The Mathematician’s Shiva (29 page)

T
he following month, my uncle, Anna, and I sat together at two events that honored my mother. The first, the official State of Wisconsin Memorial Ceremony for Professor Rachela Karnokovitch, was originally going to be held in the capitol building. With the addition of Miss Dolly Parton and the accompanying need for a decent public address system and good acoustics, it was moved to the main hall of the city convention center, a stately facility on Lake Monona designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. My father chose not to attend, and had I not wanted to show my uncle my support, I certainly would have done the same. Before the ceremony began, we went backstage and shook the hands of the governor and Miss Parton. Then we were whisked away to our seats when my cousin said, “It’s time to make the strudel.”

How did this event come to be? My uncle told us he owed the governor a favor. When the governor sniffed out an opportunity to celebrate one of Wisconsin’s own—with a strudel my mother would have found repulsive—my uncle Shlomo was stuck. According to him, it all went back to Aunt Zloteh’s death. His liquor business originally had been registered with the state, for legal liability reasons, entirely in my aunt’s name. After my aunt died, my uncle, on a bender that lasted well past one year, was in no shape to do anything. The business kept going in his absence, but certain details were ignored. One of those details was the transfer of the title of incorporation to a living person. Without that transfer, my uncle’s business was technically no longer legal. That meant, among other things, that all contracts that my uncle had with the state of Wisconsin for alcohol sales at state-sponsored events were null and void.

The failure to transfer went unnoticed for three years. When it was discovered, my uncle’s accountant made its repercussions known. The financial penalties and the loss of future revenue from the state of Wisconsin were enormous. Something had to be fixed somehow.

According to my uncle’s accountant, there was one person who could make everything legal again, the treasurer of the state of Wisconsin, Wayne Dombrowski. My uncle went to Dombrowski’s office and pleaded his case in Polish. He told his story of coming to America, losing his lovely Polish wife, and being so devastated by the loss that he forgot to do many things, including filling out the incorporation transfer form. The treasurer took pity on him. A document was drawn up that granted a back transfer of the incorporation papers to my uncle. All had been fixed.

Treasurer Dombrowski eventually became Governor Dombrowski. When the request came from the governor’s office for a state-sponsored memorial service for his sister, what could my uncle do? Why would a popular governor want such a ceremony? Somehow the genius of a Polish woman whose face reminded him of his own mother’s touched him to his core. This is what Dombrowski told me at my mother’s ceremony. For what it’s worth, he sounded sincere.

Of course, my uncle’s story probably wasn’t exactly true. It may have not even been mostly true. With my family, historical facts are subsidiary to narrative, and narrative must always show the narrator in the best light. Regardless, my cousin baked an excellent strudel for this show, an effort that made my uncle glow with pride.

In addition to being able to use the production services of my cousin for free, the governor had been lucky on another front. When he had proposed the ceremony, the idea was, at best, odd. Yes, my mother had won the National Medal of Science, but who outside the mathematical world knew of her? What did her obscure mathematics have to do with Wisconsin’s technological innovation, anyhow?

But with her solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, my mother was, at least for a brief while, a bona fide minor national celebrity. Her achievements were noted on NPR and the
NewsHour
, and in the
New York Times
and other media sources that targeted the ever-shrinking population of citizens capable of paying attention to more than two hundred words at one time. A ceremonial event that might have baffled many suddenly seemed a stroke of brilliance. My mother’s life was indeed worth celebrating.

The University of Wisconsin symphony played a movement from Beethoven’s Sixth, my mother’s favorite. A young Milwaukee man, Daniel Beliavsky, played a Chopin etude. Then the program moved from somber reflection to a colorful recounting of the life of my mother by the University of Wisconsin’s chancellor. The brass section of the orchestra introduced the governor with a slightly muted version of “On, Wisconsin,” and Dombrowski was in his element, talking about the parallels between his parents’ life and my mother’s, all native Poles who came to Wisconsin and enriched the state and country with their hard work and patriotism. The first time I heard the words “Badger Ingenuity” flow from his tongue, I expected to cringe, but surprisingly I was swept along by the sentiment. He mentioned Badger Ingenuity six times in his speech by my count. Three times would have been more than enough. Yet when Dombrowski walked off the stage, I was at least temporarily convinced that my mother was indeed a shining example “that the fertile ground of the Badger State was not only excellent for corn, soybeans, and cranberries, but also for technological innovation.”

