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Dawidow bio: He had huge, ugly feuds with Vladimir Nabokov ...]
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Subject: He had huge, ugly feuds with Vladimir Nabokov ...
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2002 07:22:58 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
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[chicagotribune.com]
July 9, 2002
[Image] http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/books/chi-0207060069jul07.story
The enigmatic life of a Harvard scholar from Odessa
By Dan Santow. Dan Santow has written for Metropolitan Home, Cooking
Light and Men's Health magazines, among other publications
July 7, 2002
The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World
By Nicholas Dawidoff
Pantheon, 353 pages, $26
"I feel sure that if he could have, my grandfather would have invented a
great literary character, a Levin, a Copperfield, a Zhivago," writes
Nicholas Dawidoff of his paternal grandfather, Harvard economic
historian Alexander Gerschenkron. "But this kind of writing was not his
talent, and so he improvised. My grandfather made up such a character
all right, but he didn't put him into fiction. He lived him. His life
became his stories, and his stories were his life."
These stories, which Dawidoff has unearthed and brought back in full
living color, together re-create a magnificent, sweeping life and are
the subject of his exceptional memoir, "The Fly Swatter: How My
Grandfather Made His Way in the World." Fortunately for Dawidoff, he had
a grandfather custom made to be the subject of such a book.
During his life Gerschenkron escaped Odessa, Ukraine, for Vienna, and
Vienna for the U.S. He was said to have spoken 20 languages, played
chess with Marcel Duchamp, corresponded with Simone de Beauvoir,
confided in Isaiah Berlin, maintained a close friendship with Ted
Williams and charmed Marlene Dietrich so much she slipped him her phone
number on a sheet of paper. He had huge, ugly feuds with Vladimir
Nabokov and John Kenneth Galbraith, and at a tempestuous faculty meeting
just days after students violently took over Harvard's University Hall
in April 1969, he gave a fiery, much ballyhooed oration to thousands (it
was broadcast live on radio) while tear gas was "still drifting in the
air." He thought nothing of working grueling hours, sometimes only
finding time to sleep every other night. " `He knew everything, had read
everything, and could talk about anything,' " said economist and Kennedy
adviser Carl Kaysen. Gerschenkron, known as Shura to his family, had an
outsize personality, a deeply complicated and conflicted interior life,
and the wit, charm, verbosity and passion that make him hugely
fascinating to read about (though I have to admit I'm not sure I would
have enjoyed him in the flesh; he wasn't an easy man to like, and some
of his verbal jousting, which usually targeted the mind more than the
heart, was as deflating as any Don Rickles routine, just on a higher
intellectual plane).
The Russia into which he was born in 1904 "was a vast and varied country
of people who had been so frequently abused by tyrants that out of all
the misery came a commonality of spirit shared even by Europeanized
Russians like the Gerschenkrons." Its was also what Dawidoff--the author
of "The Catcher Was a Spy," editor of "Baseball: A Literary Anthology"
(reviewed on Page 1 of this section), and a contributor to The New
Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, among others--calls "a nation of
show-offs." Russians, Dawidoff writes, "believed in losing their heads
and aspired to do so. Russians made outrageous claims, traveled to
absurd lengths, pushed the limit, and exceeded expectations. Always they
wanted to be more loyal, more devoted, more steadfast, more stoic,
and--when circumstances called for it--more long-suffering. That was a
lot to live up to, and to meet the perpetual challenge typical Russians
spent spectacular amounts of time lying around dreaming up magnificent
feats for themselves to accomplish."
In that milieu, young Shura fit right in. If it was typically Russian to
read a favorite author's oeuvre, Dawidoff says, it was even more typical
of Shura to tell people that he was trying to read every author's
oeuvre. Even many years later, as a respected and tenured professor at
Harvard--a man so broadly intelligent, worldly and well-read that he'd
been offered a chair in three disciplines: economics, Slavic studies and
Italian literature--he couldn't resist showing off. He became, says his
grandson, "a cognoscente of the art."
When a young colleague told Gerschenkron he was planning to write a book
on Dickens, for instance, he had no compunction against one-upping him.
