Джеймс Глик - Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

The vil age’s main street, Central Avenue, seemed shabby and narrow. The population had become largely Orthodox

Jewish, and Feynman was vaguely disturbed to see so many yarmulkes, or, as he actual y said, “those little hats that they wear”—meaning: I don’t care what things are called. And casual y repudiating the culture that hung as thick in the air of his childhood as the smoke of the city or the salt of the ocean.

The Judaism of Far Rockaway took in a liberal range of styles of belief, almost broad enough to encompass atheists like Richard’s father, Melvil e. It was a mostly Reform Judaism, letting go the absolutist and fundamental traditions for the sake of a gentle, ethical humanism, wel suited for fresh Americans pinning their hopes on children who might make their way into the mainstream of the New World. Some households barely honored the Sabbath. In some, like Feynman’s, Yiddish would have been a foreign language. The Feynmans belonged to the neighborhood temple. Richard went to Sunday school for a while and belonged to a Shaaray Tefila youth group that organized after-school activities. Religion remained part of the vil age’s ethical core. Families like the Feynmans, in neighborhoods al around greater New York City, produced in the first half of the twentieth century an outpouring of men and women who became successful in many fields, but especial y science. These hundred-odd square miles of the planet’s surface were disproportionately fertile in the spawning of Nobel laureates. Many families, as Jews, were embedded in a culture that prized learning and discourse; immigrants and the children of immigrants worked to fulfil themselves through their own children, who had to be

sharply conscious of their parents’ hopes and sacrifices.

They shared a sense that science, as a profession, rewarded merit. In fact, the best col eges and universities continued to raise barriers against Jewish applicants, and their science faculties remained determinedly Protestant, until after World War I . Science nevertheless offered the appearance of a level landscape, where the rules seemed mathematical and clear, free from the hidden variables of taste and class.

As a town Far Rockaway had a center that even Cedarhurst lacked. When Richard’s mother, Lucil e, walking down to Central Avenue, headed for stores like Nebenzahl’s

and

Stark’s,

she

appreciated

the

centralization. She knew her children’s teachers personal y, helped get the school lunchroom painted, and joined her neighbors in col ecting the set of red glassware given out as a promotion by a local movie theater. This vil age looked inward as careful y as the shtetl that remained in some memories. There was a consistency of belief and behavior.

To be honest, to be principled, to study, to save money against hard times—the rules were not so much taught as assumed. Everyone worked hard. There was no sense of poverty—certainly not in Feynman’s family, though later he realized that two families had shared one house because neither could get by alone. Nor in his friend Leonard Mautner’s, even after the father had died and an older brother was holding the family together by sel ing eggs and butter from house to house. “That was the way the world was,” Feynman said long afterward. “But now I realize that

everybody was struggling like mad. Everybody was struggling and it didn’t seem like a struggle.” For children, life in such neighborhoods brought a rare childhood combination of freedom and moral rigor. It seemed to Feynman that morality was made easy. He was al owed to surrender to a natural inclination to be honest. It was the downhil course.

A Birth and a Death

Melvil e Feynman (he pronounced his surname like the more standard variants: Fineman or Feinman) came from Minsk, Byelorussia. He immigrated with his parents, Louis and Anne, in 1895, at the age of five, and grew up in Patchogue, Long Island. He had a fascination with science but, like other immigrating Jews of his era, no possible means to fulfil it. He studied a fringe version of medicine cal ed homeopathy; then he embarked on a series of businesses, sel ing uniforms for police officers and mail carriers, sel ing an automobile polish cal ed Whiz (for a while the Feynmans had a garage ful of it), trying to open a chain of cleaners, and final y returning to the uniform business with a company cal ed Wender & Goldstein. He struggled for much of his business life.

His wife had grown up in better circumstances. Lucil e was the daughter of a successful mil iner who had emigrated as a child from Poland to an English orphanage, where he acquired the name Henry Phil ips. From there

Lucil e’s father came to the United States, where he got his first job sel ing needles and thread from a pack on his back.

He met Johanna Helinsky, a daughter of German-Polish immigrants, when she repaired his watch in a store on the Lower East Side of New York. Henry and Johanna not only married but also went into business together. They had an idea that rationalized the trimming of the elaborate hats that women wore before World War I, and their mil inery business thrived. They moved to a town house wel uptown on the East Side, on 92d Street near Park Avenue, and there Lucil e, the youngest of their five children, was born in 1895.

Like many wel -off, assimilating Jews, Lucil e Phil ips attended the Ethical Culture School (an institution whose broad humanist ethos soon left its mark on J. Robert Oppenheimer, nine years her junior). She prepared to teach kindergarten. Instead, soon after graduating, stil a teenager, she met Melvil e. The introduction to her future husband came through her best friend. Melvil e was the friend’s date; Lucil e was invited to accompany a friend of Melvil e’s. They went for a drive, with Lucil e joining Melvil e’s friend sitting in the back seat. On the return trip, it was Lucil e and Melvil e who sat together.

A few days later he said, “Don’t get married to anybody else.” This was not quite a proposal, and her father would not al ow her to marry Melvil e until three years later, when she turned twenty-one. They moved into an inexpensive apartment in upper Manhattan in 1917, and Richard was born in a Manhattan hospital the next year.

A later family legend held that Melvil e announced in advance that, if the baby was a boy, he would be a scientist. Lucil e supposedly replied, Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. But Richard’s father undertook to help his prophecy along. Before the baby was out of his high chair, he brought home some blue and white floor tiles and laid them out in patterns, blue-white-blue-white or blue-white-white-blue-white-white, trying to coax the baby to recognize visual rhythms, the shadow of mathematics.

Richard had walked at an early age, but he was two before he talked. His mother worried for months. Then, as late talkers so often do, Richard became suddenly and unstoppably voluble. Melvil e bought the Encyclopaedia Britannica , and Richard devoured it. Melvil e took his son on trips to the American Museum of Natural History, with its animal tableaux in glass cases and its famous, towering, bone-and-wire dinosaurs. He described dinosaurs in a way that taught a lesson about expressing dimensions in human units: “twenty-five feet high and the head is six feet across”

meant, he explained, that “if he stood in our front yard he would be high enough to put his head through the window but not quite because the head is a little bit too wide and it would break the window”—a vivid enough il ustration for any smal boy.

Melvil e’s gift to the family was knowledge and seriousness. Humor and a love of storytel ing came from Lucil e. At any rate, that was how family lore tended to apportion their influence. Melvil e liked to laugh at the stories his wife and children told, at dinner and afterward,