Martian's Daughter: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

I knew she would never forgive me for outing the carefully hidden secret that had become such an important part of her self-identity.
     
    My choice of what I saw as the lesser of two evils was confirmed by the Hungarian American author Kati Marton, whose book The Great Escape tells the story of my father and eight other Hungarian Jews who reached the pinnacle of success in their fields after emigrating to the United States. In the course of interviewing me for that book, she confided that, in terms of her relations with her own parents, she wished she had made the same decision I had. In her book Enemies of the People , Marton tells how she learned of her own Jewish ancestry, quite by accident, at the age of thirty. When her father learned that she had discovered his secret, she wrote, “It put a strain on our relationship for the next 25 years.” 4
     
    At a 2006 family gathering of some forty-five descendants of a common ancestor brought together from all over Europe and the United States by an enterprising cousin for an all-day celebration in Budapest, Iasked several American members of my children's generation what their experiences had been regarding the “Jewish question.” Each of them responded that his or her parents had shrouded the issue in silence or mystery. Some of the families were devout Catholics; others were Protestants of varying denominations and degrees of religious commitment. All of the relatives I talked to—including myself and my daughter—had non-Jewish spouses. Among my generation, I appeared to be the only one who had chosen to tell my children about their Jewish background, emphasizing pride in that intellectual heritage rather than embarrassment or insecurity about their association with an oft-despised minority. And my daughter has made sure that her own children are just as knowledgeable about, and proud of, the Hungarian Jewish side of their ancestry as they are about my husband Bob's Mayflower American one.
     
    Having put an ocean between themselves and the more overt anti-Semitism they had left behind, my parents arrived in Princeton filled with enthusiasm for life in the United States—fortunately, their multilingual upbringing had included the study of English—along with considerable naïveté regarding social customs and everyday behavior in the New World. This ignorance of the social mores of their new homeland led them to show up at Princeton dinner parties shockingly late and wildly overdressed, as had been the custom in their European circles. With one foot in their new world and one in the old, they spent roughly a third of each of the years 1930-32 in Princeton; a third in Berlin, with my father teaching an academic term in each place; and the third on vacation in Budapest, back in the arms of their families. This peripatetic existence was complicated by the fact that my mother's response to the weeklong ocean voyage—the only way of crossing the Atlantic at the time—was seasickness so severe that one ship's doctor feared that she might die of dehydration before they reached land.
     
    While my father carried his busy and productive life as a member of the global mathematical elite to a new venue, my mother made the shift from protected young girl to mistress of a household in her own way. She expanded her belle of the ball persona to incorporate that of social hostess, holding evening open houses for my father's colleagues and students in their Princeton apartment. When it became clear to her that, in a country where chauffeurs were not a staple of academic life, a driver'slicense was essential, she took the advice of a friend who told her that the best way to acquire one was to offer the person in charge of the test drive a cigarette from a case containing a five-dollar bill—a substantial sum in 1931. The bribe worked, and my father apparently followed her example.
     
    Accordingly, they both remained appallingly bad, albeit licensed, drivers until the end of their