Then it was Miss Parton’s turn to lift up the crowd. The band struck up “On, Wisconsin” again, and she picked up the tune with her instantly identifiable wavering, sweet soprano voice. She followed that with a game version of the governor’s favorite Polish song, “Stracic Kogos,” the chorus translated into English by yours truly. Miss Parton introduced the number by noting that she’d loved Poland ever since she learned they named their tank armor after her. Finally, she sang “God Bless America” and “America the Beautiful” in quick succession. The orchestra’s string section, playing an arrangement created by my cousin, added extra weight to the words. Maybe my mother would have approved in the end.

Despite the absence of pomp and circumstance, it was the second event, the special symposium to honor Rachela Karnokovitch at the 107th meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Boston, Massachusetts, that proved far more exciting. All of my childhood I had heard the acronym AMS. As a kid I would sometimes be carted off to these meetings and be left to run around the halls on my own while my parents attended talks. When I decided to go into meteorology, I smiled when I learned of the corresponding professional organization, the American Meteorological Society. My change in field of study would require some significant adjustments, but at least I wouldn’t have to remember a new acronym.

In 2001, I had the privilege of attending both AMS meetings. I was on the roster of authors with specially invited abstracts at both, as well. But it was the mathematical AMS that was on my A-list that year.

One by one my mother’s collaborators came up to the podium. Perry, O’Connell, Orlansky, Ito, Epshtein, Ben-Zvi, one of the triplets (I still couldn’t tell which one), all of the people who had invaded my mother’s home just six weeks before—and most of whom I had become disgusted with by the time they left—were there. Somehow on the podium they each looked completely respectable and appealing in their own way. This was their element. They said little in the way of personal stories, except for Professor Kelly Hickson. She noted that as a result of spending a week with the Karnokovitch family she had decided to take up cross-country skiing and Russian, both of which she was certain would improve her mathematics. When someone shouted out in a Polish accent, thick as sour cream, “learning Polish would be even better,” the crowd roared.

Yakov presented his new proof in mathematical physics, the triumphant solution to the Boussinesq equation problem that had been preceded by twelve years of frustration. He said nothing of the origin of his breakthrough. The crowd was tense with excitement as they listened. The applause that followed was hearty. In a normal year Yakov’s work might have been the highlight of the meeting. But this was no ordinary year.

I watched my father step to the podium. He stood before his colleagues, erect, confident, and without any hint of sadness or flashes of pride, presented my mother’s work. The cameras of a few journalists flashed as he spoke, and he paid them no mind. He was focused on one thing and one thing only. This was my father at his best.

Following that talk, my father started to make plans for his retirement. He too, he said, was leaving for California. Everyone else was there, save for his son in Alabama. Why not him? Except he wasn’t going to Los Angeles like his brother-in-law. He was going to find an apartment in Berkeley to be near his granddaughter and great-granddaughter. It wasn’t meant to be, though. Three months later my father would have a fatal stroke in his office. As my mother wished, he was buried next to her.

When I think of my father, the first moment that usually comes to mind is of him delivering that talk at the AMS. He’s wearing a blue suit and a white shirt. His bow tie is one that was picked out by my daughter as a present for that special day. There would be no greater moment in his life. He knew it. I knew it. Everyone did. When he was done, he walked from the podium with the cameras flashing and sat down next to me and the rest of his family. I looked at him as he sat listening to the chair of the session say a few closing words. His eyes looked straight ahead. He betrayed no emotion. But I knew exactly what he was feeling at that moment.

