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A Tale of Two Continents
A Physicist's Life in a Turbulent World
By Abraham Pais PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1997 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-01243-8
CHAPTER 1
Descent
I, ABRAHAM (friends call me Bram), am the son of Jesaja, son of Abraham, who was a diamond cutter, son of Jesayas, also a diamond cutter, son of Benjamin Pays—who was married twice and had eleven children from his first and seven from his second marriage—son of Nathan Pais, son of Benjamin Paes, son of Nathan Paes. All of these ancestors, as well as I myself, were born in Amsterdam.
The reason I can trace my paternal ancestry that far back is that all of these Paises belonged to the Portuguese-Israelitic, also called the Sephardic, congregation Talmud Torah of Amsterdam and were registered in its record books, which have been preserved.
I have not been able to follow my lineage to still earlier times. It is certain, however, that my ancestors came to Amsterdam from the Iberian peninsula at some time after the 1590s, when the first Sephardic Jews reached the Low Lands (now the Netherlands and Belgium) via the Friesian town of Emden, most probably from Portugal. (The early spelling "Paes" perhaps indicates earlier Spanish origins.) Many Sephardim fled from Spain to Portugal after the Inquisition began. To this day the telephone book of Lisbon shows a long list of Paises, a name which in Portugal dates back to medieval times. In 1160, a Gualdim Pais established the Templar Order of Christ near where, in 1345, the town of Tomar was founded—by a Dom Pais, according to an inscription on his statue in the town's main square. I do not think that these gentlemen are ancestors of mine, however.
The arrival of Sephardim in the northern Netherlands marked the founding of the oldest emancipated post-Renaissance Jewish community in the Western world. Later it would sometimes be called the Jerusalem of the North.
In 1519, the humanist and scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote in a letter: "If it is Christian to hate the Jews, then we are all of us outstanding Christians." Nothing unusual about that. There were only a few Jews to hate in his environs, however. Before 1500, one finds only scarce and scattered references to the presence (and persecution) of Jews in the area now known as the Netherlands. Of the few Jews who lived there, most disappeared after 1544, when Emperor Charles V, king of Spain, who also ruled over the Netherlands, issued a decree ordering their expulsion from the region. By that time they had already suffered a similar fate in Spain.
The Spanish Inquisition, initiated in 1478, "had been originally devised for Jews and Moors, whom the Christianity of the time did not regard as human beings." It brought to an irrevocable end the golden age—the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—for Jews and Arabs living in Spain; many Spanish Jews converted to Catholicism in order to escape horrible brutality. These neo-Christians were known as Marranos, which is Spanish for swine. Most remained secretly faithful to Judaism, however; thousands were caught and lost their lives at the stake. Those who continued openly to profess Judaism were expelled from Spain by the royal edict of March 31, 1492, four months before Columbus set sail on his first voyage of discovery of the New World. Many fled to Portugal where, shortly afterward, they were again forced to renounce their faith. In 1536, the rule of Inquisition was also introduced in Portugal, causing some to flee, others once again to become Marranos.
Meanwhile, the Inquisition had extended its activities to the persecution of Christian heretics. Recall that the sixteenth century was the age of the great religious and political revolution known as the Reformation, spearheaded by men such as Martin Luther and Johannes Calvin. The new Protestantism found a large following in the Netherlands; the Inquisition reacted there accordingly, ably sustained by Philip II, son and heir of Charles V, with its customary cruel tortures and executions. These events caused the peoples of the Low Lands to rise up in arms, led by William (the "Silent"), count of Nassau, prince of Orange. In 1568, the eighty-year war with Spain began. Up till then the Low Lands had been an agglomerate of regions ruled by counts, barons, and other nobles. Now it became one nation, "the Netherlands," which initially comprised both Holland and Belgium. William, known to the Dutch as "the Father of the Fatherland," wrote that he was prepared to stake "his person and all that is in his power to commence and maintain the liberty of religion and of the fatherland."
In this favorable climate the first Sephardim settled in Amsterdam, from where the Spaniards had meanwhile been expelled. By 1612 about 500 were already living there. In 1618 they inaugurated their enlarged synagogue on the Houtgracht. It was there that in 1642 Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel welcomed William's son, Prince Frederick Henry, who was accompanied by the queen of England; also here, on July 27, 1656, the infamous ban on the Sephardi Baruch Spinoza was pronounced. Rabbi ben Israel played an active role in the readmission of Jews to England—from where they had been expelled since 1290—when in 1655 he visited London at Cromwell's invitation. Sephardim were also the first Jewish settlers in New York (in 1654).
