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CHAPTER THREE

  Learning to Learn  010 Elliot at Brandeis, 1950.  My uncle Fred knew exactly what I should do when I faced the two most momentous decisions of my life, and his advice was wrong both times.  When my father died I was about to enter my senior year of high school. His death precipitated a family conference—not from the Aronson side but from the tight-knit Feingold side. The Aronsons would never dream of calling a family conference or of trying to dictate a course of action for one of their kin, but the Feingolds did it all the time. Accordingly, it was natural for my aunts and uncles to gather in our living room to consider the question: What is to become of Dorothy and the children? Almost all of them attended, as well as my mother, Jason, and Paula, who was then about twelve. Uncle Fred, the dentist, who was the oldest and wealthiest of my mother’s brothers, presided. And, as the self-appointed head of the family, he dominated the meeting. He proposed that Jason, who was entering his second year at Brandeis University, stay in college. I should finish high school and then get a job, so that I could support my mother and sister and help finance the rest of Jason’s education.  It seemed like a reasonable plan to me, but Jason immediately saw through the facade of familial concern to the real issue—money, and how not to spend it on us. The Feingolds might be willing to augment whatever savings my mother had for one year, until I was able to work full-time, but then they would be free of us. Jason said, “Screw that! Elliot is going to go to college, and it’s not going to cost any of you a red cent. He and I can both work our way through school.”  “What about your mother and sister?” Uncle Fred asked.  “Ma knows how to work,” Jason replied. She had in fact worked as a stenographer before she married, although of course she had not had a job in more than twenty years.  My mother took all of this in, but said nothing. I think she did not want to cross either her brother or her oldest son; she may have been a little afraid of both of them. Uncle Fred was skeptical of Jason’s plan and annoyed with his insubordination; he was accustomed to getting his way in family discussions. Noisy argument ensued, but Jason was resolute. His year at college had opened a world of possibilities for him, and he wanted me to enter that world, too. He feared, reasonably, that once I went from high school into the workforce, I would not turn back. The meeting broke up unhappily. When the uncles and aunts left, Jason turned to my mother and said, “Ma, you can do it.” And she could. Within a few months she had a job selling dresses in Chandler’s, a fine department store on Tremont Street in Boston, and was enjoying it.  Jason not only had to convince Uncle Fred but also had to convince me. I hated high school, because, with few exceptions, the teachers were burned out and boring (my history teacher often came to class drunk). They didn’t think I was worth much, and I can’t blame them: I got mostly Bs and Cs, without working very hard. Jason gave me a pep talk about exerting more effort in my senior year so that I would stand a chance of being admitted to a good university. In my heart of hearts, I thought the effort would be useless. I didn’t think I was smart enough, and even if I got admitted, I couldn’t afford to go; I was not about to ask Uncle Fred for a loan. Jason tried to convince me that I could earn a scholarship as he had done. “But I’m not as smart as you are!” I protested.  He grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “Look, schmuck, do you want to spend your life pushing a baby buggy down Shirley Avenue?”  That was a chilling image. For years, with a mixture of sadness and fear, he and I had observed guys in their early twenties who had married their high school sweethearts, were soon saddled with children, had taken miserable dead-end jobs, and were pushing that baby buggy down one of the main streets of our town. The mere thought of that fate scared me into trying harder. By the middle of my senior year I had pulled my grades up a little, but the big surprise came when I took the SAT exams. I astonished my teachers, and myself, by getting an astronomical score. And so I applied to a few colleges, all in the Boston area. I was accepted at Boston University, Northeastern, and Brandeis, which had been founded just two years earlier but was achieving national recognition as a first-rate college. The fact that Jason was already at Brandeis gave me a moment’s pause—once again, being judged as his little brother, arriving in the wake of his stellar achievements. He was on the Dean’s List, he was elected as the very first president of the student union, he would go on to be the editor of the first yearbook, and he was founding director of the campus satirical revue, Hi Charlie. But Brandeis made the decision easy by offering me a one-year full-tuition scholarship and a part-time job that allowed me to pay most of my room and board. I would be working five nights a week at the campus snack bar, making milkshakes and grilling hamburgers.  