The Mathematician’s Shiva Read online

  In a flight of fancy before my mother died, I had actually thought of following Brodsky’s model. We could bury my mother in Israel, maybe even near the Mount of Olives grave of her landsfrau, the nineteenth-century mystic Maid of Ludmir. But the fact is that Israeli mathematicians are as impossible and nosey as those in America.

  I didn’t mention this crazy thought to my mother. I knew what she wanted. “Kowalevski, where did they bury her? In Oslo, where she was a professor,” my mother once said about the greatest female mathematician of the nineteenth century. Russian-born, Kowalevski had not been allowed to be educated and never taught in her homeland. “I’m no better than Sophie,” she said.

  That morning, the three of us—Anna, Bruce, and I—left the house together and walked slowly in our long coats. We navigated around the streaks of ice on the sidewalks with our slippery leather-bottomed shoes. It’s true that Bruce, despite hearing the stories from Russia and Poland again and again, could never fathom what life was like for me as a young child. He had spent all his years in dreamy America, where stories are expected to have happy endings. But he understood enough Yiddish and Polish to know when people were talking about him, and probably understood more Russian than he realized. As for Anna, she had lived a life that was far more like that of my parents’, but she had come here young enough to dip at least one toe into America and experience it freshly without always translating her experiences into the Russian equivalent. Though there were almost ten years separating us, we did share common experiences and a common mood and setting. We were here and we were there both.

  “We’re going to be late,” Anna said.

  “They aren’t going to start out without us,” I said.

  “It’s so fucking cold here. Even colder than I remember,” Bruce said.

  “Actually it’s getting warmer. Mendota freezes over for a smaller number of days every year,” I said.

  “Don’t piss on my shoes with lies, Sasha,” Bruce said.

  “That’s something zaydeh used to say in Yiddish. Very good translation, too,” I said.

  “I remember. I’m not a dummy, you know,” Bruce said, getting defensive.

  “True, but it is getting warmer. That’s a fact,” I said, getting pedantic.

  “I’m channeling. I’m turning into an old Jew right before my very eyes,” Bruce said.

  “I’m already there,” I said.

  “That’s a fact, too,” Bruce said.

  “I don’t like being late. It’s rude,” Anna said.

  “We won’t be late, Anna. We have thirty-five minutes,” Bruce said.

  “I don’t like falling and breaking my leg, either,” I said.

  “Bruce took dance lessons. He can walk faster than this. We’ll pull you along.” Anna started to grab me by the elbow, but I resisted.

  “I was never good at it. And besides, I don’t think Sasha wants any help.”

  “No, I don’t. You’re right. Five minutes and we’ll be there. Just wait.”

  We walked into the synagogue, the place as packed as it was for the High Holy Days. I could feel it again instantly, just like in Van Vleck Hall, the air of overpowering sadness. No, I don’t think I was projecting. These were my people. I knew their body language. Their arms swung when they were happy, and their shoulders sagged when they were defeated. If Binion’s World Series of Poker would allow only Russian and Polish Jews, I would eagerly sign up and make a killing every year. Then again, as my mother had told Anna, I don’t exactly possess a poker face myself.

  We sat in the front row, my father, Shlomo, Cynthia, Bruce, Anna, and me. The rabbi stood on the bima, a man about my age who barely knew me, and I could sense his pride welling up as he surveyed the crowd before him. There are no Nobel Prizes in mathematics, which urban legend says is the result of Nobel’s wife screwing a mathematician (studying the topology of curved spaces, no doubt, haha), but really now, this seems far-fetched. More than likely it’s due to the fact that, while mathematics is a useful tool, the way it is studied by mathematicians is rather useless for society. Nobel was all about practical matters. I am too, sort of. My mother and my father? No. Their friends? Certainly not. Be that as it may, there is a Nobel equivalent in mathematics, the Fields Medal, which comes with five figures in cash. No woman has ever won this prize. We’ll get to why this is so later, but there were eleven Fields Medal winners in that synagogue, not an everyday occurrence.

  I suppose I could have been angry at seeing this rabbi—who my mother thought was a hack—full of egotism. His beard had been tastefully trimmed just that morning, and he was taking in the crowd as if he were the star of a Broadway show. Instead, I was impressed. A few minutes before we began, he walked up to me, said just the right words of condolence, pulled out a little safety razor, and in a half second was done with the ceremonial tearing of my grandfather’s old tie. A real professional he was, or so I thought. In a small college town like Madison you usually got shy, tongue-tied, overintellectualizing minor leaguers. They were rabbis who couldn’t possibly handle the big congregations of New York, Chicago, or even Milwaukee. My mother probably had been, as per usual, overly critical.

  I half listened to the words of praise that flowed from him. My mind was racing. Unlike the rabbi, I do not enjoy performing. I simply wanted to be in my own world and think my own thoughts about my mother, about my life, about my future, and about the ones I loved. But it was expected that I make a speech, a summary of my mother’s life, that I be the representative of this family for the crowd. To do less would be to shirk a major responsibility to show that this family, undeniably human, could rise above its frailties.

  There is an old Jewish joke (are there ever any new ones?) that I thought about before I went to see the rabbi to discuss what he was going to say. A man dies, a complete scoundrel. His brother, also a scoundrel, goes to the rabbi the day before the funeral, and says, “I’ll give one million dollars to the synagogue if you call my brother a mensch when you give your speech.” The rabbi spends a sleepless night thinking about what he’s going to say at the funeral. The morning comes. His heart is heavy as he gets ready. He stands in front of the congregation and says, “This man was a complete scoundrel, a swindler, a cheat, and a whoremonger. But in all honesty, compared to his brother, he was a mensch.”

  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 in
tellectual 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.

  CHAPTER 18

  From Generation to Generation

  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.