We, of course, don’t get to choose our parents. We don’t get to choose where we are born, either. We are adaptable creatures, though, and genetics often means that our families share innate attitudes, emotional responses, and intellectual traits that make us feel an intimacy much closer than what can be produced by simple day-to-day interaction alone. In a modest bungalow in a small city with a cold climate, I shared many years with two people who were more than parents, if that’s possible. They were not simply guides or examples or emotional anchors. Our collective strangeness and eccentricity relative to those around us meant we were almost our own sovereign Slavic nation.

I moved back to Madison to take a position at the University of Wisconsin the year after my parents died. Jenny’s two boys were still in high school, and after a lot of discussion, we both agreed that it would be cruel to yank them away from their friends and bring them to Tuscaloosa. The South was different, far different than any other place in the country. I liked it, yes, but fourteen- and sixteen-year-old boys would probably have a difficult time adapting to its unique ways.

In the South, lineage is very important, and perhaps more than in any other part of the country, Southern families are concerned with their family trees. They trace them back to the plantation days and make strange and unnecessary apologies for their great-great-grandparents’ slave holdings. “I know my family was kind to their slaves, because that’s the kind of people we are” is a common sentiment. Then they go back to Europe, where something strange often happens. An inordinate number of the family trees from these Scotch-Irish people who trace their lineage over one thousand years find their roots in one person, Charlemagne. I’ve seen these family trees in some homes in the South. Evidently there is a straight path from Hank Williams to a ninth-century Holy Roman Emperor.

I thought about these Southern family trees when I looked at my own, so carefully put together by my mother. Hers was more than just a tree. My mother was nothing if not thorough, and she had put together an epic tale, with biographies of noted people from my lineage that filled up two shelves of bookcases in my old bedroom.

Most Jewish efforts at Jewish genealogy don’t try to go back more than a few hundred years. Like the Southern conceit of being related to Charlemagne, there are an inordinate number of American Askhenazi Jews who claim the Baal Shem Tov as blood kin. My mother, once she had freed her brain from the ultimate quest of solving the Navier-Stokes problem, also claimed to have found something extraordinary in our family tree.

Of pedestrian interest was that we were related to a prominent Hassidic rabbi, in our case the Grand Rabbi of Minsk from the 1850s. This was plausible. The grand rabbi had fifteen children, after all. But then her family tree marched back through the centuries, to Spain in the fourteenth century, and it hit true pay dirt. According to my mother, she and I were the descendants of none other than Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, someone more commonly known as Maimonides.

If I were to believe my mother, the greatest Jewish philosopher and mathematician of the Middle Ages and I are blood. I don’t, not for a second. My mother was the best mathematician of her time, but I am certain that as a genealogist she fell prey to the same heady embellishment of most who look at their past. She was, after all, a very sentimental woman. Still, there is always the finite probability that this blood tie does exist. If so, my mother and Maimonides are the twin towers of my lineage, my
yikhes
.

I’m of an age where I spend a good deal of time looking back. I like to take walks and retrace steps from my childhood. I look at buildings and remember what businesses used to be there and what I would buy there with my parents. Sometimes I’ll walk past my old house with my stepsons or my grandchildren when we’re on our way to Vilas Park and I’ll just stop, look up, reminisce, and try to think how I could possibly explain all that happened inside to these people who are so utterly American. I can’t do it. Maybe when they read this book they’ll understand just a bit of what it was about.

On occasion, I look at my CV with my list of academic publications and note that my career is slowing down. I’m publishing far less. My grants are down to a trickle. The awards I’ve received as of late are not for current work but for the “body of his achievements.” I’m a happy has-been. No, I haven’t achieved nearly as much as my mother or my supposed patriarch Maimonides, but those are both ridiculous standards. I’m very proud of what I’ve done. The future is for my children. It’s for my grandchildren.

Amidst the list of publications on my CV, one stands out because it isn’t in
Science
or
Nature
or a geophysical or atmospheric sciences journal. It’s in
Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics
. It’s true that I’m only a fourth author on this publication, but my father was right. I did play a significant role in its creation.