I.Asimov: A Memoir

by Isaac Asimov

  My father came to the United States in the hope of a better life for his children, and this he certainly achieved. He lived to see one son a successful writer, another son a successful journalist, and a daughter happily married. However, this was all at a great cost to himself.

  In Russia, he was part of a reasonably prosperous merchant family. In the United States, he found himself penniless. In Russia, he had been an educated man, looked up to by those about him for his learning. In the United States, he found himself virtually illiterate, for he could not read or even speak English. What’s more, he had no education that would be counted as such by secular Americans. He found himself looked down upon as an ignorant immigrant.

  All this he suffered without complaint, for he concentrated entirely on me. I was to make up for everything, and I did. I have always been very grateful to my father for this sacrifice of his, once I was old enough to understand what it was he had had to do.

  Once in the United States, he turned his hand to any job he could get, selling sponges door to door, demonstrating vacuum cleaners, working for a wallpaper concern and later in a sweater factory. After three years, he had saved enough money for a down payment on a small mom-and-pop candy store and our future was assured—and shaped.

  My father never pushed me toward prodigiousness, as I have already explained. He also never punished me physically; he left that to my mother, who was very good at it. He contented himself with long, improving lectures whenever I misbehaved. I think I preferred my mother’s blows, but I always knew my father loved me, even if it was difficult for him to put it into words.

  My Mother

  My mother was born Anna Rachel Berman. Her father was Isaac Berman. He died when she was young, and it was for him that I was named.

  My mother, who looked like a typical Russian peasant woman and was only about four feet ten inches tall, was literate and could read and write both Russian and Yiddish. —And here I have a complaint against both my parents. They spoke Russian to each other when they wanted to discuss something privately that my big ears were not to hear. Had they sacrificed this trivial urge for privacy and spoken to me in Russian, I would have picked it up like a sponge and had a second world language.

  This, however, was not to be. I presume my father’s defense was that he wanted me to learn English and make it my first language, untroubled by the complexities of another, so that I could become a complete American. Well, I did that, and since I consider English the most glorious language in the world, perhaps all is for the best.

  Aside from literacy and the knowledge of enough arithmetic so that she was able to serve as cashier in her mother’s store, my mother was not educated. In orthodox Judaism women simply weren’t educated. She knew no Hebrew and had no secular knowledge.

  Nevertheless, I have heard her sneer at my learned father’s Russian handwriting, and I think she was probably justified. It is my experience that women’s handwriting is, for some reason, more attractive and more legible than men’s handwriting. My sister’s writing, for instance, makes mine look crabbed and semi-literate. It would not be surprising to me, then, if my mother’s Russian was more elegantly written than my father’s.

  My mother’s role in life could be explained in one word—“work.” In Russia, she had been the oldest of numerous siblings and had to take care of them in addition to working in her mother’s store. In the United States, she had to raise three children and work endless hours in the candy store.

  She was all too aware of the limitations of her life, of the lack of the kind of freedom others had. She was often lost in self-pity, and while I cannot blame her for that, I was the most frequent recipient of her self-pitying tirades. And since she made it clear that I was part of the cross she had to bear, and not the lightest part either, I was filled with guilt.

  Her hard life made her short-tempered as well, and her rage found its outlet chiefly on me. I won’t deny I gave her cause, but she hit me frequently, and with no light hand either. This didn’t mean she didn’t love me to distraction, because she did. I wish she had had some other way of showing it, though.

  My mother never had a fair chance as a cook. She had to prepare meals quickly and on the run because of the candy store, so that all during my youth (till I got married, in fact) I ate fried foods of all kinds with occasional boiled beef or boiled chicken with boiled potatoes. We were not strong on vegetables, but we were very strong on bread. —I’m not complaining, though. I loved it all.

  However, I think that my mother’s cooking started me on a way of life that led to troubles with my coronary arteries in late middle age. On the more positive side, her cooking inured my alimentary canal to difficult tasks, so that I developed an iron digestion.

  My mother did have some specialties, though—grated radish with onions and hard-boiled eggs that were heaven going down but repeated on you for a week and forced people to grant you privacy.

  She also prepared jellied calfs feet with onions and hard-boiled eggs, and who knows what else. It was called pchah, and I would rather have had that than Elysium. Even after I was married, I would occasionally be given a vast container of pchah to take home. It is an acquired taste, of course, and it was a sad day for me when my wife, Gertrude, acquired the taste. It instantly cut the supply in half. I remember sadly the last bit of pchah my mother made for me.

  My present wife, Janet, the dearest woman in the world, has carefully looked up recipes and occasionally makes pchah for me even now. A pleasure, but not quite like mother’s, I’m afraid.

  Marcia

  My younger days were spent in the company of my younger sister, Marcia, who was born on June 17, 1922, in Russia and came to the United States with us when she was eight months old. She has frequently complained that I rarely speak of her in my writings, and that is true. In 1974, however, I published a book in which I did mention her and said she was born in Russia.

