In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954
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My NYA job during the sophomore year was rather interesting. I worked for Professor Gregory Razran of the Psychology Department. (Cohen and I took his course in psychology—we took almost all our classes together—so I knew Razran well.)
I remember several incidents in connection with my work for Razran.
Razran was interested in preparing a table of the lengths of the hypotenuses, given the lengths of the two sides of a right triangle—or, mathematically, the square roots of the sums of given squares. It was
useful in some sort of statistical work, and a table would have been handy in those precomputer days.
He had several students working on it, including me, and since it meant working with numbers, it was right up my alley. I threw myself into it, apportioned the work (doing my own fair share), checking the work of others, designing and preparing a master chart, and so on.
Nobody, however, has ever said I had the knack of working with people. I find it difficult to follow orders from someone who is my superior since I would much rather do things my own way. I find it equally difficult to avoid giving precise orders to someone who is working under me and do not like to let him do anything his way. (Is this inconsistent on my part? Certainly, but it always seemed to me, unfortunately, that my way was better than any other.)
What happened in this case was that the others involved in working out the table complained to Razran that I was being high-handed and, to keep the peace, Razran asked me to stop trying to run the project. I was horribly embarrassed, and handed over the master chart (which I had been keeping at home, so that I could work on it at all hours) to the other students. I then asked that I be given a different job to avoid the friction. I was given one (I forget what it was) that did not involve my working with anyone, and then I had no trouble.
The sequel to the story is this:
In the summer of 1937, Razran asked where the master chart was, and I answered, in surprise, that I handed it over to the protesting students. But Razran didn't have it, it turned out, and couldn't get it. No one seemed to know what had become of it. It might be that Razran eventually found it, but my impression is that the project was never completed.
It would have been completed if he had left me in charge, though, and the master chart would eventually have been safely in his possession. I didn't say, "Serve you right!" but I thought it, and I was mean enough to grin over it when he wasn't looking.
Another memory is this one:
While I was working for him, one of his graduate students came wandering in and asked me for help. He didn't know who I was but I was there and alive and that was enough.
It seemed he was devising a maze that he intended to use to test students for some dark purposes of his own. He had a board with innumerable nail-heads on it and if you touched any of them with a wired metal stylus, a circuit would be completed. Some nailheads would light a green light and some a red light. The trick was to try to go from one
end of the board to the other lighting only the green lights. Naturally, you had to begin by doing it hit-and-miss, but each time you repeated the attempt, you got it more nearly right, and in the end you could follow the winding path of the green lights rapidly and surely.
The student timed me and when I learned the path, he decided I had done it too quickly so that it must be too easy. He added winds and twists in private and then brought it back and timed me again. Then he added more winds and twists until finally he thought, from the time it took me to solve the maze, that it was difficult enough for the average student.
Then, on a later day, he showed Razran the plot of the green-lighted pathway when I happened to be in the room working on my NYA job. Razran looked at the pathway in astonishment and said, "Why is it so complicated?"
"It has to be," said the student, "or it's solved too easily."
"Did you check it on someone?"
"Certainly."
"On whom?"
And the student pointed to me. "On him."
Razran clicked his tongue in exasperation, and said "Here, take it back, start all over, and use somebody else to test it on so that you'll end with something reasonably simple."
When he left, I said, "I'm sorry, Dr. Razran. If I had known he was looking for an average student, I'd have told him I was above average."
"It's all right," said Razran, "you're below average in plenty of ways." And I guess he was right.
One thing I recall with disappointment. The first slide rule I ever saw was in Razran's office. I picked it up and fiddled with it curiously.
"What is this, Dr. Razran?" I asked.
"A slide rule," he said.
"What does it do?" I asked.
"That would take too long to explain," he said with irritation, and took it away from me.
I have never forgiven him for that. If he had simply said, "It's to multiply and divide" and had showed me how to multiply two by three and no more, I would have worked out the rest for myself. It would have taken him ten seconds and, because he wouldn't, he lost me three years in which I might have used the slide rule.
One last incident that puzzled me at the time was this:
Sidney Cohen and I were standing on 116th Street, talking, when
Razran passed by. We said, "Hello, Professor Razran," in chorus (and in the approved polite manner of students who were aware that they had not yet been graded).
Razran stopped, looked at us, shook his head sadly, and said, "I wish that when I saw one of you on campus I didn't always see the other one." And he passed on.
We watched him in astonishment until he turned a corner, and then Sidney said to me, "Why did he say that?"
"I don't know," I answered. "Maybe he thinks we ought to make more friends."
Then we walked on and forgot about it, or at least Sidney did, for long afterward, when I recalled the incident to him he drew a complete blank. (It's the curse of a good memory that one often doesn't forget trivial incidents that are, perhaps, better forgotten.)