The summer after high school graduation, I did not go back to the Pokerino tables. I found a way to make more money, working on highway construction for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. During that summer I did a lot of thinking about the transition I was about to make. From my experience as a mike man on the boardwalk, I had learned that, somehow, entering a new situation would give me an opportunity to try to re-create myself. In high school I never went to a prom; I had never even dated, being too shy to ask a girl out. Because my fellow students saw me as shy, they contributed to my self-concept, and my self-concept in turn constrained my behavior. (Later I learned there is a name for this phenomenon—the self-fulfilling prophecy.) But going to college would wipe the slate clean. In a new environment I could try to become the person I wanted to be. I figured that if I behaved as if I were not shy, the new people I met would see me as an outgoing guy.  And so, arriving at Brandeis in the fall of 1950, I hit the ground running—socially, anyway. I made some close friends. Most of the guys I was hanging out with were tough, smart, and verbally aggressive, skilled in sarcasm and the witty put-down, and I saw from the start that to keep up with them I would have to become a good counterpuncher. At home I used to cry easily. Here, to protect myself, I started building a shell. I also began dating, and within a few months, I discovered that I was attractive to women. I started going steady with Barbara, who was pretty and popular, and my view of myself as an awkward, inept teenager slowly faded. Barbara told me that her friends were calling us the cutest couple on campus.  I worked every evening from seven to ten at the snack bar. Curfew at the girls’ dormitory was eleven. Barbara would come into the snack bar shortly before it closed, so that we could be together for that hour. In those days there was no place to go for making out, let alone for making love. We couldn’t go to a dorm room, as men were not allowed in the women’s dorms. We couldn’t go to a hotel or motel, even if we could have afforded it, because you had to be married, and desk clerks were suspicious of nervous teenagers who weren’t wearing wedding rings. So most of our sexual activity, such as it was, took place in the back seat of cars or in a small coin-operated laundry room that was frequently empty (and dimly lit). For the first months of our relationship we necked and petted, often to orgasm, but we didn’t go “all the way” until one evening when we were in the back seat of a friend’s car. Usually, Barbara would press her thighs together and whisper “no no no” at the ultimate moment, but this time she didn’t. She opened her legs, and I slid in. It was my first time. I felt an exhilaration that filled my whole body. I also felt enormous gratitude that she had allowed me to enter her. At the crucial moment I withdrew and ejaculated into my hand.  Moments later she turned to me and said, “Did you put it inside?”  “Couldn’t you tell?” I asked.  “No! Of course not! You actually put it inside me? That’s awful!”  “But I thought it’s what you wanted.”  “It’s not what I wanted. I’m a virgin—or I was.” And she began to cry.  “My God, Barbara, I’m really sorry.”  My exhilaration and gratitude deflated rapidly and were replaced by guilt, contrition, and confusion. How could she not know? I drove her to her dormitory, kissed her good night, and thought about what had happened. I was naive, but not that naive. Of course she knew; she had to know. It dawned on me that we were caught up in a sexual drama and we would each have to play our parts: She would pretend to have been unaware of the penetration, and I would pretend that I didn’t know that she was pretending. For the next few months, from time to time we made love “accidentally.” Then, without discussing it, we dropped the pretense.  One night, when I left Barbara and arrived back at my room after eleven, I found Jason waiting for me.  “With Barbara again?” he asked. “You know, you don’t have much time to study as is. You have to make use of whatever time you have free, instead of fucking around with Barbara every night. You could flunk out of this place.”  “What is this?” I said. “Am I living in the same dorm with my father? Lay off.”  “I’m not your father, I’m your brother, and I want you to get the most that you can out of being here.”  “I am getting a lot out of being here.”  “Okay, have it your way,” Jason said, going out the door, “but at least be careful.” And with that, he tossed me a package of Trojans.  Jason’s concern about my study habits was justified, but not because of Barbara. Soon after I got to Brandeis I discovered that I had never learned how to be a student. I didn’t even know the first thing about taking notes. I would sit in class, listening to the lecture, scribbling furiously. By the time midsemester exams came around, I pulled out my lecture notes and found they were virtually unintelligible. I did poorly on those tests, but I learned something from the experience. From then on, at the end of every class, I would find a little nook—sometimes even the nearest stairwell—read over my scribbled notes, and neatly summarize them in a page or two. At the end of the semester, when it was time to prepare for the final, my notes described the heart of the course. More than that: They revealed the scope and pattern of the professor’s thinking and the way his lectures dovetailed with the readings. I had taken the first step toward mastering the art of getting to the essence of a topic. When I was boiling down my lecture notes, I could see the professor’s thought process and where he was heading. I found I was also learning to love to learn, and, perhaps most important, I was learning to think critically and challenge unsubstantiated assertions. For the first time in my life I understood what it was to be a student. In the second semester of my freshman year, I was earning straight As.  