  I phoned her to read the passage to her as proof that I did speak of her sometimes and she immediately broke into loud, hysterical wails. I said, in consternation, “What’s the matter?”

  She said, between sobs, “Now everyone will know how old I am.” (She was fifty-two at the time.) “So what?” I said. “Is this going to disqualify you for the Miss America contest?” It didn’t help. I could not placate her, and now you know the sort of relationship my sister and I have had too often.

  Marcia is not her original name. She had a very nice Russian name which I am not allowed to use. She chose Marcia for herself in later life and that’s what I must call her.

  We did not get along well when we were children. That’s not surprising. Why should we have? Our personalities were completely different and had we been independent individuals we would never have chosen each other for friends. Yet here we were, bound together and in constant irritation with each other.

  Almost anything one of us did aroused umbrage in the other. There would be an argument that quickly escalated to a shouting match and then to a ferocious howling. Things might have been better if we had had parents who could pull us apart, listen patiently to each one of us as we detailed the high crimes and misdemeanors of the other, and then adjudicate the matter fairly. Unfortunately, our parents had no time for that.

  My mother would come running upstairs from the store and hurl her ukase at us: “Stop fighting.” She would then launch into an angry oration, the burden of which was that we were die only children in the neighborhood, nay, in the whole world, who fought in this disgraceful manner, and that all other children were nothing but sweetness and light. She would also say that customers and neighbors at a distance of two blocks would hear us and come running to the store to find out what was happening and that, as a result, she was embarrassed beyond description by all this. If we hadn’t heard that speech a hundred times, we hadn’t heard it once. Nor did it have any effect on us, especially since I knew that other siblings did not get along any better than we did.

  Now here’s a funny thing. Marcia
remembers that I taught her to like Gilbert and Sullivan and that I had friends in the science fiction world who were interesting and witty, but she doesn’t remember that we ever fought. She pictures an idyllic existence between us and I have found this to be true of other people who have shared memories with me. They wipe out whole continents of fact and construct some fairy tale that never existed and insist that that’s the way it was. Maybe it is more comfortable to create your own past, but I can’t do it. I remember things too well—although I don’t say that my own past is entirely immune to reconstruction. When I wrote my autobiography and consulted my diary, I was astonished at the things I had forgotten, as well as the things I remembered that weren’t so. They were all matters of trivial detail, however.

  Marcia was a bright child. I taught her to read (somewhat against her will) before she went to school, and she raced ahead, just as I did, graduating from high school, again as I did, at the age of fifteen. Then the male chauvinism of Judaism raised its head to Marcia’s great disadvantage. My father was poor, but he managed, somehow, to send both his sons to college. There was no thought, however, of sending poor Marcia to college. Girls, after all, were simply meant for marriage.

  Marcia, therefore, at fifteen had to find work. She was too young for marriage and, as a matter of fact, she was also too young to work, at least too young to work legally. I think she must have lied about her age. In any case, she got a secretarial position and did quite well at it.

  She did not marry until she was thirty-three. With a brother’s in ability to see the virtues of a sister, I was not surprised. I remember that when I was getting ready for marriage thirteen years earlier, some woman (obviously of the old school) expressed surprise. “Brothers,” she said, “shouldn’t marry till after the sister is married.” That may have been a viable custom in Eastern Europe in the days when marriages were arranged and any girl could be (and usually was) married off as a teenager as long as the dowry was right. But here? In America?

  I said, “If I wait for my sister to marry, I’ll die a bachelor.”

  I was wrong, though. A man of thirty-seven, Nicholas Repanes, who was passive, quiet, and gentle, was smitten by her. They married, had two handsome sons, and were happy together for thirty-four years till Nicholas died on February 16, 1989, at the age of seventy-one. Janet and I drove out to the wilds of Queens to see him lying in state (wearing his glasses). I owed him that much for making Marcia so good a husband.

  Marcia, by the way, is just five feet tall, has a ready smile, and is a really generous person. I’m sorry we couldn’t get along better.

  Religion

  My father, for all his education as an Orthodox Jew, was not Orthodox in his heart. For some reason, we never discussed this—perhaps because I felt it to be a very private thing with him and I did not wish to intrude upon it. I think that while he was in Russia he went through the motions only in order to please his father. —This sort of thing is, I believe, very common.

  It may be that since my father was brought up under the Tsarist tyranny, under which Jews were frequently brutalized, he turned revolutionary in his heart. He did not, to my knowledge, engage in any actual revolutionary activity; he was far too cautious a man for that.

  One of the ways a Jew could be a revolutionary, could work for a new world of social equality, of civil liberty, and of democracy, would be to shake off the dead hand of Orthodoxy. Orthodox Judaism dictates one’s every action at every moment of the day and it enforces differences between Jew and Gentile that virtually make certain the persecution of the weaker group.

  It followed, then, that my father, when he came to the United States and was freed of the overwhelming presence of his father, could turn to a secular life. Not entirely, of course. Dietary laws are hard to break, when you’ve been taught that the flesh of swine is the broth of hell. You can’t entirely ignore the local synagogue; you are still interested in biblical lore.

