Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Did you notice that Lazarus has the Lady herself speak out? he asked me. Remember the passages with quotes about them? It’s the Madonna.

Is it?

“Mother of Exiles.” There she is, said my friend, looking out eastward. She’s pleading on behalf of the poor and the meek, for they shall inherit the New World if not the Old. Imagine Christians from Eastern Europe arriving by boat here. What did they think?

Didn’t one of the exhibits say Lazarus was Jewish?

She was.

Weren’t they mainly Jewish — the immigrants from Eastern Europe?

Jewish visibility says more about Jews than it does about migration patterns from Eastern Europe.

What do you mean?

There was a lull in the conversation as Zafar considered his answer.

I’ve read that in fishing communities throughout the world, the same story is apparently told about dolphins, the benign dolphin is how it’s described, about a fisherman thrown overboard but saved by a playful dolphin that nudges him all the way back to land. But you have to ask: What if the dolphin is just playing, nudging away for fun but with no regard for the direction it’s moving this bobbing creature, the stricken seaman? Who knows? There may be lost fishermen whom the incoming tide would have returned to safety but for the dolphin who playfully takes them off to the setting sun. The only fishermen we ever hear from are the ones brought back to shore. The rest perish at sea. Which is another way of saying we live in the world we notice and remember. Scientists call it the availability bias.

So I tend to think, I said, that most Eastern European migrants to America were Jews because I know more Jews who migrated here from Eastern Europe than I know non-Jews?

Or know of, said Zafar.

Yes, of course! There’s Morgenstern, von Neumann, and Gödel, and all those other Eastern European intellectuals who escaped Nazism and landed up in Princeton. They were all Jews.*

Not Gödel.

No?

Lutheran. He said he was a theist and believed in a personal God. Einstein believed in an abstract God, the God of Spinoza, he said, who apparently reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists and not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men.

And Gödel did as well?

No. The two of them discussed God, or so it’s thought; no one really knows what they talked about. No, Gödel, possibly the greatest logician who ever lived, believed in a personal God you could talk to, and he said so.

I was surprised to hear this and, I have to say, Gödel slipped a notch in my estimation. But what I find myself perceiving now is that although Zafar and I never discussed religion, other than in the terms of politics and society and never in the sense of a spiritual enterprise, my friend had evidenced a deeper interest in God, in the figure of Christ as I now know, than I understood then. In hindsight, I see now the pieces of the thread that had gone unnoticed.

Is your father a believer? Zafar asked me.

He seems to be. Goes to mosque on Fridays. Always has.

Do you think physicists make God in the image of science?

I don’t know. Religion is something he does.

He drinks, doesn’t he?

Yes. And likes his bacon crispy.

* * *

I have thought again of that day in New York, of darting to the tip of Manhattan and jumping on the ferry for Liberty Island. I remember it vividly. But I must wonder why I should have been quite as moved as I was by the words of Emma Lazarus, knowing that I had no claim to the poem’s categories; tired and poor, deprived of freedom — I was never these things. Is there, I have asked myself, a part of me so disingenuous that I can be moved in this way? The thought of those who would have a much better claim, who would be better deserving, embarrasses me a little. But at the end, as I reflect on Zafar’s story, I am left to consider whether the quiet, answered longing I felt in the glow of those words did not evidence something deeper in all human nature, a receding cry in every human heart, when the promise of home peeks into view.

* * *

During their frequent visits to the U.S. from Pakistan, either my grandparents would come to Princeton or, more often, we would join them in New York, where they’d take up a suite of rooms at the Carlyle on the Upper East Side. My grandparents had extensive connections in New York society, in the diplomatic, banking, and business circles, and I remember the cocktail parties they hosted as dazzling affairs though the conversation always surprised me with its formality and accessibility. As a child I maintained the expectation that obscure and difficult things would be discussed. My parents circulated in the crowd and were always smiling or laughing, and I marvel now at their tremendous versatility; they were at home among academics and scholars but equally found pleasure in the company of businessmen and political types.

The women at those parties were very beautiful, and in New York my mother looked beautiful to me in a way I had not seen her before. She was a classical beauty in her day, tall, fair skinned, slim, with long black hair and green eyes. My mother was Punjabi, like my father, but over centuries the sweeping tides of people from Central Asia had left behind a mixed gene pool, the widely differing effects of which can be seen, in fact, in many Pakistanis. I can’t remember exactly when, but at some party or other in New York my mother suddenly looked stunning and remote to me; it unnerved me, and I remember holding her tightly when later I kissed her good night.

In Princeton, my family had many friends. To my young ears and eyes, the variety of accents and national identities was a source of wonder. And my parents, perhaps inheriting my grandparents’ talent for bringing people together, acted as a focus for social life. My mother’s cooking was legendary, and I remember that quite a few wives sat in the kitchen, watching and learning, while my mother cooked. There was also Sergey. He was a riot. Sergey was a graduate student in chemistry. He was Russian and Israeli, explained my mother, and I remember adding “and American.” My mother smiled, and I remember being rather pleased with myself for my correction. Sergey met my father at the university, I think, but soon he was around at our house all the time. His command of English was probably much better than he let on, but he constantly got things wrong, especially pronunciation, which to a seven- or eight-year-old child was highly amusing.

My favorite was his pronunciation of the h in words like how or help —he pronounced it like the ch in loch , a wet, rasping sound. I used to taunt him with my imitation: Chello, Sergey, chow can I chelp you? I would say.

Did you know, he asked me once, that there are eight ways of pronouncing o-u-g-h in the language of the English?

He proceeded to recite them, while counting each one off on his fingers.

Yes, he said, there is tough, cough, through, though, bough, ought , and, finally, there is borough — borough the way the British pronounce it.

I looked at his hands.

That’s seven, not eight, I said.

Okay. Seven or eight, what does it matter?

Sergey loved my mother’s cooking and wanted to learn how to cook “the Asian food,” as he called it, even though in America in those days, and still today, “Asian” is used to refer to people from China, Japan, and other parts of East Asia. I often came home from school, one street away, to find him in our kitchen hovering about her, helping my mother prepare a meal, my father still at the physics department; inevitably she would be laughing. He described her cooking as “chemistry with flavor,” though, in his pronunciation, flavor rhymed with hour , which mystified me until my mother explained that he was rhyming the British spelling, flavour. Why that was an adequate explanation to me attests to Sergey’s eccentricity in my eyes.