My political awakening at Brandeis was just as intense—in fact, it had begun before classes even started. One night during freshmen orientation week, I was having a discussion in the dorm lounge with Steve, one of the older students who were advising us. The topic was Senator Joseph McCarthy, and our discussion quickly grew heated. Like just about everyone I knew back home in Revere, including all of my teachers and fellow students, I thought McCarthy was a hero. In my final year of high school he had been giving speeches, to everyone from Republican women’s groups to the U.S. Senate, claiming that the State Department was infested with Communists in high positions. McCarthy would dramatically hold up a sheet of paper, declaring, “I have in my hand a list of their names!” and expressing outrage that the State Department would allow such dangerous people to be making foreign policy decisions.  When I was in high school our teachers had told us that Communists had infiltrated the State Department, so I was filled with anxiety and gratitude for Joe McCarthy. Moreover, because I believed that the Soviet Union was evil and sinister, it followed that any American Communist was a potential spy who should be exposed and punished, and McCarthy seemed to be doing just that. No one I knew would have disagreed with that position. My history teacher (who happened to be sober that day) had quoted former ambassador Joseph Kennedy’s claim that McCarthy was both a war hero and a peace hero. The only newspaper my parents, friends, and I read was the Boston Daily Record, a Hearst tabloid, which intensified the fear of the Communist threat and hailed McCarthy as the savior of democracy. The whole issue seemed like a no-brainer; all we needed to do to protect ourselves was root out the Commies. And McCarthy had their names. Case closed.  At Brandeis, I discovered that I had been living in a hall of mirrors. To my astonishment Steve and most of the freshmen in my dorm not only considered the issue debatable but were convinced that McCarthy’s claims were wild and irresponsible, and that the senator himself was more of a menace to our democracy than anyone in the State Department. They pointed out that the numbers on his list kept shifting. He told one group that the State Department had 205 “card-carrying members” of the Party, to another group it was 87 or 79, to the U.S. Senate it was 57.  “And notice,” Steve shouted at me, “that he never actually named anyone on his list!” I fought back, lamely, arguing that even if there were only one, it would be one too many. Steve retorted that the Tydings Committee had determined that McCarthy’s so-called list was a hoax, and there were no spies in the State Department.  I was dumbfounded. This may have been the first time that a belief that I thought was absolutely right had been challenged, and not just challenged but treated with derision. What was this Tydings Committee anyway? How could anyone consider Senator McCarthy to be a menace? Wasn’t he a patriot? Maybe, I remember thinking, Steve and some of the other guys were Communists themselves. But soon I realized that this debate was not simply a matter of opinion or taste, like whether you liked a particular movie, or you believed Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams was the better all-around ballplayer. This was a matter of cold facts, on a crucial question at that. Either McCarthy had a list of documented Communist spies or he did not. It dawned on me that I might need to find a way to dig into the evidence for myself. I should no longer rely on what other people thought, whether they be my peers and teachers at Revere High School or my liberal classmates at Brandeis University.  During our argument, Steve suggested, at the top of his lungs, “Why don’t you read the New York Times instead of the Daily fucking Record?” That idea alone was astonishing, a reflection of my naïveté. My initial thought was, “Why should I read the New York Times? I’m from Boston; I’m not from New York.” But privately I made the decision to take his advice. The next day I went to the college library and began following McCarthy’s exploits in the Times, where I learned that Steve had been right about how much the Boston Record had distorted and omitted.  Over the next few months I learned that the Tydings Committee, a Senate subcommittee that had investigated McCarthy’s allegations, had concluded that there were no Communists in the State Department, which in any event had adequate screening devices in place. And then I read something that shocked my innocent freshman mind even more: When the Tydings Committee’s report was brought before the entire Senate, the vote as to whether to accept its conclusions split precisely along party lines. So perhaps it was a matter of opinion after all! Just as Red Sox fans favored Ted Williams and Yankee fans favored Joe DiMaggio, Republican senators unanimously had accepted McCarthy’s charges against the State Department while Democratic senators had unanimously repudiated them.  