Martian's Daughter: A Memoir by Marina von Neumann Whitman Page A
Authors: Marina von Neumann Whitman
Ads: Link
the Devil, which had grown and developed in several languages over hundreds of years. When, as a college freshman, I went out for coffee with a Harvard PhD candidate in English whom I had just met at an informal dance, the man who was to become my husband swears that it was my ability to talk knowledgeablyabout such an arcane subject that first made him take serious notice of a seventeen-year-old. And there is no question that the intellectual challenges my classmates and I received and rose to at Miss Fine's, and the self-images they nurtured, created a firm foundation for the intellectual self-confidence that I carried into adulthood. As an early and often lonely entrant into professional arenas dominated by men, that faith in myself was an absolutely essential ingredient.
My classmates and I spent a lot of time in earnest discussions about the dangers of another global conflict; my own pessimism regarding the inevitability of war reflected my father's views, spelled out in the letter he had written to Klari in 1946 predicting another world war within the next decade. Hoping to avert catastrophe, several of us joined an idealistic organization called the World Federalists, whose goal was to create a world government, a gesture that doubtless earned me a spot on some FBI list of members of subversive organizations. Even then I admitted in a school essay how naive the movement was, but concluded, “There seems to be only a very slight chance that the idea will work, but even that slight chance is worth working for if it could mean the prevention of the almost inevitable next war.” My efforts to bring about world government did not survive my adolescence, but a commitment to greater coordination of national policies in a world grown increasingly interdependent has infused my entire career.
The people and the conversations around my father's dinner table were even more important than my school environment in expanding my teenage horizons. Some of them were leading mathematicians and scientists, many were fellow Hungarians transplanted to the New World, and all of them were brilliant. Among them were two friends from his high-school years in Budapest—the physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner. The gruff, beetle-browed Teller, who spoke in staccato sentences that called to mind the firing of a repeater rifle, had been a colleague of my father's at Los Alamos. There he had not only played an important role in the development of the atomic bomb but became the major proponent of building the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. Slight, balding, soft-voiced Wigner, whose rabbitlike buck teeth made him speak with a lisp, also worked on the Manhattan Project, and he eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work on atoms and elementary particles.In his later years he went a bit batty, becoming a supporter of the Unification Church, which he hoped might offer a path toward world peace and thus an escape from the vision of wholesale destruction that his work had helped create.
These three men were linked not only by their Jewish Hungarian backgrounds and their scientific achievements but also by the vehemence of their anticommunist views. In this they were joined by yet another Hungarian, Arthur Koestler, the dark, brooding former communist whose novel, Darkness at Noon , became one of the most powerful exposés of the cruelties of Soviet communism ever written. In a paper I wrote at the time, tracing the evolution of communism through the lens of three political novels ( Man's Fate by André Malraux, Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone, and Koestler's Darkness at Noon ), I noted that Koestler's was “the most hopeless of the three,” a reflection of his deep pessimism and, probably, chronic depression.
Another Hungarian who appeared often at our house couldn't have been more different from the brooding Koestler. He was short, urbane, wise-cracking Emery Reves, a close friend and confidante of Winston Churchill, whose
My classmates and I spent a lot of time in earnest discussions about the dangers of another global conflict; my own pessimism regarding the inevitability of war reflected my father's views, spelled out in the letter he had written to Klari in 1946 predicting another world war within the next decade. Hoping to avert catastrophe, several of us joined an idealistic organization called the World Federalists, whose goal was to create a world government, a gesture that doubtless earned me a spot on some FBI list of members of subversive organizations. Even then I admitted in a school essay how naive the movement was, but concluded, “There seems to be only a very slight chance that the idea will work, but even that slight chance is worth working for if it could mean the prevention of the almost inevitable next war.” My efforts to bring about world government did not survive my adolescence, but a commitment to greater coordination of national policies in a world grown increasingly interdependent has infused my entire career.
The people and the conversations around my father's dinner table were even more important than my school environment in expanding my teenage horizons. Some of them were leading mathematicians and scientists, many were fellow Hungarians transplanted to the New World, and all of them were brilliant. Among them were two friends from his high-school years in Budapest—the physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner. The gruff, beetle-browed Teller, who spoke in staccato sentences that called to mind the firing of a repeater rifle, had been a colleague of my father's at Los Alamos. There he had not only played an important role in the development of the atomic bomb but became the major proponent of building the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. Slight, balding, soft-voiced Wigner, whose rabbitlike buck teeth made him speak with a lisp, also worked on the Manhattan Project, and he eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work on atoms and elementary particles.In his later years he went a bit batty, becoming a supporter of the Unification Church, which he hoped might offer a path toward world peace and thus an escape from the vision of wholesale destruction that his work had helped create.
These three men were linked not only by their Jewish Hungarian backgrounds and their scientific achievements but also by the vehemence of their anticommunist views. In this they were joined by yet another Hungarian, Arthur Koestler, the dark, brooding former communist whose novel, Darkness at Noon , became one of the most powerful exposés of the cruelties of Soviet communism ever written. In a paper I wrote at the time, tracing the evolution of communism through the lens of three political novels ( Man's Fate by André Malraux, Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone, and Koestler's Darkness at Noon ), I noted that Koestler's was “the most hopeless of the three,” a reflection of his deep pessimism and, probably, chronic depression.
Another Hungarian who appeared often at our house couldn't have been more different from the brooding Koestler. He was short, urbane, wise-cracking Emery Reves, a close friend and confidante of Winston Churchill, whose
Similar Books