The Portuguese synagogue of Amsterdam, inaugurated in 1675, unharmed by war and occupation, stands today as one of the world's most renowned synagogue buildings. Its services are still held in a Hebrew that, apart from small variants, is identical to the Iwrith now spoken in Israel. As I remember from my youth, however, announcements to the congregation were made in Portuguese; for example, "Mincha a una hora e mea" (the afternoon prayers will start at one thirty). I also remember the melody and text of the Sabbath prayer for the House of Orange, also in Portuguese: "A Sua Majestade, a Rainha dos Paizes-Baixos, e Seu Real Consorte," etc. (To her majesty the Queen of the Netherlands and her royal consort). On high holidays, the Sephardim would greet each other not with a hearty "Gut Jomtov" but rather with a formal "Boas Festas." When in 1887 the male synagogue choir was formed, it was given a Portuguese name: Santo Ser????. A photograph shows my father as second conductor; later he became first conductor.
In the Holland of my youth, half the Dutch Jewish males were engaged in petty trades. Sixty percent of those employed in the diamond industry, and twenty percent of all art and antique dealers, were Jews. Jews belonged in modest numbers to the middle class (from which I hail) but mostly to a large proletariat, all of them led by a handful of well-to-do men.
As to our language at home, my parents, grandparents, and their friends spoke only Dutch, never Yiddish or Ladino, its Sephardic equivalent. (Until about the middle of the nineteenth century, Portuguese had been the Amsterdam Sephardim's everyday language.) I grew up in a religious but strongly assimilated milieu.
My mother was Ashkenazi. Her maiden name was Kaatje van Kleeff. She was called Cato, more often just To. All I know of her ancestry is that her father, Levi, was a diamond cutter. She met Isaiah, my father, when both were studying to become elementary-school teachers. I have never heard anyone call him Isaiah, however; he was always Jacques, and so he signed his letters. Mother taught school until she married my father, on December 2, 1916.
My father was also an elementary schoolmaster, and later headmaster. In addition, he was headmaster of the Sephardic Hebrew school—all this until the Second World War. After the war he became the secretary of the Sephardic congregation of Amsterdam, the executive officer in all secular matters. He was a much respected and greatly beloved man in that community, always ready to listen to and counsel people who would flock to him with their worldly problems. He was formally named a rabbi posthumously. At his funeral we carried his coffin to the Portuguese synagogue and set it down in front of its main doors. (No dead body is ever allowed inside an orthodox synagogue.) Then the doors were opened. Candles had been lit inside. Next, the chief rabbi proclaimed my father a rabbi. Thereafter we brought his body to the serenely beautiful Sephardic cemetery, founded in 1614, in Ouderkerk aan den Amstel, a village just outside Amsterdam. There both he and my mother now rest in peace.
CHAPTER 2
Early Years
I was born in my parental home in Amsterdam, Pretoriusstraat 24, then a pleasant tree-lined, cobblestoned street. That was on May 19, 1918, in the closing months of World War I, during which Holland had managed to remain neutral.
According to my mother, the first comment she heard about me came from Dr. Trompetter, just after he had delivered me: "Look at those big eyes!" The earliest photograph of me that I own shows me lying on a scale, staring at the world with intense curiosity, one of the few commendable qualities I never lost. My mother has told me that I was "clean" (no more diapers) within six months, a source of pride to her. Like so many Dutch women, she had a compulsion for cleanliness.
On November 1, 1920, Annie, my sister and only sibling, was born. Much later my mother spoke to me about that event. She and my father were still in bed that morning when she told him to get up and fetch the doctor: her time had come. My little bed stood in my parents' bedroom. Soon after my father had left the room in haste, my mother's water broke. I stood up in bed and watched in amazement, yelling at her: "You pig!" I myself have no recollection whatever of that day's events. This is perhaps curious, since I do remember what happened right thereafter.
I had been brought to my mother's parents' home to stay for the next few days. One evening, my grandmother put a plate of food in front of me, but 1 refused to eat. When in her grandmotherly fashion she urged me to take the food, I became enraged and threw the full plate onto the floor. I can still see the mess of broken shards and scattered food. As a young child I would occasionally throw such tantrums, as the time I threw a wooden ball from a bowling set at a boy with whom I was playing. Fortunately he ducked; unfortunately the ball went through a big window. I would get quite pale during such outbursts—they came to an end when 1 was about seven—and had to sit down afterward to rest. It strikes me that these earliest memories are rather angry ones.