Wow, I thought, so this is college. I guess not all learning takes place in the classroom. It was a revelation to me that facts can be distorted by ideology and that knee-jerk patriotism, the kind I had brought with me from Revere, can blind us to immoral behavior in our leaders. I vowed to try to keep an open mind and, wherever possible, do my own digging. Although I considered the Soviet Union to be a serious threat to democracy, I also learned, for the first time, that many thousands of Americans had become members of the Communist Party in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s for humane, idealistic reasons and how incredibly simpleminded I had been to think that all of them were traitors or spies. During the first months of my freshman year, I felt intensely ambivalent. On the one hand, I wanted my country to be safe, and in the 1950s the threat of a nuclear holocaust was palpable. On the other hand, I was beginning to understand the monumental importance of civil liberties. All the things I learned in high school history and civics classes, about what a great country this is, were of little consequence if this great country was depriving law-abiding citizens of their freedom of speech, their right to have their own political opinions, and their right to work without harassment. I realize how obvious that lesson sounds to anyone who came of age after 1965, but in 1950, a scant five years past the end of what we called The War, there were no nuances about the word “patriotic.” The more I studied McCarthy’s tactics, however, the more I saw what a ruthless, erratic school-yard bully he was, willing to drag people and their reputations through the mud in a manner that was both careless and uncaring. His investigations were fishing expeditions designed to intimidate and humiliate his victims.  The summer of 1951, back in Revere, I spent some of my free time hanging out at Bob’s Variety Store with some of my old pals from our neighborhood baseball team. Mostly, we talked about sports and sex. But when the topic of Communism came up, I blurted out my reservations about Joe McCarthy and his tactics. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Billy MacDonald wink at Al Ross. “What?” I asked.  Billy laughed and said, “Do they teach you that stuff up there at the college?” I got defensive and started to explain that anyone who followed the issue closely in the newspapers would know . . . and then I stopped short and said, “Yeah, I guess so.” And I realized that Billy was half right. They didn’t actually teach me that stuff “up there at the college,” but I sure learned it there. If I had stayed in Revere, my attitudes would undoubtedly have remained stagnant.  That summer, while Billy and I were once again swinging a pick and wielding a shovel on a highway construction crew, I received two letters from the dean of students. The first came in late June and congratulated me on my sterling grades during my freshman year. The second arrived a week later, informing me that, due to a shortage of funds, the university could no longer offer me financial aid. I was crushed. I surmised, with some bitterness, that the dean was reserving their meager scholarship money for incoming freshmen; he probably figured that I was already hooked. If so, he was right. I was so much in love with learning that nothing could have kept me from going back to Brandeis.  I earned enough money over that summer to pay for tuition, but I could not afford to pay for a dorm, and the university was too far away from Revere for me to commute. I tried sleeping on the floor of Jason’s room, until my presence was detected and reported by the cleaning crew. I was summoned to the dean’s office and informed that the rules of dormitory use were strict and inflexible. If I were caught again, I would be expelled.  So I spent that first semester of my sophomore year sleeping wherever I could. When the weather was fine, I slept in the woods surrounding the campus; when it rained, I slept on the back seat of any unlocked parked car I could find. One night I awoke from a sound sleep because the car I was in had started moving. The driver, a guy named Harvey, and his girlfriend were driving to a popular necking spot called the Duck Feeding and Parking Area. (The students referred to it as the Duck Peeding and Farking Area.) Needless to say, they were unaware of my presence in the back seat. What to do? I decided it was prudent to keep quiet. But twenty minutes later, when I heard the sound of zippers being unzipped, I decided I had better make my presence known. I gently cleared my throat. They leaped up, startled, as if a police siren had sounded. Harvey turned, saw me, and said to his girlfriend, “It’s okay, honey. It’s only Elliot.” Apparently, my unorthodox sleeping arrangements were well known to my fellow students. They generously drove me back to campus, so I could find another car for the night.  I felt like I was hanging on to my education by my fingernails. During the day the only place serving food was the campus cafeteria, but you had to have a meal contract to eat there. If I wanted lunch, I had to scrounge food from one of my friends, under the watchful eye of the cafeteria manager, Mr. Grim (I swear, that was his real name), who, like the cleaning crew in the dorms, was ever alert for interlopers. When he turned away, my friend would surreptitiously shove his plate in my direction, and I would eat whatever I could as fast as I could. It was hardly gracious dining, but it kept me nourished. In the evenings I might get lucky and devour an illicit hamburger from the snack bar where I worked.  