"When I was a boy I read Dickens in Russian and French," Gerschenkron
boasted. " `Then I read him in German. Then in Italian. Then I read him
in English. Since we've been here in America, I've only read all of him
two or three times.' " (Not surprisingly, the other professor's response
was, " `Okay Alex. . . . You write the book.' ")
But Gerschenkron wasn't just a masterful put-down artist (in a funny
aside, Dawidoff notes that his grandfather didn't feel English had
enough common insults, so he created his own, such as calling people "
`First-rate second-raters' "). He was a brilliant man who had lived
through some of the 20th Century's most tumultuous eras, from the
Russian Revolution to the Austrian Anschluss to the anti-war movement of
the 1960s. And yet few of those who knew him knew anything beyond the
broad outlines of his life, for while he would have been happy to
pontificate until the wee hours on the history of the Swedish economy (a
favorite subject), or to relate how, for fun, he spent a summer vacation
teaching himself Icelandic and calculus, or to explain how each of the
fly swatters in his collection "had its own particular entomicidal
capacities," hardly anyone knew the finer details of his life.
"My grandfather offered an abundance of provocative details about
himself," Dawidoff writes, "but managed to obscure the actual facts of
his life in a cloud of rumor, mystery, speculation, and conjecture."
Dawidoff spends as much time excavating the details as he does
unraveling the mysteries they inspired. "One likely reason Shura never
revealed much about himself," Dawidoff says, "was that he sensed the
power of . . . emotions and wanted to take no chances with setting them
free."
Though Gerschenkron was raised in a relatively cosmopolitan family, life
in czarist Russia was complex and full of hardships, all of which he had
come to view on pragmatic terms, "as a fillip for moving on in life. His
intuition told him that there could be advantages to being placed in
backward circumstances. A person just had to be shrewd enough to
discover them."
It was the recognition of this upon which he later based his entire
economic theory. "The whole point of the Gerschenkron approach was that
backward countries like Russia did not simply imitate industrial
forerunners like Britain, but compensated for their slow start by
devising sophisticated new means of development," Dawidoff writes, while
"Shura's view of life held that a successful person was someone limber
enough to understand that each event in life can prepare you for the
next event if you know how to let it. . . . Adversity forced its
opponent to find new and creative ways of moving forward. Sometimes the
setbacks it administered were stinging, but with effort and
understanding they could always be overcome."
And overcome he did, over and over again. After settling into Vienna
with his father (the rest of his family arrived later), he at first was
denied admittance into school. To pass his tests he studied 16 hours a
day (one hour for each year he'd been alive), seven days a week for
months on end, never missing a day, finally passing stringent exams in
German, geography, French, mathematics and history (where he was
peppered with questions about Austrian battles and reigns). Eventually,
he felt he'd become as Austrian as he had earlier in life been Russian,
immersing himself in the country's cultural and civic life.
After a successful early business career, and marriage and the start of
a family, he refused to recognize what was happening in his beloved,
adopted country during the 1930s. Despite all he had accomplished, as
far as the Nazis were concerned, "there was nothing legitimately
Austrian about him," Dawidoff writes. "He was no more than a wandering
Russian Jew, and, for implying otherwise, a charlatan." Eventually
Gerschenkron fled Austria with his family, landing in Berkeley, Calif.,
where, Dawidoff says, he "began life for the third time."
It wasn't until 1948 that Shura was offered a teaching position at
Harvard, where he spent the rest of his dazzling--though relatively
speaking, understated--career. Most of Harvard's "great men," such as
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and George Santayana,
writes Dawidoff, "could be said to have done their work out in the world
and therefore brought credit upon Harvard," not to mention upon
themselves. His grandfather, by contrast, "became revered not so much by
what he'd done but for who he was." That he published few books (with
such titles as "Bread and Democracy in Germany" and "Economic
Backwardness in Historical Perspective") only made him more obscure. His
many essays were published in "periodicals read by nobody but experts,"
which inspired a game amongst Gerschenkron's admirers, who "began to
treat prose sightings the way lepidopterists react to the spotting of an
uncommon Lycaeides."
In fact, Dawidoff writes, though his grandfather dreamed of writing "The
Big Book--`Za Beeg Buke,' as it came out in the Gerschenkron
elocution--[his] El Dorado, his holy grail, the pot of coins at the end
of the great scholarly rainbow," he never did.
"So why didn't he do it? Why does a man of great talent fail to
accomplish the one thing in life he seems to aspire to above all
others?" Dawidoff asks, seeking an answer from deep within Shura's
psyche. "Among his many problems," Dawidoff writes knowingly of his
grandfather, who died in 1978, "was that he knew too much."
Being a professor at Harvard enabled Gerschenkron "to become fully
himself, allowed him to decide who he wanted to be and to fashion
himself into that man. It was both a realization of personality and a
reconstruction. The university became the center of his personal holy
trinity of institutional loyalty: the United States was the greatest
country in the world; the finest thing in the United States was Harvard;
and the best thing at Harvard was the economics department."
It wouldn't be an overstatement to say this loving memoir is the most
fascinating in its class.
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