At age four I started kindergarten or, as Amsterdam schoolboys called it, kakschooltje (little shit school). The only memorable event of those two pleasant years was that I made my first lifelong friendship, with Max Dresden, born on the same street as I, and only one month older. We became inseparable, going later to the same elementary school and high school. At about age nine we moved to another apartment, on the Linnaeusparkweg, also in Amsterdam. At about the same time, Max and his family moved to that street as well. One early recollection: like all the boys around me, I had an intense interest in dirty language. One day Max triumphantly marched up to me and declared: "I know what fucking means." It took some time to get this important information out of him.
Max and I also started our university studies together, in physics, in Amsterdam. In those years we became part of the first generation of hitchhikers, traveling through Belgium, France, and Switzerland, often sleeping in haystacks on farms—which is comfortable but do not ask how we smelled. Such trips helped solidify our high school knowledge of foreign languages. When you drive with a trucker through France you speak French or else. When you are picked up by an Englishman in a classy automobile—as happened to us in the Rhone Valley in Switzerland—you speak English. One summer day we were near the Vosges in northeastern France, sitting at a roadside, having our gourmet lunch of bread and cheese when suddenly, out of nowhere it seemed, a French soldier stood before us and asked what we were doing there. Our reply appeared to be acceptable to him. He walked off and suddenly vanished again. Only later did we understand that we were having lunch in the middle of the Maginot Line, built before the war to protect the eastern border of France.
After a few years at the university, Max and I parted our ways when, mainly because of the threat of a European war, he left for America. In later years we have seen each other off and on, to our pleasure—most recently as emeritus professors.
Back to the earlier years. At age six I entered elementary school. I had not learned to read earlier but quickly picked it up. Within a few months I was reading books. According to my mother, after having finished my first book I said to her: "I never knew that reading was so wonderful." Soon I had to be rationed to one book per day. When I was smaller, I had played with my few toys, blocks, a Meccano set. But now I just read. First, the traditional Dutch children's books, which include neither Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates nor the story of the boy with his finger in the dike—these tales are unknown in Holland. Then I took interest in books about American Indians written by the German author Karl May—who had never set foot in America—and the great characters such as Winnetou, chief of the Apaches, Old Firehand, and Old Shatterhand. I read everything by Jules Verne and by Paul d'Ivoi, and then I discovered detective stories, including those by the Dutchman Ivans and by Edgar Wallace (the latter in translation, of course). On occasion I would pick up adult novels being read by my parents, with particular interest in the erotic passages. My mother once found me absorbed in one such book and took me aside, explaining that what was written there was not what went on in the real world. I reassured her with barely hidden smugness that, yes, I understood that. Once I got hold of a copy in Dutch of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, and became furious when I saw that all the juicy parts were in Latin.
At school I became a smart, rather arrogant kid, always learning fast, especially arithmetic. I was always number one in my class, through high school, doing poorly only in physical education.
In my young days Holland was a stable, bourgeois, and very rich country with little upward mobility. It was then the world's third largest colonial empire, still possessing the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia) and the West Indies, Suriname, and Curaçao. My parents could always make ends meet, but well-to-do they were not. We lived in a modest-sized apartment heated with coal stoves. As was quite common, we had no hot water, nor did we have a telephone.
In those years we always had a live-in maid. Most often these young women were German, eager to escape from the economic ruin in their homeland following the First World War, working in Holland at modest salary but with plentiful good food. The maid and my mother kept busy all day long. Every day the bed linens were hung out of a back window. Every day the apartment was dusted and cleaned. Silverware was polished. There was constant washing of clothes and dishes. Once a week the street in front of the house was scrubbed. My mother did the cooking herself.
My parents never owned a car; in my young days that was a prerogative of the rich only. A radio came later. I remember being invited to the home of friends—I must have been less than ten years old—and hearing my first broadcast crackling from a crystal set. Like most middle class homes, ours had no bath. My mother bathed us children in a zinc tub in the kitchen, while she and my father went to a nearby "bath house," a tidy place that provided shower rooms. Only after the Second World War did my parents have a shower in the home; also a telephone. They were past forty when they went abroad for the first time, to Paris. (Note that the distance from Amsterdam to the Dutch border is about the same as from New York to Philadelphia.) It was a big to-do; aunts and uncles, Annie and I came to the railway station to wish them bon voyage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Tale of Two Continents by Abraham Pais. Copyright © 1997 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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