This history is beginning to sound like something out of Dickens or, closer to home, like the romantically embroidered stories my grandfather used to tell me about his walking to school bare-foot through blizzards in czarist Russia. In my case, there was nothing romantic about it, but I was willing to endure these minor hardships. I almost never cut class, even when the professor was boring. That would have been akin to working hard to earn the money to buy a ticket to the theater and then not showing up. During that fall semester I managed to save enough money from my job to rent a room off campus. I was able to come in from the cold during the most brutal part of the Massachusetts winter.  During the winter semester I had to declare a major. I thought seriously of literature or philosophy, both of which were exciting the hell out of me. But, remembering my father’s despair during the Depression, and having no idea whether another one was around the corner, I thought it might be smart to study something more practical, something that might help me land a job after college. So, with reluctance, I declared economics as my major.  My relationship with Barbara, which had lasted a year and a half, had run its course. In those days most students didn’t have casual relationships that lasted more than a few months: You broke up, or you became engaged to be married. We both realized that although we liked each other enormously, we did not want to spend our lives together. And so we parted.  One afternoon I was having a cup of coffee with an attractive young woman I was hoping to get to know better. Suddenly, she looked at her watch and realized that she was late for class. I decided to walk along with her, hoping that she and I might sit in the back of the lecture hall and hold hands. It turned out that the class was Introductory Psychology, being taught by some guy named Abraham Maslow, a new professor who had just arrived at Brandeis. As it happened, Maslow was discussing the psychological aspects of racial and ethnic prejudice. Much to my astonishment, he was raising questions like the ones that had puzzled me ten years earlier, while I was sitting on that curb in Revere, nursing my bloody nose, wondering why all those Irish Catholics hated Jews so much. Where does prejudice come from? Is it inborn or is it learned? Can it be changed through good experiences with a member of the disliked group, or will the prejudiced person just dismiss it as the exception that proves the rule? Until that moment, I had no idea that there was a field of study that addressed such questions. I was enthralled. So I let go of the young woman’s hand and started taking notes. I lost the girl but found my bliss. The next day I switched from economics to psychology.  Brandeis in those years was a small, informal college on a bucolic campus. It had first opened its doors in 1948, and when I got there two years later, there were only five hundred students—none of whom were even seniors yet. The four full-time faculty members in the Psychology Department had their offices not in an ordinary academic building but in a cozy, charming cottage on Ridgewood Terrace at the edge of campus. The faculty would hold seminars in the living room, and students would hang out there, reading and talking with our professors, getting to know them quite well. Once I started majoring in psychology, I spent a lot of time in that cottage. I studied primarily with Maslow, who was both an inspirational teacher and a visionary thinker. He was charismatic, but his charisma was not the flamboyant kind that people often associate with the word, but gentle and compelling. He spoke softly and thoughtfully, frequently pausing for several seconds in the middle of a sentence—he’d look up at the ceiling, making a little tuneless and almost soundless whistle, while he sought precisely the right word—but his listeners hung on every one of them. I got a great deal out of his lectures, but I most enjoyed our conversations.  At the time, psychology was dominated by two great forces: behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Maslow’s revolutionary view was that neither approach truly captured the essence of humanity or the possibility of what human beings could become. He was particularly contemptuous of behaviorists, believing that the study of rats and pigeons in what he regarded as the restricted, artificial conditions of the laboratory could never ask, let alone answer, important questions. And he objected to what he considered the unduly gloomy portrayal of humanity through the eyes of psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on neuroses, defenses, existential anxiety, and unconscious conflicts.  As an alternative to these two dominant perspectives, Maslow proposed that it was time for psychology to develop a third force, one based on a humanistic, philosophical approach to human nature and motivation. He believed that psychologists needed to observe and interview healthy, mature people to find out what they were feeling, what they were thinking, and how they dealt with life’s challenges. How did they survive, indeed transcend, adversity and deprivation? Maslow arrayed human needs along a hierarchy, from the lowest, basic needs for food, water, and safety, to a single glowing, transcendent motive at the top, which he called self-actualization. Maslow considered self-actualization to be the ultimate goal of all human beings, and he wanted psychologists to understand how best we can achieve it.  