Martian's Daughter: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

days. My father's car-totaling accidents were a more or less annual event, and when once asked why he habitually drove a very unacademic Cadillac, he replied “because no one will sell me a tank.” Many decades later, in Washington, DC, my husband narrowly avoided having his own car struck by a vehicle that barreled at full speed through a stop sign. As it passed him, he recognized his mother-in-law at the wheel, with both of our young children as passengers. From that day forward, the children were strictly forbidden ever to ride alone with their grandmother until they were old enough to take the wheel themselves.
     
    My father's professional life in the United States became full time in 1933, when he was appointed at the age of twenty-nine as one of the five original members of the faculty of the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, along with three much older but also very distinguished mathematicians and, of course, Albert Einstein. The faculty of the institute did not—and still does not—have teaching obligations; the aim of its founding benefactors was to provide a pleasant, secure environment in which the world's leading mathematical minds could spend all their time thinking and writing (gradually, the institute expanded to incorporate a number of other academic disciplines as well) without the interference of other commitments.
     
    Given what was happening in Germany, the institute appointment came just in time. In April 1933, the Nazi government passed laws mandating the firing of all civil servants (a category that included university professors) “descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents.” 5 Although my parents continued to visit their families in Hungary every year until 1939, they made their transits across Germany as quickly as train schedules allowed. My father began his tenure at the IAS in the fall of 1933; shortly thereafter, both he and my mother applied for US citizenship. Their lives as Americans had truly begun.
     
    While Europe was, in my father's words, “relapsing into the dark ages,” 6 my parents were able to continue their gilded lives in theiradopted country. The institute's professorial salary of ten thousand dollars per year was, during the Great Depression, more than adequate to support a lifestyle that included a series of luxurious rented homes on Library Place, Princeton's most elegant neighborhood, several servants, and my mother's Paris wardrobe. The von Neumanns soon became locally famous for their parties, at which resident and visiting geniuses imbibed large quantities of alcohol and generally let their hair down. My mother told a tale of one particularly exuberant evening at the end of which she and my father threw the dishes out the window rather than clean up.
     
    These gatherings were not entirely frivolous, however. A growing number of scientists fleeing Hitler's expanding reach obtained temporary appointments at the institute, and the von Neumann parties, to which many of the world's most brilliant scientific minds gravitated, provided networking opportunities for these displaced scholars seeking permanent jobs. 7 The plight of many of his fellow European intellectuals underscored both my father's conviction about the scale of the disaster that was occurring in Europe—even though he didn't fully foresee the horrors of the “final solution”—and his goal of seeing his adopted country become the savior of civilization.
     
    My father's assistance to Jewish intellectuals whose lives and livelihoods were threatened wasn't confined to helping them once they had reached the safety of the United States. Among his papers are a letter to Abraham Flexner, director of the institute at the time, pleading with him to intercede with the State Department (which was rife with anti-Semitism) to grant a visa to Kurt Gödel, a non-Jew who had nonetheless been deprived of his job by the Nazis, as well as letters to colleagues at