Years later, when I looked back on that remark, I suddenly put a scandalous construction on it and found myself moved to fury. How could Razran have dared misconstrue my utterly non-sexual friendship with Sidney? And how many others had made the same misconstruction?
5
An event, equally trivial, stands out in my mind as having taken place in the summer of 1937.
My father was taking his nap in the apartment across the street and my brother—then eight years old—was throwing the ball against the wall as I had once done when I was his age.
My mother called to him to stop, but he was obviously caught up in the game. He was a good kid and never made trouble, which of course made my mother all the more impatient that he didn't obey her now. She did what any good officer does: She called on the non com.
"Isaac," she said, "go over there and stop him."
I was in no mood to hit him (I would have had to chase him and catch him first), and yelling might not work, so I tried strategy. I walked over slowly, with a pleasant smile on my face, very much the seventeen-year-old big brother.
"Hey, Stan," I said, "throw me the ball and I'll show you a trick."
My brother watched me warily and then—obviously deciding I intended no harm—tossed me the ball.
Whereupon I promptly tossed it onto the unreachable roof of the candy store.
Poor Stanley burst into tears, and in exactly half a second my
clever trick turned into pure garbage in my mind. I began to apologize nd to ask forgiveness and to try to hug him, but he would have none )f it. He just left me.
I remember it still. I have never forgotten it. It takes me the imallest effort to jump the intervening decades, see the store, the street, my brother at eight, and his face crumpling at the deceit I had practiced on him. Thirty-two years later (at a time I will describe in due course) I finally brought the matter up, apologized once again, and said 'If you don't forgive me, Stan, 111 carry this to my grave."
He frowned a
nd said, "I forgive you, I forgive you, but I don't emember it at all."
He probably forgot it after half an hour; I carried the scar for a third of a century. It is surely better to be wronged than to do wrong.
I think it was also in the year 1937 ^at m y Grandfather Aaron
died. When he fell sick, my father's younger brother, Abraham Ber
who had taken to calling himself Boris), took him to Moscow for
medical treatment, and there he died. I have no idea when either of my
grandmothers died.
News from Russia was very slim and intermittent. Worse yet, my : ather and mother discussed what news there was, but never talked about it to me. It was a life I had not shared and they hugged it to themselves.
My Diary
With the new year of 1938, a turning point came in my personal life that might have seemed of the most trival character.
I started a diary.
In itself, this was not remarkable. I believe that almost any youngster who is reasonably articulate and introspective sooner or later tries his hand at a diary so that he might record his momentous acts and thoughts. Why should I be an exception?
In most cases, I suspect, a diary lasts for a few days, a few weeks, a year at most. Sometimes, though, it endures, and in my case it did. It is still going on today, and dozens of annual diaries stand side by side on my shelf like good and faithful soldiers, each of them, with one or two exceptions, in the same style, for I am an orderly creature of habit. 1
My diary did, of course, trail off in some ways. I began with the intention of recording everything of significance each day. And I did—at least what I regarded as significant. I reported the news each day in incredible detail and from a very partisan pro-New Deal and anti-Nazi slant. I also reported baseball games in even more incredible detail. In fact, my baseball record took up something like one third of each page, and the entire first year is written in very small handwriting top to bottom and left to right with no margins anywhere.
As time went on, however, I grew less interested in baseball and less preoccupied in converting my diary page into a compendium of newspaper headlines. I wrote in a larger hand, rarely filled the page, and eventually my diary became a kind of compact literary and social record of my life.
Whether I wrote at length or briefly, however, it was never my intention to say anything in the diary that it was no one's business but my own to know. I relied on my memory for any secret or disgraceful items.
This, I suppose, is not traditional. Girls especially are supposed to
1 In one way they differ. The price went up by stages. My first diary cost me $.50, my most recent $2.85 plus tax. I'm not complaining, mind you. It is a lot easier for me to come up with $2.85 plus tax now than it was for me to locate $.50 in 1938.
write diaries in which they record their inmost erotic fantasies. Maybe they do, but I didn't. The result was that I never had to lock my diaries away. Anyone was welcome to read them, and no one ever did after a first attempt.
Even I don't read them for pleasure. They are a series of reference books for me, a way of finding out when something happened and in exactly what order things happen.
Why should this matter? Well, I'm an orderly person and it is my experience in life that people who describe events of which I had personal knowledge almost invariably get the story wrong in almost every detail, sometimes missing or inventing important portions of the story.
One of my motives in starting a diary was, in fact, to be able to lave some documentary evidence to help out in the numerous arguments that started when I said, "That's not the way it happened. It was after you did this that I did that. . . ."
I don't know that the diary helped, though. I found that the people with whom I had the arguments would develop a pettish way of saying, "I don't care what your diary says."
The diary came in handy, in a systematic way, when I wrote The Early Asimov (Doubleday, 1972) but that was only a limited autobiography—limited in time to the eleven years during which I wrote only for the magazines, and limited in subject almost entirely to that writing.