I immediately resonated to the concept of self-actualization because it addressed the notion of transcendence, which I linked to my hopes for my own life and to understanding my own history. Even then, however, I knew the concept was slippery; Maslow kept shifting the definition in his writings and conversations with us. I guess I was already an incipient scientist, because I kept trying to pin him down. Once I confronted him and asked whether by “ultimate goal” he meant that people had a conscious desire for self-actualization. He hemmed and hawed, whistled (tunelessly!) and looked at the ceiling, and then said, “I think ‘desire’ is too strong a term because self-actualization is nothing a person strives for; he sort of slips into it after satisfying the other needs in the hierarchy. The journey toward self-actualization is a never-ending process and is never fully achieved except, perhaps, by saints.”  “I guess that leaves me out!” I said. Maslow laughed and said, “Me, too!”  Well, maybe. At one seminar, Maslow listed some of the major characteristics of individuals whom he regarded as being at the top of the hierarchy, people in the process of self-actualizing. These qualities included spontaneity, the ability to face unpleasant facts and difficult challenges with a minimum of stress, an interest in solving problems, openness to experience, a lack of prejudice, the ability to laugh at themselves, the ability to love without possessiveness, and a strong sense of autonomy—the ability to go their own way in spite of opposition. Maslow’s description of the self-actualizing person sounded suspiciously close to how Maslow might have described himself, and a few of us teased him about it. He insisted that this list was derived from empirical research, though his notion of empirical was, shall I say, somewhat casual. His research, he said, consisted of observing and interviewing hundreds of people and examining the lives of exemplary individuals like Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Frederick Douglass, and Jane Addams. I agreed with his candidates for self-actualization, but it was only years later that I understood the fatal flaw in his reasoning: It was circular. How do we know whether Einstein et al. are self-actualized? Because they have the qualities of a self-actualized person. And what are the qualities of a self-actualized person? Those that Einstein et al. display.  By today’s standards Maslow would not be considered a scientist. Science requires that you state your theory in a way that it can be tested and shown to be wrong. Maslow’s theories were not even specific enough to allow others to test them. When I pressed him about the questions that he (and the nine-year-old Elliot Aronson) had raised about prejudice, his only answer was that he was certain that it was not innate, that it was learned, and that it could be modified; that empathy and altruism could be fostered if the environmental conditions were right. But he had no specific answers as to how we might bring this about.  Although I found Maslow’s answer disappointing, I learned something even from my disappointment. I wanted him to have all the answers, to be the perfect father I never had, and he didn’t quite fit the bill. “Get over it,” I’d admonish myself. “He gives you plenty.” Maslow was my first mentor, the first older man I was close to, the first to show concern for my personal as well as academic progress. Once, after taking me aside to compliment me on a presentation, he cautioned me about the sharp-tongued, sarcastic qualities that I was developing as part of my masculine survival strategy. “Your sharp edge is not venomous,” he observed, “but it keeps people at arm’s length.” I was flattered by his interest in me, but I wasn’t ready to give up that edge just yet. It disguised the shyness I still felt most of the time.  What Maslow also gave me was a vibrant and powerful humanism, which he lived as well as preached, and which made him exciting to be with. Many of his lessons stayed with me for the rest of my life, and of these the most important was his optimistic orientation toward human beings and their potential to grow, learn, improve. Society too, he taught us, could become healthier. That optimism got into the very marrow of my bones. From Maslow, I acquired the determination to apply psychological wisdom and knowledge toward the betterment of the human condition. I only dimly realized it at the time, but that was a tremendous gift.  But Maslow’s greatest gift to me was yet to come. In my senior year he hired me and another student to serve as his assistants and errand runners. The other student was a remarkable young woman named Vera Rabinek. She was Maslow’s absolute favorite, for he saw her as someone who was already far along the path to self-actualization. Besides, he was playing matchmaker. At that time Vera was being ardently courted by two first-year graduate students in psychology. Maslow didn’t think either of those guys were right for her and probably thought I might be able to dislodge them.  Vera had grown up in Hungary, survived the Holocaust, and emigrated at the age of seventeen. She was brilliant, gorgeous, and fairly glowed with a quality that I would call serenity. During my first three years at Brandeis I had admired her from afar but had not gotten to know her. She was far more sophisticated than I. She and her friends were the campus literati, and she seemed way out of my league. But after Maslow had thrown us together as his assistants, we gradually got to know each other; within a few months we had become close friends.  