouquets of such affairs. This was Bruce’s work, his eye for detail exemplary, as always. Everyone in my family was, in fact, doing what was needed to be done to keep this horde satisfied. I was deluding myself if I thought my role was somehow more important or more difficult.

I watched the faces approach the closed casket, one after another. I had no intention of staying for the entire procession, and neither did the rest of my family. Reflexively, I looked at the faces and categorized them the way my mother taught me as a child. She said it was a useful skill to know where someone was from, or at the very least, to know the birthplace of their ancestors. “Look, look,” she would say to me in Russian as we approached someone on the street. “That face like an eggplant, Italian. Look carefully. That face like a ripe apple, Irish. That face like a potato, Ukrainian.” Of course, in the case of Slavic faces, my mother’s description wouldn’t take place until the subject in question was out of earshot.

The fruits and vegetables of my childhood were transformed into a United Nations through my mother’s lessons. So it was as I watched the procession, full of many potatoes and cauliflowers, with the occasional onion, plum, and mushroom. It was a good distraction. There was quite an assortment in those first fifty or so faces. But then I saw two quite unlike the others, the older one a mixture of an apple and a Bosc pear, a little long in the face, with blond, thick hair, pulled back. It was a young woman with her daughter, who was far more apple than pear, her blond hair in braids. I had never met them. But I knew who they were. They walked past the casket, and then they walked toward my family. My uncle knew too, instantly, or so he said later. My father looked at that little girl, and whatever fog he was in instantly lifted. “
Chto eto takoe?
[What do we have here?]” Me? I was at a loss for words.

I
don’t look like my mother except in my cheekbones, which are high on my face and broad, a bit like a summer squash I suppose. But from what little I know, my mother didn’t look like the rest of her family. Bruce and I look like brothers, I’m told. I look like the brawn, he looks like the brains. Peasant wisdom says that family traits often skip a generation. I have my doubts whether such an assertion can be quantified and tested. But that sense of who is and isn’t blood is a sixth sense that I learned I possessed the day of my mother’s funeral, just like my mother could sense over the phone that she had found her brother decades before.

Of course, these things can be apparitions. Certainly I felt that, in my middle age, there was something elemental missing in my life. There is a Hebrew prayer that is recited during every daily service,
l’dor vador nagid godlecha
. From generation to generation we will tell of your greatness. It was a prayer that held little meaning to me as a child or even as a young adult. But as I recited it in my late forties, the phrase
l’dor vador
began to sting. I was the end of the line. In truth, I hadn’t held up my end of the deal. I was supposed to ensure that our gene pool continued for at least one more generation in a verifiable way.

Bruce’s verdict on our gene pool was a definite thumbs-down. He had said no to a friend who asked if he would donate his sperm. “She’d have ended up with a brainy geek of a kid, or maybe worse, someone with scary ambition who’d end up in a penthouse and, in the end, a jail cell.”

But me, I wasn’t so negative about our traits. Certainly compared to other mathematically inclined families we were by far among the most socially adept. My mother, when necessary, could talk to the car mechanic, the dry cleaner, and the plumber. My father avoided the car mechanic, the dry cleaner, and the plumber not because he didn’t possess adequate social skills, but because as a child of relative privilege who suffered little during the war, he was convinced such tasks were beneath him. While he was more than a bit aristocratic and snobby, his airs could easily be mistaken for curmudgeonliness, a behavior that, if you are above a certain hard-won age, is customarily well accepted in the Badger State.

We are smart. What’s wrong with smart? We have outstanding survival skills. Our resourcefulness would peg any scale built in America. We believe that no problem, even one of Hilbert’s notorious twenty-three, is too difficult to solve. We aren’t bad looking. We are responsible citizens, every one of us. We pay our taxes. We are never behind on our credit cards, utility bills, and mortgages. We are hard workers, and even my father has an iron handshake, a characteristic that comes from being only two generations removed from farm work.

OK, we drink too much. You could call us alcoholics, I suppose, but if that is the case, three quarters of Russia consists of worse drunks than us. As far as I’m concerned, Americans don’t drink nearly enough. A good alcoholic poisoning of the brain now and then clears it out in a way that nothing else can. Yes, it’s also true that we have broken hearts. We abandon our children if we believe we are leaving them in good hands. We are not always reliable in romantic relationships, at least the men aren’t. I wouldn’t call that a genetic defect.

If I were to rate our gene pool like Standard & Poor’s or Moody’s rated bonds before the days when they began to make stuff up, I’d give it a solid honest AA. My father’s rating I’m sure would be even more generous. His response to realizing in that synagogue that I had been a good son, one who had given him two generations instantly, consisted of only slightly tempered euphoria. He had, on the day that he buried his wife, won the gene propagation lottery.

