Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

Now my memory starts. I remember, quite distinctly, the first place we lived in after having arrived in the United States. I even remember the address. It was 425 Van Siclen Avenue, in the East New York section of Brooklyn. [I feel a little silly giving statistics of this sort. I mean, who could possibly care what the exact address is? However, these are among the questions I am sometimes asked: “Exactly where did you live when you first came to the United States?” I hope that no one is thinking of making a pilgrimage to the site. It was a slum when I lived there and it has gone downhill steadily ever since.] I lived in Brooklyn for nineteen years after my arrival in the United States, and my Brooklyn accent is with me to this day.

The Van Siclen Avenue abode was nothing lavish. There was no electricity; we used gas jets. There was no central heating; we had a cast-iron stove, which my mother started with paper and kindling.

Fortunately, I didn’t know that this represented slum living. It was home to me, and I was happy. I was particularly fascinated by the stove, and I was always on hand to watch the fire start and my mother knead dough and make noodles. In 1925, when we moved to more advanced quarters, at 434 Miller Avenue, one block away, I cried bitterly.

In February 1925, shortly after my fifth birthday, I began school: kindergarten. If you want further statistics, the school was P.S. 182.

In the ordinary course of events, I would have entered first grade a year later, shortly after my sixth birthday. My mother, however, could not wait.

You see, I had already taught myself to read by hounding the older boys to write out the alphabet for me (which I had learned from a rope-skipping game) and identify each letter and tell me what it “sounds like.” I then practiced on street signs and newspaper headlines, sounding the letters till words made sense. To this day, I remember the sudden surge of triumph when I realized there must be such things as silent letters and that the word I was trying to pronounce, ISland, which meant nothing to me, was really EYEland. That made “Coney Island” luminously clear all of a sudden. On the other hand, I remember being completely defeated by “ought.” I could not pronounce it, nor could any of the other boys tell me what it meant when they pronounced it.

My parents, of course, couldn’t read English and so couldn’t help me, and the fact that I learned to read without their help seemed to impress them the more. (My sister was much luckier. When she was five years old, I was seven and a past master at the art. Considerably against her will, I taught her to read quite efficiently, so that when it came time for her to enter school, they put her into the second grade directly.)

In September 1925, I remember, my mother took me to school. My mother’s half brother came along, too, as interpreter. (He was my “Uncle joe.”) At the time, I did not know what they were doing, but in later years it dawned on me that they must have been altering my birth date. My mother, backed by Uncle Joe, assured the school authorities that I was born on September 7, 1919. (Considering the uncertainty of my birth date, it was less of a lie than it looked, but it was a little of a lie, because, allowing for all uncertainties, I could not possibly have been born earlier than October at the outside.)

With a September 7, 1919 birthday, that made me six years old the day before the fall term started in 1925, and I was allowed to enter the first grade.

The reason I know that this is what must have happened is that when I was in the third grade, the teacher (for some reason) had the children recite their birth dates. In all innocence, I said January 2, 1920, and she frowned and told me it was September 7, 1919.

Well! I have always been quite certain of knowing what I know , and I became very emphatic about having been born on January 2, 1920. So energetic did I become in the matter, in fact, that the school records were changed accordingly. If that had not been done, my official birthday would have been September 7, 1919, to this day.

Oddly enough, that turned out to have an important influence on my life. During World War II, I was working at the U. S. Navy Yard in Philadelphia as a chemist and was periodically deferred from the draft because of the war-related importance of my labors. After V-E day, May 8, 1945, the upper age for those liable to the draft was lowered to twenty-six, and those who were still under that age and had thus far escaped being drafted were scrutinized with special care.

On September 7, 1945, I received my notice of induction, and, two months later, was taken into the warm bosom of the Army of the United States as a private. It was no great tragedy, as it turned out, since by that time the war was over, and I remained in the Army only nine months. However, had I kept my little third-grade yap shut, my birthday would have stayed September 7, 1919, and that notice of induction would have arrived on my twenty-sixth birthday and I would have been ineligible for the draft.

My stay in grade school was hectic. On two different occasions, my despairing teachers got rid of me by shoving me ahead a semester. This had its elements of trauma, for on each occasion I lost the friends I had made in the old class and was forced to associate with the strangers of the new one.

Besides that, there was always that panic-laden moment when I realized the class had learned things I didn’t yet know and that it would take me days of frightened activity to catch up and move ahead again. On the first occasion on which I was “skipped,” I found myself in a class that was solving problems in multiplication, something I had never heard of.

I went home crying. My mother, unable to tell what it was that I did not know, called in a neighboring girl, aged twelve. (I found out in later years that she had been aged twelve; at the time, I thought she was a grownup.) The girl began drilling me in 2X1=2, 2X2=4, 2X3=6, and so on.

After a while it began to seem very familiar. I asked her to wait a moment and got my five-cent copybook. On the back were reference tables telling me that there were 12 inches to a foot, 16 ounces to a pound, and so on. There was also a large square array of mysterious numbers.

‘What is this?” I asked.

“That,” she said, “is the multiplication table.”

“In that case,” I said, “I know how to multiply,” and I sent her home. Having nothing better to do, I had memorized the numbers long before, and from what she told me, I saw how the multiplication table worked.

The other time when I was pushed ahead, I found the class was studying geography, something of which I was utterly innocent. I remember the teacher had asked me where Yucatan was, and I drew a complete blank and the class laughed. (The less advanced a student was, the louder he laughed at someone else’s ignorance.)

Quite humiliated, I asked the teacher after class if we had a book on the subject, and she pointed out the largest of the new books I had been given and said it was the geography book. That night, I went over every map in the book, and you can bet I was never caught again.

It turned out quite early, you see, that I was a child prodigy. My parents apparently knew it, but never told me so, because they didn’t believe in giving children swelled heads. I wish they had, though, since then I wouldn’t have thought it so unreasonable that every time I came back with less than 100 in any test I took, it would be interpreted as an unsatisfactory performance deserving of punishment. (And my mother, who knew nothing about modern child psychology, always punished by means of a physical assault.)

But then I didn’t really need the information from them, since I gathered it by myself when I made the astonishing discovery that other people didn’t understand something till it was explained and then didn’t remember it after it was explained.