The two of us could not have taken more different routes to get to Brandeis, but it was several months before Vera told me her story. She was born in 1930 and had an idyllic childhood, living in the center of Budapest, a stone’s throw from the opera house, which she frequently attended. But in the 1940s Hungary’s home-grown Nazi affiliate, the Arrow Cross, with the complicity of the country’s totalitarian government, began murdering some Jews and deporting others. Vera’s older brother, George, was seized and sent to Buchenwald. Vera barely managed to avoid capture and deportation herself, although she had some harrowing close calls, until the Soviet army finally broke through and drove the Germans out of Hungary. In 1947 she arrived in the United States, where she was taken in by a foster family in Baltimore. Her understanding of English was poor, and she spent the first several weeks of high school in tears because she had no idea what anyone was saying. But she was a quick study. In 1950 she graduated fifth in her class and won a four-year scholarship to Brandeis.  I would later observe that many Holocaust survivors struggled for years with the cynicism, rage, and bitterness their experiences engendered—toward Nazis, toward Germans in general, toward all humanity. But some, like Vera, went another route, deciding to seize the beauties of all that life had to offer. We would be taking a walk and she would pause to watch a group of children at play. To me, it was just a bunch of kids, but Vera helped me focus on the beauty and wonder of the scene. To Vera, nothing was ordinary; every sunset was a gift. She also sharpened my appreciation of extraordinary works of art, such as a Schubert trio, a Mozart opera, or a Van Gogh painting. These were illuminating lessons for a young man like me, who had not grown up with art and music and lacked much of an aesthetic sense. Before long, the same intuition that cautioned me against Barbara now drew me to Vera: how wonderful it would be, that little voice said, to spend your life with someone who, having seen the worst that the world has to offer, finds joy and beauty in everything around her.  Vera had a directness that was irresistible. Unlike Barbara, and the few other women I had seriously dated after her, Vera did not play the gender game by the conventional rules of the time. She put her cards face up on the table. When she said no, she didn’t mean “maybe in an hour or in a week or in a month, as long as I can pretend I don’t know what is happening.” And eventually, when she said yes, she was clear about why and what it meant for her, and for us. I fell in love with her, and, miraculously, she with me.  Decades later I learned that it was not only Maslow who had been pulling for me in the “who will win Vera’s hand?” sweep-stakes; the rest of the psychology faculty was also. Ricardo Morant, who had been a new assistant professor when Vera and I were first dating, told me that every Psychology Department faculty meeting would include an analysis of who they thought might be ahead in the quest for Vera Rabinek. Morant was also happy to remind me that Vera got an A in his course in experimental psychology—and I got a B+.  Vera and I decided to marry, but there was a roadblock. I had resolved not to get married until I had a clear idea of what I was going to do with my life, and as graduation approached, I was more confused than ever. Because Maslow had been pointing me toward a career in clinical psychology, I dutifully applied to a few graduate programs and was accepted. To gain experience as a clinician, as well as earn my keep, I had been working summers and weekends as an orderly in the neuropsychiatric ward of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Brighton. One of my duties was to assist with electroshock therapy (ECT). I had to brace the patient’s shoulders and hips so they wouldn’t get dislocated during the convulsions that accompanied the treatment. I came to care about several of the patients, was happy for them when they were released from the hospital as cured, and dismayed to see them return a few months later. I saw that the treatments available at the time—psychoanalysis, ECT, or heavy-duty tranquilizing drugs—were temporary at best and did not do much for people with severe mental illnesses, such as major depression or schizophrenia. The hospital was a revolving door. Patients were admitted, got buzzed, felt better, went home, relapsed, and then came back. This observation shook my idealistic hopes about what I could accomplish as a clinical psychologist. Not seeing an alternative, I rejected the offers to go to graduate school.  Even then, I held the belief that every person needs to know two things—one, where am I going? and two, who’s going with me?—in that order. There I was, in the spring of my senior year, about to graduate in a month, with no plans for the future. I knew who I wanted going with me, but I had no idea where I was going.  