Chapter 6. Transition and Crisis
Each summer between 1936 and 1939, I returned to Poland for a full three months. The first time, after only a few months' stay in America, I was surprised that street cars ran, electricity and telephones worked. I had become imbued with the idea of America's absolute technological superiority and unique "know-how." My main emotional reactions were, of course, related to reunion with my family and friends, and the familiar scenes of Lwów, followed by a longing to return to the free and hopeful "open-ended" conditions of life in America. To simplify a description of these complicated feelings: in May I started counting the days and weeks left before returning to Europe, then after a few weeks in Poland I would count the days impatiently before I would return to America.
Most mathematicians remained in Lwów during the summer, and our sessions in the coffee houses and my own personal contacts with them continued until the outbreak of World War II. As before, I worked with Banach and Mazur. Twice, while Banach was spending a few days in Skole or in nearby villages in the Carpathian mountains, some seventy miles south of Lwów, I visited him. I knew these places from my childhood. Banach was working on some of his textbooks, but there was always lots of time to sit in a country inn and discuss mathematics and "the rest of the universe," an expression which was dear to von Neumann. The last time I saw Banach was in late July of 1939 at the Scottish Café. We discussed the likelihood of war with Germany and inscribed a few more problems in the Scottish Book.
In the summer of 1937, Banach and Steinhaus asked me to invite von Neumann to come and give a lecture in Lwów. He arrived from Budapest and spent several days among us. He gave a nice lecture, and I brought him to the Café several times. He jotted some problems in the Scottish Book, and we had some very pleasant discussions with Banach and several others.
I told Banach about an expression Johnny had once used in conversation with me in Princeton before stating some non-Jewish mathematician's result, "Die Goim haben den folgenden Satzbewiesen" (The goys have proved the following theorem). Banach, who was pure goy, thought it was one of the funniest sayings he had ever heard. He was enchanted by its implication that if the goys could do it, Johnny and I ought to be able to do it better. Johnny did not invent this joke, but he liked it and we started using it.
I showed Johnny the city. I had experience in showing it to foreign mathematicians; when I was only a freshman, because I could speak English, Kuratowski had assigned to me the job of showing the town to the American topologist Ayres. I also had to escort Edward Czech, G. T. Whyburn, and several others around Lwów during their Polish visits.
Johnny was much interested in Lwów and surprised at the nineteenth-century appearance of the center of town and its many relics of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both Hungary and Poland were still semi-feudal in some respects. There were many picturesque parts of town, where old houses leaned towards each other, and crooked narrow cobbled streets. In one little street in the Ghetto, black-market operations in currency were conducted openly. Butcher shops in the suburbs had sides of beef hanging exposed to full view. There were still horse-drawn carriages and electric street-car lines. Taxis were not numerous, and even in the late nineteen-thirties one could take a horse-drawn "fiacre," usually pulled by two horses. When I first arrived in New York, I was surprised to see the shabby old fiacres in front of the best Fifth Avenue hotels with only one poor horse to pull them.
We visited an Armenian church with frescoes by Jan Henryk Rosen, a contemporary Polish artist now in the United States. We also went into a little Russian Orthodox church, where we were both shocked by the sight of a corpse in a half-open coffin about to be buried according to Russian ritual. It was the first time I had ever seen a dead person.
Johnny also came to our house. He met my parents — my mother, who was to die the following year, and my father, who had heard so much about him from me. I took him to see my father's offices, which were in a different part of our big house on Kosciusko Street.
Johnny already knew some of my family. An aunt of mine, the widow of my father's brother Michael, had married a Hungarian financier by the name of Arpad Plesch. Von Neumann knew the Plesches. Arpad's brother Janos was Einstein's physician in Berlin. Arpad was an immensely rich financier, but a rather controversial figure. My aunt was wealthy too, a remarkable woman, descended from a famous fifteenth-century Prague scholar named Caro. In Israel many years later, while I was visiting the town of Safed with von Kárman, an old Orthodox Jewish guide with earlocks showed me the tomb of Caro in an old graveyard. When I told him that I was related to a Caro, he fell on his knees — that cost me a triple tip. The Plesches traveled frequently and lived often in Paris. I visited them there on my trip in 1934. My aunt's first husband, Michael Ulam, my uncle, was buried in Monte Carlo, and my aunt, who is now dead too, is also buried there in a fantastic marble mausoleum in the Catholic cemetery. Aunt Caro was directly related to the famous Rabbi Loew of sixteenth-century Prague, who, the legend says, made the Golem — the earthen giant who was protector of the Jews. (Once, when I mentioned this connection with the Golem to Norbert Wiener, he said, alluding to my involvement with Los Alamos and with the H-bomb, "It is still in the family!") So much for the family's rich connections.
A story which Johnny and I liked to tell each other, though I do not remember who proposed it first, was a quote from one of those rich uncles, who used to say: "Reich sein ist nicht genug, man musst auch Geld in der Schweiz haben!" (It is not enough to be rich, one must also have money in Switzerland.)
In the summer of 1938, it was von Neumann's turn to invite me to Budapest. I traveled by train via Cracow, and went directly to his house. (I think the address was 16 Arany János Street.) He had reserved a room for me at the Hotel Hungaria, the best hotel in town at that time. It was at the end of a narrow little street, so narrow in fact, that there was a revolving platform at the end for cars to turn around on, as for locomotives in a roundhouse.
Johnny showed me Budapest. It was a beautiful city with the houses of Parliament and the bridges on the river. After dinner at his house, where I met his parents, we went to nightclubs and discussed mathematics! Johnny was alone that year, his marriage was breaking up and Marietta had remained in America.
The next day sitting in a "Konditorei," talking, joking, and eating, we saw an elegantly dressed lady going by. Johnny recognized her. She entered, and they exchanged a few words. After she left, he explained that she was an old friend, recently divorced. I asked him, "Why don't you marry the divorcée?" Perhaps this implanted the thought in his mind. The next year they indeed were married. Her name was Klara Dan. We became very good friends later on. Johnny and Klari, as she was known to her friends, were married in Budapest and she moved to Princeton in the late summer or fall of 1939. Klari was a moody person, extremely intelligent, very nervous, and I often had the feeling that she felt that people paid attention to her mostly because she was the wife of the famous von Neumann. This was not really the case, for she was a very interesting person in her own right. Nevertheless, she had these apprehensions, which made her even more nervous. She had been married twice before (and married a fourth time after von Neumann's death). She died in 1963 in tragic and mysterious circumstances. After leaving a party given in honor of Nobel Prize-winner Maria Mayer, she was found drowned on the beach at La Jolla, California.
Johnny took me also to a pleasant mountain resort called Lillafüred to visit his former professors, Leopold Fejer and Frederick Riesz, who were both pioneer researchers in the theory of Fourier series. Lillafüred, about a hundred miles from Budapest, was a resort with luxurious castle-like big hotels. Fejer and Riesz were in the habit of summering there. Fejer had been Johnny's teacher. Riesz was one of the most elegant mathematical writers in the world, known for his precise, concise, and clear expositions. He was one of the originators of the theory of function spaces — an analysis which is geometrical in nature. His book, Functions of Real Variables, is a classic. We were to walk in the forest, but in the morning before the walk Johnny said we had to wait until the master had his inspiration. By this he meant the daily physiological necessities — not spiritual ones, which had to be met with a pre-breakfast sip of brandy before the day could begin! We had a nice discussion. Of course the talk also concerned the world situation and the likelihood of war.