  However, he didn’t recite the myriad prayers prescribed for every action, and he never made any attempt to teach them to me. He didn’t even bother to have me bar mitzvahed at the age of thirteen— the rite whereby a young boy becomes a Jew with all the responsibilities of obeying the Jewish law. I remained without religion simply because no one made any effort to teach me religion—any religion.

  To be sure, at one period in 1928, my father, feeling the need for a little extra money, undertook to serve as secretary for the local synagogue. To do so, he had to show up at the synagogue services and, on occasion, took me with him. (I didn’t like it.) He also, as a gesture, entered me in Hebrew school, where I began to learn a little Hebrew. Since that meant learning the Hebrew alphabet and its pronunciation, and since Yiddish makes use of the Hebrew alphabet, I found I could read Yiddish.

  I showed my father I could, in rather halting fashion, and I was astonished when I found that he was thunderstruck and asked how I did it. By this time, I thought, he should be past being surprised at anything I did.

  My father didn’t stay secretary long; he couldn’t swing both it and the candy store. After some months, therefore, I was taken out of Hebrew school, to my great relief, for I didn’t like it either. I didn’t like the rote learning, and I didn’t see the value of learning Hebrew.

  I may have been mistaken in this. Learning anything is valuable, but I was only eight years old and hadn’t quite got that into my head. One thing, though, remained from this early period and from my father’s lectures on this and that which he would illustrate with biblical quotations. I gained an interest in the Bible. As I grew older, I read the Bible several times—the Old Testament, that is. Eventually, and with a certain circumspection and hesitation, I read the New Testament also.

  By the time I was reading the Bible, however, science fiction and science books had taught me their version of the universe and I was not ready to accept the Creation tale of Genesis or the various miracles described throughout the book. My experience with the Greek myths (and, later, the grimmer Norse myths) made it quite obvious to me that I was reading Hebrew myths.

  In my father’s old age, when he had retired to Florida and found himself at a loss for something to do, he felt he had no choice but to join with other elderly Jews whose life centered in the synagogue and in the discussion of the minutiae of Orthodoxy. There my father was in his element, for he loved arguing over trifles and was always convinced he was right. (I have inherited some of that tendency.) In fact, I sometimes say sardonically that my father never backed down from any opinion he had, except when that opinion happened, by accident, to be correct.

  In any case, in the last few months of his life, he became happily Orthodox again. Not in his heart, I think, but in his outer actions.

  I am sometimes suspected of being nonreligious as an act of rebellion against Orthodox parents. That may have been true of my father, but it was not true of me. I have rebelled against nothing. I have been left free and I have loved the freedom. The same is true of my brother and sister and our children.

  Nor, I must add, is it simply that I find Judaism empty and that I must search for something else to fill the spiritual void in my life. I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.

  Mind you, this isn’t easy. We are so surrounded by tales of the supernatural, by the easy acceptance of the supernatural, by the thunders of the powers that be who attempt with all their might to convince us of the existence of the supernatural, that the strongest among us may feel himself swaying.

  Something like that happened to me recently. In January 1990, I was lying in a hospital bed one afternoon (never mind why—we’ll discuss that at the proper time) and my dear wife, Janet, was not with me, but had gone home for a few hours to take care of some necessary chores. I was s
leeping, and a finger jabbed at me. I woke, of course, and looked blearily about to see who had awakened me and for what purpose.

  My room, however, had a lock, and the lock was firmly closed and there was a chain across the door too. Sunlight filled the room and it was clearly empty. So were the closet and the bathroom. Rationalist though I am, there was no way in which I could refrain from thinking that some supernatural influence had interfered to tell me that something had happened to Janet (naturally, my ultimate fear). I hesitated for a moment, trying to fight it off, and for anyone but Janet I would have. So I phoned her at home. She answered immediately and said she was perfectly well.

  Relieved, I hung up the phone and settled down to consider the problem of who or what had poked me. Was it simply a dream, a sensory hallucination? Perhaps, but it had seemed absolutely real. I considered.

  When I sleep alone, I often wrap myself up in my own arms. I also know that when I am sleeping lightly, my muscles twitch. I assumed my sleeping position and imagined my muscles twitching. It was clear that my own finger had poked into my shoulder and that was it.

  Now suppose that at the precise moment I had poked myself, Janet, through some utterly meaningless coincidence, had tripped and skinned her knee. And suppose I had called and she had groaned and said, “I just hurt myself.”

  Would I have been able to resist the thought of supernatural interference? I hope so. However, I can’t be sure. It’s the world we live in. It would corrupt the strongest, and I don’t imagine I’m the strongest.

  My Name

  My first name, Isaac, is, of all first names, with the possible exception of Moses, the most clearly Jewish. I am quite aware that there are Isaacs among old New Englanders, and among Mormons, and here and there elsewhere, but nine times out often, I believe, it signifies a Jew.