And then I caught a lucky break. Three weeks before graduation Maslow received a letter from David McClelland, the chairman of the Psychology Department at Wesleyan University. McClelland ran a small master’s program in order to have teaching assistants for the undergraduate courses, but that year no one had applied. McClelland was desperate and wrote to Maslow, asking if he knew of any bright psychology majors who had no postgrad plans. Maslow simply tacked McClelland’s letter to the bulletin board outside his office, where Vera was quick to spot it. Uncharacteristically, she ripped it off the board. She ran to find me and handed it to me, saying, “Abe must have meant to give this to you! It has your name all over it.” I thought, “Perhaps it does. I won’t become a psychotherapist, but maybe at Wesleyan I could pick up the skills to become a good college teacher.” I phoned McClelland immediately. A few days later we borrowed a car, drove to Wesleyan, and spent the afternoon with him. We hit it off. Not only did he offer me a half-time teaching assistantship on the spot, but he also offered Vera a full-time position doing research in his lab. Suddenly, we were financially secure, and I knew where I was going. There were no further impediments to our getting married—except Uncle Fred.  My mother liked Vera, but because of her obsession with long-term financial security, she had misgivings about my marrying someone who lacked the family resources that Barbara had. My mother confided her worries to her sisters, and it was agreed to convene another meeting of the Feingold family, at which Uncle Fred once again presided. He summarized the family’s concerns. “I think you’re making a big mistake,” he told me. “Marriage is hard enough when it’s between two people from the same background. But Vera is foreign born—Hungarian!—and who knows anything about her parents? They don’t even live in America. She has no money, no hope of any inheritance. And neither do you.”  My aunts and uncles had not seen much of me since I went away to college and began to flourish. What Uncle Fred didn’t say out loud was that in their eyes, I was still the ineffectual little boy they had always known, the one who would never become Captain Marvel.  Once again, Uncle Fred’s advice was wrong. Marrying Vera was the best decision I ever made. But if it had not been for the timing of McClelland’s letter, my guess is that I would have enlisted in the army to mark time and think about my future. Without a clear career path, I would not have married Vera, at least not at that time, and I might have drifted into a far different line of work. To borrow from Leo Szilard’s story, I would have missed the train.  That summer after our graduation Vera and I pooled our meager savings to buy our first car. One of my former baseball teammates from Revere, who had become an auto mechanic, found us an old, beat-up Nash for $140 that he said was in great shape under the hood, except that the transmission was shot. He generously volunteered to scour all the automobile graveyards in the area until he could find a junk transmission in good shape. After several days he came over, held up a greasy-looking thing, yelled “Eureka! Thirty-five dollars!” and installed it. From that day on Vera referred to that transmission as her engagement ring.  Our wedding was joyous but not in the usual way. By Feingold family standards, it was a terrible affair. They favored lavish weddings—complete with tuxedos (of course!), evening gowns, brides-maids galore, a six-course banquet, and a five-piece band—whether or not the bride’s parents had the means to pay the piper and the caterer. To be fair, the Feingolds were hardly alone in their notions of what a proper wedding should be, but Vera and I opted for simplicity. It was not our intention to disappoint the family or swim against the tide, but we firmly believed in living within our means, and we were turned off by the whole idea of conspicuous consumption. We just wanted to be married; the ceremony itself and the party that followed were unimportant. The compromise was a stand-up reception, held in my mother’s living room where my aunts and uncles mingled with our friends, sipping off-brand liquor and chomping on lox, bagels, and the ubiquitous sponge cake. My relatives left early; our friends stayed late.  But first came the ceremony. As it happened, there was an unintentional note of hilarity in the otherwise formal proceedings. My grandfather Ben Feingold had insisted that the ceremony be conducted by an Orthodox rabbi. Although that would not have been our first choice, in the interest of maintaining some semblance of family harmony, we acquiesced—rather graciously, as I recall. For his part, as a thoughtful nod in the direction of our “modern ways,” Ben found a young rabbi. “I didn’t think you would want one of those ancient, stooped Old Country schnorrers with a white beard down to his knees,” he said. The rabbi he chose was young, all right. Ours was his first wedding. He trembled noticeably, stammered, and kept pausing while he frantically dug into his pocket to fish out his notes. I sneaked a peek at Jason, our best man, who was biting his lower lip and turning crimson as he gamely tried to suppress laughter. The sight of Jason trying not to laugh made me chuckle, and that started a chain reaction: Vera burst into laughter and was joined by my friends who were holding the poles of the bridal canopy, causing the canopy to shake violently. Uncle Fred was not amused.  With no time for a honeymoon, Vera and I were off to Wesleyan two days later, as the fall semester was about to begin. We drove from Revere to Middletown in our beat-up Nash. The car wasn’t much to look at, but it got us there, and, as my baseball buddy had promised, it served us well during our entire stay.  在线读书:http://www.yueDu88.coM/