On the surface there was not much of a resemblance between my daughter or my granddaughter and him, but the hair and those undeniable cheekbones of my granddaughter—my cheekbones as well as those of my mother—told him everything he needed to know. He went from being bored to ebullient in an instant.

My daughter’s name was Andrea. My granddaughter was Amy. Pleasant names both. Easy to pronounce. Andrea walked up to me and I stood up instinctively and held out my hand. “I’m glad you could come,” I said.

“Do you know who I am?” Her accent was a Southern hemisphere thing, either Aussie or Kiwi. Her eyes, the way she looked at me, were those of her mother. Her tone implied that I wouldn’t have the slightest notion who she might be.

There are many Yiddish words that are misused in America. I don’t know how, for example, the word
putz
became used to describe a man who is a clueless and tasteless idiot. It’s an extremely offensive word in Yiddish, an obscene condemnation that should be used only in response to the most contemptuous behavior. I do know how another word became twisted and trivialized,
farklemt
. It became a haha-that’s-so-funny signature word used by a recurring female character created and played by a male comedian on a popular TV show. But the fact is that being
farklemt
isn’t a cheap emotion to laugh about. Your heart presses against your chest, your throat tightens, your eyes water, and it’s nearly impossible for you to say even a single word. You could describe it as being “choked up” in English and, though that two-word description is bland, at least it isn’t comical.

I looked down at the wood-tile floor and tried to compose myself. “I didn’t really know about you, no. But looking at you, I know, yes.” That was all I could summon up at the time. We’ve talked about this first meeting, my daughter and I, over the years. She has said she was so nervous herself that she didn’t notice anything odd about my behavior. More than anything else, she was simply happy to have found me. Sometimes we get lucky for all the wrong reasons.

I still couldn’t look up, but I took in my granddaughter again. “And her. It’s amazing, really.”

“She looks like your mum?”

“Uncanny.”

“Well, she doesn’t look like anyone from back home. Except her nose, maybe. I think that’s Mother’s and mine.”

“I think so, yes.”

“I suppose this isn’t the best time to meet.” She was a single mother who had traveled all the way from Christchurch to Berkeley to try and earn an advanced degree in urban planning. A very ambitious sort she was. She had chosen Berkeley because it was close to my former in-laws. “I tried to call several times actually, but your message box was always full.”

“You didn’t have to call. You were right to simply come. Very right. The phone messages are from a lot of mathematicians, mostly.”

“That’s how I heard. My landlord.”

“He’s a mathematician?”

“Yes. A math prof. We rent a cottage in back of his house. He was saddened. It seems your mother touched many, many people.”

“Your grandmother, yes, she did.”
Shtark zich, shtark zich
, I thought to myself again. Don’t be a crying baby. I looked into her face, and my awareness of her happiness made me feel diminished and trivial. Uncharacteristically, I couldn’t find confidence in myself. It seemed altogether likely and possible that my daughter would, at any second, pull the curtain aside and reveal me for the phony I was. “You know, I knew about you all these years,” I said. “I didn’t know if you were a boy or a girl, but I knew.”

“She never told me about you. It was just a guess, really, on my part. I knew it would be someone here. My landlord would joke about Amy’s hair, that she looked like a little Rachela Karnokovitch, and told me about your mum. Just a crazy guess. He suggested we come out here, even gave me the flyer miles to come.”

“That was not a crazy guess, miss. No. It was an excellent deduction,” my father said. My father had been hovering about us, staring at his little great-grandchild.

“This is your grandfather, I suppose,” I said.

“There is no ‘suppose.’ It is a certain fact,” my father said, shaking Andrea’s hand. “I am so pleased to meet you, miss. You have no idea how much. My name is Viktor. Where are you staying?”

“The Howard Johnson’s. We didn’t know anyone, so I called the math department and asked them. It seems the place is filled with mathematicians. Very nice people, actually.”

“Your mother was a fine mathematician,” my father said.

“She still is. Teaches in secondary school.”

“You should come to my house,” my father said. “I have plenty of room for you.”

“Really? Would it be OK?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

My father was beaming. His eyes were alight in a way I hadn’t seen in a long time. Unlike me, he was pivoting with ease to a new circumstance. This is how he was, as were my mother and grandfather. Perhaps the war was what made them so. Perhaps it was just the tumult of the Soviet system. Whatever the reason or reasons, I always knew I’d never be as adroit as them when it came to change. I took pride in my resourcefulness, certainly, but only by American standards was it remarkable.

We walked out of the synagogue to the waiting limousine, which while a little tight for seven adults, could easily fit six of them and one six-year-old girl. Eight mathematicians, all former students of my mother, four men and four women—wearing the kind of clothes I seldom saw on any mathematician save for my father—easily carried the coffin with the oh-so-light load.