by Miriam Sved
Tibor and Levi would send their love if they knew I was writing to you. I think Levi has mostly recovered from the shock of your hasty departure – like me, he is only concerned to know you are safe and happy; although (forgive me for saying it) I am sure he still wishes he could have been the deliverer of your safety and happiness. He is much more solemn and solid these days; I think the war has made quite an admirable grown-up of him (I don’t mean for that to sound so terribly condescending; I am wishing I could rewrite this whole letter but there isn’t time).
Mrs Vos and the baby are stirring now – I don’t know how they have managed to sleep through the clattering of the little boys’ game, which involves pegs enacting a battle scene. I had better run next door and give this to the blessed son, implore him to look for your address and post it if he gets to America. It gives me such a feeling of lightness to think of this paper starting out on a journey to find you. Eventually the war will end, and then we will find each other properly. Until then, my oldest and dearest Ildi (Better Eszter), remember me.
Acknowledgements
This book is heavily indebted to my grandparents, George Sved and Marta Sved (née Wachsberger).
Marta, the wordsmith of the family, outlived her beloved George by eleven years, and it was largely in that time that I got to know her properly and started paying attention to her stories. Many of the stories were about her life in pre-war Budapest with George, and about their friends: a group of young Jewish mathematicians who would meet, to talk and work, at the statue of Anonymous in the City Park.
Some of the people in those stories survived the war and remained friends with my grandparents. Some of them are inspirations for characters in this book, although not with any straightforward adherence to real life.
Anyone familiar with twentieth-century mathematics might recognise in Pali Kalmar elements of the great mathematician Paul Erdős. Eccentric, prolific, collaborative and itinerant, Erdős travelled the world (with his mother until she died) staying with his friends and working in great bursts of productivity. I met him a few times as a child, when he visited my grandparents. I knew he was some kind of big deal. My main memory with him is of playing a game in which he dropped a money note between my fingers and challenged me to catch it.
Pali Kalmar is not a biographical rendering of Paul Erdős; I only cherry-picked bits of Erdős’s amazing life and personality. For anyone who wants to find out about the real Erdős I recommend two terrific biographies, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman and My Brain is Open: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdős by Bruce Schechter, and also George Csicsery’s documentary N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős.
Two other important people in my grandmother’s life and stories were George Szekeres and Esther Szekeres (née Klein), whom my family called Gyu and Epsz. Marta and Epsz were best friends at school and stayed close throughout their lives.
It was Epsz, in the early 1930s, who brought the Anonymous group an interesting problem about finding structure in random sets. The real story of this problem has been widely told and is very different from the one I imagined. The story, briefly, is that after Epsz brought the first conjecture to the group – that it is always possible to form a convex quadrilateral given five points, no three in an exact line – George Szekeres raced to a solution as a way of winning her hand. There is also some suggestion that he was competing for it with Paul Erdős. After Gyu and Epsz became engaged, Erdős started calling the work the ‘Happy Ending Problem’.
George Szekeres and Paul Erdős went on to publish about the problem. After bringing the initial idea to the group, Epsz seems to have fallen away from it.
Epsz and Gyu escaped Europe in 1939. They spent the war in Shanghai and then travelled to Australia, where they lived for a few years with my grandparents and both families’ children in a small apartment in Adelaide.
By the time I knew Epsz, she and Gyu were established in Sydney. Gyu had a long and distinguished career as a mathematician, and Epsz worked in maths education. This was how she had the misfortune to come to be tutoring me for a while, when I was fourteen or fifteen and failing maths. Epsz was a wonderful teacher, endlessly patient and empathetic (nothing like the old Hungarian woman in this book). At that stage I don’t think I knew about her role in the Anonymous group, but even in my teenaged self-absorption I had the sense that she was someone extraordinary.
Epsz and Gyu were together until their mid-nineties. They eventually moved back to Adelaide, where they died in a nursing home within an hour of each other. Marta died a month later.
I was very lucky to overlap with those people, albeit on the outskirts. The fact that this story bounced around in my mathsless brain for thirty years is a testament to their magnetism and their remarkable lives, as well as to my grandmother’s storytelling abilities, which she eventually used in her autobiography – Two Lives and a Bonus – after she finished her mathematics PhD in her seventies. It was largely through that autobiography that I learned about things like the experience of a segregated Jewish education in the twenties, and the national importance of the high school mathematics journal in Hungary.
Back in the present I’ve had another piece of unbelievable good luck in my access to another brilliant mathematician: my uncle Tony Guttmann. I couldn’t have written large swathes of this book without his patient and clear-eyed advice.
For help with the maths I’m also grateful to Larry Braden, Tim Brown, John Cleary, Andrew Conway and Tony Gardiner.
Josh’s ‘big breakthrough’ about the internet is based on the work of Jon Kleinberg, whose research in small world networks is fascinating even to a mathematical layperson.
Any and all errors in the maths are mine.
This book was written with the assistance of a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, for which I’m very grateful.
Thank you to my writers group and feminist editorial collective: Natalie Kon-yu, Christie Nieman and Maggie Scott. Life, geography and babies have made it harder for us to be a regular writers group, but I feel superstitiously certain that I would never write a word without having them there to read it, and that our conversations are the best reason to be a writer at all.
Mathilda Imlah at Picador is an editorial wizard full of freaky voodoo powers; thank you for transforming this book into the story it wanted to be.
Christie Nieman is my editorial shepherd; thank you for the indispensable hand-holding, I owe you a saké.
Thank you Brianne Collins at Picador, for your eagle eye, super competence and calming presence; Ali Lavau for being the best copyeditor in the world; publicist extraordinaire Clare Keighery and Georgia Webb for helping it across the line. Thank you also to my previous publisher at Picador, Geordie Williamson, and Alex Craig, who took the book on and gave me a prod when I needed it.
Thank you Marianne Frommer and John Sved, for being lovely and supportive and also excellent readers; Vanessa Dawson, Sarah Kemp and Fiona Maguire, for reading early versions of the manuscript and giving valuable feedback; and Eszter Kalman and Katalin Pal, my ‘Hungarian eyes’, for being so generous and helpful. Thank you to my police adviser Daniel Pinter, and to Laura Buzo for fixing the title and coming back into my life.
Thank you to my great friends and cheer squad Kate Adams and Maital Dar, for all the encouragement, practical help and cards.
And thank you Jennie McKenzie and Georgie Sved, for your love and support, for accepting my writing absences – physical and mental – and still being there to make life fun when I get back.
About Miriam Sved
Miriam Sved’s debut novel, Game Day, was published by Picador in 2014. She has been a contributing editor on the feminist anthologies Mothers and Others, Just Between Us, and #MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement. Her novella ‘All the Things I Should’ve Given’ was a winner of Griffith Review’s 2018 Novella Project, and her short fiction has been published
in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Overland and elsewhere. She lives in Melbourne.
Also by Miriam Sved
Game Day
Anthologies:
Just Between Us: Australian writers tell the truth about female friendship
Mothers and Others: Australian writers on why not all women are mothers and not all mothers are the same
#MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement
First published 2019 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © Miriam Sved 2019
The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available
from the National Library of Australia
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
EPUB format: 9781760785963
Typeset by Post Pre-press Group
Image of Anonymous, City Park, Budapest courtesy of Shutterstock.
The author and the publisher have made every effort to contact copyright holders for material used in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked should contact the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.
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