Note: This column is written to commemorate my father’s 24th yahrzeit, which falls on Erev Purim, on the Fast of Esther.
I must confess that at times I can identify with Tom Hanks’ movie character Forrest Gump or Woody Allen’s character Zelig in the sense of being present for historic events without actually participating in them, or incidentally meeting famous people. The following examples should not be taken as self-promotion, merely as illustrations of the phenomenon.
First, while in elementary school (P.S. 208 in Brooklyn), I was one of about a hundred students who were awarded medals for writing an essay on fire prevention, which was presented in a ceremony at City Hall where we lined up to receive our award from and shake hands with Mayor Robert F. Wagner.
Next, while in junior high school (Meyer Levin J.H.S. 285), I was a reporter for the school newspaper. Since my father, a”h, was an employee of the United Nations Secretariat (more about that later), I had the rare opportunity to interview U.N. Undersecretary General Dr. Ralph Bunche. In 1950, Bunche became the first Black American to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiation of the armistice that ended Israel’s War of Independence, which necessitated conducting shuttle diplomacy between hotel rooms because the Arabs refused to sit in the same room with the Israelis.
When the time came for our interview, as befits the great man he was, Dr. Bunche came out from behind his huge glass-top desk and sat next to me on the sofa to put me at ease. He answered my questions as seriously as he would have done for an adult reporter, and at the end, when I presented him with a glossy photograph of him that my father had obtained from the U.N. press office and asked him to autograph it, he agreed on the condition that I autograph one of me for him. (Fortunately, we had a wallet-size photo.) Dr. Bunche exemplified what my mother, a”h, used to say: “The greater they are, the nicer they are.”
Dr. Bunche was the first, but by no means the last, Nobel Prize winner I met, or at least, was in the same room with. When I went to Stanford with a National Science Foundation fellowship for graduate study in physics, I encountered a virtual parade of Nobelists, beginning with my first-year academic adviser, Dr. Robert Hofstadter, and continuing with visitors presenting colloquia. And remarkably, I was scheduled to take statistical physics in the spring quarter of my first year with another Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Felix Bloch (incidentally, a Swiss Jew), but before the term started, he was replaced by a postdoctoral research associate, Dr. Theodor (Ted) Hänsch, who went on to share the Nobel Prize many years later for his inventions in the field of spectroscopy.
One last personal brush with fame (pardon the name-dropping): My wife’s sister is married to nationally known broadcaster Gil Gross, whose mellifluous voice I first heard when he was the principal substitute for the legendary Paul Harvey.
Enough about me. As amazing as all these connections were, they pale in comparison with my father’s actual participation (at a distance) in an event of truly global significance. First, a little background. After graduating from City College of New York with a bachelor’s degree in statistics, the first college graduate in his family, Dad went to work as a junior statistician in the War (now Defense) Department. From there he was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army in World War II, but wasn’t sent overseas into combat after D-Day because his father tragically passed away in 1944 at the age of 49, and Dad was the only son in the family.
After being discharged, he secured a job in the Records Control section of the U.N. Secretariat, working his way up from the mail room to becoming the supervisor of the Codification Unit, whose assignment it was to codify and file every document coming into the U.N. according to a classification system not unlike those used in libraries. A decade later, he had the opportunity to perform a significant service.
In October 1956, rebels in Hungary overthrew their Communist government and attempted to break free from the Soviet Union’s orbit. In response, the USSR sent in tanks and troops to crush the rebellion. Once that became known, the U.N. Security Council held an emergency overnight meeting to consider what action, if any, to take. (In the end, they couldn’t agree on anything more than a statement.) As the supervisor of the Codification Unit, my father was called upon to remain at work in case the Security Council requested any documents. This was in effect a test of his superb memory, as there were no computer databases at the time, only rows upon rows of filing cabinets in an enormous room on the 20th floor of the Secretariat Building. I can’t recall whether he actually had to answer any requests, just that he came home in the morning, told us that the Hungarians had lost, and promptly went to bed to get some sleep.
As the saying goes, they also serve who only stand and wait.
