The Mathematician’s Shiva Read Online Free PDF Page B

never open her eyes again.

CHAPTER 4
From A Lifetime in Mathematics by Rachela Karnokovitch: The Bear
    I remember a good deal about our trip to Vorkuta. It was in 1940, in April, I believe, about the time of my tenth birthday. No one celebrated such things in my part of Poland, even in well-to-do homes like ours. It would have been considered decadent and indulgent to bestow such attention on a child. It was a time of war as well.
    We had been living in Odessa. My father, ever resourceful, had in advance of the war obtained a letter offering him a place to live, should he need it, from a Karlin-Stolin sect rabbi in Belarus. He presented this letter to a Soviet officer in Vladimir-Volynski, and I don’t know why—no one was being allowed to leave, even those who tried to bribe officials—he stamped our papers. Even the guards looked surprised as they inspected our documents at the Belarus border.
    We spent roughly a week in the rabbi’s house in Motal. In exchange, my father gave the rabbi gold. But there was no food. It was the first time in my life I had felt hunger. That’s what I remember, the gnawing at my stomach, oh so fierce. I was a spoiled child back then, used to getting everything I wanted, and was so angry with my mother and father. Didn’t they know I needed food? I thought of my brother, still in Vladimir-Volynski, and was terribly jealous. Our aunt was childless and she would give us little chocolates when we visited. He was undoubtedly in luxurious comfort with our aunt and here I was in a house full of children, all so quiet, subdued, and worried as they felt emptiness in their stomachs. We were disappearing little by little from our hunger. One day, we knew, we would be gone entirely.
    My father was desperate to find someplace, anyplace, where he could find a way to make enough money for us to live. There was no black market of suitable size in Motal for my father to trade. We traveled on false papers to Odessa, where my mother had a distant cousin. They were not happy to have us in their tiny cinder-block apartment. Refugees were everywhere, hungry, looking for any bit of food or clothing. It was dangerous to walk outside even in daylight. Grown women, grandmothers, would force you down to the ground and steal the shoes from your feet. The police and soldiers would watch the lawlessness apathetically, spending most of their time trying to find cigarettes and women.
    There was a place my father would go to trade, a square just a little walk from the main port. His Russian was poor at the time and the others didn’t trust him. They viewed my father as an interloper who would take away their business. While he traded, I would sit in the stairwell of the apartment building by myself during the day, trying to avoid the angry stares, and worse, of my cousins. Here it was, out of pure unrelenting boredom, the absence of any stimulus whatsoever in my life for hours on end, that I began to amuse myself with what I learned is called topology.
    The apartment building was constructed in a haphazard way, typical of what was found throughout the Soviet Union. As a result, the stairs were not predictable. Sometimes there would be twenty-two steps from one floor to another. Others would have twenty-three. The heights of these steps would be short or tall willy-nilly, and the lack of predictability would make people stumble even if they took care to watch their feet while they walked.
    I thought there was some beauty in this randomness, something wondrously different from exactitude and predictability. Plus, I was surefooted and would delight in seeing my mean cousins end up with bruises. I started to think of staircases where there was no pattern to their ascent. I wrote down crude formulae to describe these stairs of my imagination. Unbeknownst to me, I was re-creating something devised by a Russian mathematician who died of starvation in World War I, Georg Cantor.
    I’d sit on the cold cement stairs and imagine