Nine hundred years after the Battle of Hastings, I begin to internalize the fact that I will very likely soon leave South Africa. My eldest sister Shulamit and her friend Albie encourage my leaving — why do they do that, don’t they know that I will never ever return?— and help with my applications to the Institute of International Education (IIE) in New York. I go down to the U. S. Consul on Cape Town’s foreshore for an interview with an American junior consul, Charlie, who is also a representative of the IIE. He tells me that he went to Columbia and that if I end up going there I should go to Tom’s Restaurant and give his regards to Nick. Nine months later I do indeed go to Tom’s on 112th and Broadway and ask for Nick. The manager of Tom’s says they have no Nicks there, but when I insist, they bring up to ground level from the basement a dishwasher called Nikos. He does not know any Charlie.
There is probably always a Nick in a Greek-owned restaurant.
The IIE requires that I choose three American universities to apply to do a PhD. I choose Columbia because it’s in New York and because David Dorfan went there; I choose Caltech because Feynman got the Nobel prize one year earlier; I choose Berkeley because it sounds like the coolest place to be, and there’s the Free Speech Movement. All have good physics departments.
But though I grasp the fact that I will soon leave South Africa, my grasp is only intellectual. My emotional state, au contraire, goes into a kind of hibernation that avoids thinking about the future in any detail. I suppress any thought of what it will be like to be 8,000 miles away from anyone I know. When my father, well-intentioned, tries to awkwardly broach the difficulty of going far away alone for good, I irritatedly cut him off.
I have in fact been away from home many times, on many vacations with friends, in Israel, working in Habonim camps, but never all. on. my. own. without the ability to speak (or get comfort) from anyone I know. It will affect me badly. But now in 1966 I do not think about this at all. It’s beyond my willingness to imagine.
How do I know myself so poorly??
The moment of my eventual arrival in a state of foreign isolation in August 1966 in far away New York City will soon open up a wound that never totally heals. Or perhaps, as Freud would opine, reopens a wound that was inflicted much earlier.
Ever since my first month in the USA I’ve identified with lonely people.
Alone, alone, all alone Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It wasn’t quite that bad when I arrived in New York, but it was bad. But that’s not for this memoir.
All that hadn’t happened yet. Meanwhile, in February or March 1966, I have started on a Master’s degree with Prof. Whiteman. I am reading Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics. This is the book about which my Habonim friend Harry, studying sociology, mocks me when I say I will spend a few months reading it, because he cannot imagine that any book can take more than a week.
I share an office at varsity with Mike Viljoen, another Applied Mathematics Master’s student who is working on modeling the weather with Prof Parkyn. It’s early days for computing in Cape Town and Prof Parkyn models the earth as a rotating cylinder rather than a rotating globe, in order to get rid of a degree of freedom and minimize the necessary computing to solve the equations. Because the computational power is so low, and because the computer language we have, MAC (Manchester Auto Code), has built-in functions like square root that run very slowly, Parkyn makes him write his own square root algorithm in machine code.
Mike is very different from me, an Afrikaner I think, living with a girlfriend, probably a Nationalist, and a boxer. We get along well in our shared office and kid around all the time. Periodically we relax by sparring, him teaching me a bit more about how to block his blows.
And so the year begins to pass. I go out with one or two girls, not in parallel. I go to varsity every day and try to read Dirac. I apply for fellowships abroad. But I can’t really settle down to serious work, as Mike does. I know that I will leave in a few months. And I am restless.