Those were the good days, before our real troubles began. Before the disappearances.
The next time I saw Yasha was in 1962, when we were reunited as students at the university. We both sat in a course called Fundamentals of Cybernetics, taught by an aging redheaded asthmatic who’d been tossed out in the early fifties for pursuing research in computer science, a field banned by Stalin for being one of the mercantile whores of imperialism. A decade later, it occurred to someone up top that the country was too far behind in its race with the Americans, and the disgraced professor was tracked down (he was mixing resins in an industrial-paint plant) and reinstated to teach the very subject he’d been fired for pursuing. The little man’s impiety revealed itself on the first day of class, when he wrote his full name on the blackboard: Arnold Peysakhovich Lubarsky. “Most people call me Arnold Petrovich,” he said, turning to face us. “You can call me whatever you prefer.” But that enormous “Peysakhovich” stayed on the board for the rest of the lecture, a patronym not merely Jewish, but so boldly and undauntedly Yid that I couldn’t keep myself from twisting my neck to glance at the faces behind me. Lubarsky might as well have announced he was Ben-Gurion himself come to read us a lecture on Zionism. Thus glancing backward, I locked eyes with the stunned face of Yasha Gendler, possibly the only other Jew in the room who’d also managed to pole-vault the university’s invisible quotas.
Lubarsky was the only professor at the university who dared mock that to which the state had given its approving stamp. One afternoon, he interrupted his own lecture to interrogate the lyric of a popular song. “?‘I love you, Life, and I hope that the feeling is mutual’…Can anyone tell me what in the world this means?” He removed his spectacles to scan our timid faces. Each time Yasha and I walked into his lecture, we were entering a universe whose plane geometry held nothing in common with the contorted realities of our daily lives. With each theorem and arched brow, Lubarsky seemed to be saying to us, “Young people, what sense is there in these ‘laws’ that are violated by the very officials who issue them? How can they compare to the eternal, immutable laws of Newton, Pascal, Bernoulli, Einstein?”
Neither Yasha nor I ever forgot our little redheaded professor. Lubarsky immigrated to Israel and died a few years thereafter. This was the sort of news that Yasha stayed abreast of and reported to me faithfully in our annual New Year’s Eve phone call. In this way, he was more like a relative than a friend, our relationship cemented by mutual history. Years could pass without our seeing each other, but then we’d meet and Yasha might say, “Remember that New Year’s party when your father made costumes for the kids? We were both crows—he made us caps with cardboard beaks. It was the Year of the Ox, and everyone hung a picture of a bull on their door?” And just like that, I would remember.
The technological revolution arrived at the perfect time for brainy kids like Yasha and me. Strategically indifferent to politics, but not as yet perceiving ourselves as anything other than loyal Soviet citizens, we chose technical fields that seemed relatively immune to propaganda yet unimpeachably useful to society. Though we smirked at slogans, we were no less idealistic or enamored of ourselves than that first generation of revolutionaries. Instead of barricades, we believed in satellite launchers. Instead of marches, we had particle accelerators.
But, as I was reminded upon our reunion in D.C., I had long shed my idealistic notions, whereas Yasha’s had multiplied, like barnacles on a stranded vessel.
“Well, it’s what you always wanted, isn’t it?” He yawned, affecting a grand lack of interest in the pulsing spectacle of Continental’s lobby, and the view of the National Mall from my office window. “A big-time career. That’s why you left, after all.”
The boy who’d once been as lanky as a telephone pole was now a telephone pole with a gut. He’d let his stringy gray hair get too long, and now raked it back like a pompadour across his high forehead.
“Why I left?” I tried to clarify.
“Sure. They denied you your Ph.D., so you said, ‘Nothing more to do here, time to pack up and go to Ah-merica.’?”
“I would have left sooner or later. We all did.”
“Ah, but if they’d given you your fancy doctorate, you’re telling me you wouldn’t have happily stayed and built ships for them? Hell, who do you think you’re building your ships for now? Who are you making rich? The same bastards who had red telephones on their desks.”
“I see,” I said. “So you left for the right reasons, and I left for the wrong ones.”
“Hey, I applied to leave before the word ‘refusenik’ was invented. I’m not boasting. I’m just talking about principles. When they finally let me leave I’d been working six years as a janitor, not a physicist. A little bird whispers and suddenly you’re tossed out of your department and the only work you can find is cleaning elevators. But I’ll say this: in all those years I never compromised my convictions. I never gave up my activity like they wanted me to.”
Yasha loved alluding to his dissident “activity,” which as far as I knew was limited to attending a few underground Hebrew lessons to meet girls. He hadn’t gotten much past the Aleph-Bet, either with the Hebrew or with the girls. “Yasha, is it my fault,” I said, “that ‘out of principle’ you elected to immigrate to a country that enjoys a Euro-socialist lifestyle of monthlong vacations and forced unemployment? If you wanted a career in research, you could have had one. Picked up where you left off.”
“Oh sure, with all the kids graduating every year from the Technion.”
But Yasha became more animated at the Air and Space Museum. Forced early retirement had given him abundant time to obsess over Israel’s parliamentary politics while attacking various theorems whose proofs he had abandoned as a young physicist. He was also, he informed me, writing a “popular book” on the lives of the great mathematicians. At present he was working on a chapter about Niels Henrik Abel, a Norwegian who had invented group theory by age nineteen, yet died, penniless and rejected by the Academy, of pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of twenty-six.
Yasha was still talking about this unheralded genius when we arrived at the upscale restaurant that I’d carefully selected for our lunch. But then he abruptly switched topics, from the underappreciated dead to the overrated living.
“A few weeks ago, I open Vesti, our Russian paper,” he said, “and there’s a review of some book. Some samizdat press, but the author’s name I recognize. You remember our apartment neighbors, the Vainers? Their two girls, Dita and Marina…”