Now I'm going to use it again for a much broader view in every respect.
When I first turned to my 1938 diary in connection with The Early Asimov, I received a horrible shock. I had always taken it for granted that I was an extraordinarily clever eighteen-year-old, far in advance of my age. The sad truth, though, is that my 1938 diary sounds as though it were written by a very ordinary eighteen-year-old boy.
It was very disappointing.
The worth of the diary, however, is that it instantly proves that my own memory, excellent though it is, and inordinately proud of it though I am, is not to be relied on in all respects.
For instance, on January 1, 1938, the first day of my diary (a Saturday), I record that my mother and I took advantage of the holiday (which meant a slow day in the store, especially since it was drizzling icily all day) to see a play on the Yiddish stage.
When I was little, my parents would frequently take me to see Yiddish shows. It undoubtedly brought back those days in Russia to them when they had acted in such shows.
I understood the shows perfectly, of course, and I enjoyed the musicals, particularly because they were funny and because the tunes were invariably catchy. ("Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" came from one of those musicals and I knew it and could sing it, in Yiddish, a decade before the Andrews Sisters grew famous with it.)
The serious dramas, however, I found inexpressibly dreary. They dealt, very frequently, with long-suffering and noble immigrant parents and their ungrateful Americanized children (so that all the immigrant parents in the audience wept and had a wonderful time and all the ungrateful Americanized children in the audience shuffled their feet uncomfortably). Another common subject was that of the good, plain Jewish wife who scrubbed floors to send the husband through medical school, and then got thrown over for some painted, uncorseted floozie. That filled me with ennui, too.
The thing is, though, that without my diary, I would have sworn on the grave of Isaac Newton that Yiddish plays were a thing of my childhood, of the 1920s, and possibly of the early 1930s. At any suggestion that I had gone to see one with my mother when I was about to turn eighteen and a junior in college, I would have scoffed.
"If that had happened that late in my life," I would have said, "I would have remembered it."
Well, I don't. Even when I look at it on the diary page, I don't remember it. So much for my fancy memory.
The various aspects of Yiddish culture never really permeated my life, however. Up to the age of thirteen I lived in a Jewish neighborhood, but because of the candy store (and I scarcely remember the years before) we didn't participate in the neighborhood social life. There were the Jewish holidays but, except very briefly in 1928, no synagogue, no Hebrew school, and eventually, for myself and my brother, no bar mitzvah.
I have dim memories of my mother "blessing the lights" when I was very little, the traditional task of the Jewish woman, but later on, especially after we moved into a Gentile neighborhood in 1933, we did not observe the Sabbath in any way, or the dietary laws, either.
Little by little my parents took to speaking English, even to each other. The result was that Marcia's knowledge of Yiddish is much sketchier than mine, and Stanley has no Yiddish at all.
When I was very young, even as late as when I attended Hebrew school in 1928, I accepted all the tales of the Bible, the existence of God, and every other formal aspect of religion as a matter of course.
This slipped away quietly, however, as I realized through my read-
ing of science (and of science fiction, too) that much of the Bible represented nothing more than a collection of primitive legends. There was no trauma about it, no soul-searching, no internal crisis, no troubled discussions with my parents or anyone else. There merely came a time, probably before I was thirteen, when I found myself accepting atheism as matter-of-factly as I had previously accepted religion.
Nor have I ever wavered in this point of view since. The universe I live in consists of matter and energy only, and that doesn't make me in the least bit uncomfortable. I am quite certain that death is followed by nothingness, and that doesn't make me feel uncomfortable either.
As for Russian cultural influences? None at all.
In the Nazi ferment of the 1930s, it was impossible to think of ourselves as anything but Jews, even if we abandoned Judaism. We might have been born in Russia, but we weren't Russians.
Then, too, if there were Russian enclaves in the city (Gentile Russian)—and, frankly, I knew of none—they would certainly represent the "White Russian" outlook, the pre-Soviet Tsarist days, and with that my parents would feel nothing in common.
As for myself, not speaking Russian, I couldn't even penetrate Russian literature in the original. I tried reading some of the Russian novels in translation, but the culture shock was too great for me and I never managed to finish any. Even War and Peace palled on me, although I tried on three separate occasions to read it.
The other item on the page mentions my playing chess with my brother and sister.
I had known how to play checkers from childhood, for my father had been a big checker player in Russia and had taught me the game-but according to the Russian rules. The American rules were different, and when I learned the latter and tried to teach it to him, he refused to have anything to do with the new version. He probably felt that the checker game rules he knew had been delivered on Mount Sinai to Moses straight out of the mouth of God, and that people who played the American game were heretics.
Chess, however, was a mystery, and when I watched people playing the game at Columbia and asked them to explain it to me, they said it would take too long. So I did as I had often done before. I took a book out of the library and learned the rules of the game as best I could. I then cut up a piece of cardboard into squares, marked each one with