July 9, 2002
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 publicationsJuly 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.