http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20766-2002Jun20.html

 

Biography
A Genius for Living
'The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World' by Nicholas Dawidoff

 

Reviewed by Trevor Butterworth
Sunday, June 23, 2002; Page BW13

THE FLY SWATTER
How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World
By Nicholas Dawidoff
Pantheon. 353 pp. $26

Biographies of brilliant minds traverse a starry arc of accomplishment; their tale can induce a sinking feeling -- ruefully caught by poet Patrick Kavanagh: "And I believed that my stumble/ Had the poise and stride of Apollo/ And his voice my thick-tongued mumble." To the consternation of Alexander Gerschenkron's Austrian professors, the young, handsome Russian exile had such a thick-tongued grasp of German that what wasn't incomprehensible was often inadvisable. "When he said uhren (watch), for instance, it came out huren (whore)," recounts his grandson, New Yorker contributor Nicholas Dawidoff.

Gerschenkron never lost his Russian accent. He did, however, acquire and master some two dozen languages over the course of his life. And if that kind of achievement is bewildering, think only that he was not considered to be the one in his family with a real talent for language.

Despite such relentless, dizzying overachievement, The Fly Swatter is certain to charm away the idle hours of summer. For unlike the hard, gemlike flame of a Ludwig Wittgenstein, the genius of Alexander Gerschenkron burned in an irrepressible delight in life. It was thus that an economic historian who disabused the world of the Soviet economic miracle, who worked as a wartime shipyard welder and who proved the untranslatability of Hamlet could also charm Marlene Dietrich into giving him her phone number.

With a rapier wit hewn in pre-revolutionary Odessa and burnished in the Stammtische -- the coffeehouse debating circles -- of pre-Nazi Vienna, Gerschenkron exulted in argument and in one-upping his interlocutors. A typical day at Harvard, where he taught economics, would find him arguing "over who had the breech-loading and who had the muzzle-loading rifle in the Franco-German War of 1870-1871. (After that disagreement, finding himself vaguely deficient in his ordnance expertise, he quickly read a four-volume treatise on the history of warfare and armed the tip of his tongue with two hundred years of munitions.)"

Such disagreements were not always jocund, high-table affairs. Gifted with a memory that savored expertise, Gerschenkron took to intellectual feuding with all the moral fervor of Cyrano de Bergerac clamoring for his plume. He eviscerated Vladimir Nabokov for ineptly translating Pushkin , pummeled the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn with quotations effortlessly memorized from Das Kapital and excoriated Herbert Marcuse for impudently preaching dogma hostile to the very freedom he was enjoying in the United States.

Indeed, when it came to the question of liberty -- a trigger for the repressed grief over all that had been lost in Europe, and a source of avid belief in the United States -- Gerschenkron gave no quarter. Dawidoff recounts the rhetorical fate of one old friend, whom his grandfather considered to have floundered, irretrievably, in the illiberal madness of the 1960s. The setting was MIT, and the thrust began, innocently enough, with Gerschenkron recalling a recent visit to see a his old pal, the former Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams.

" 'Williams, you know, is nobody's fool,' my grandfather said smoothly. 'In fact, Williams is an extremely literary man, and it also turns out that he has a real interest in economics.' All of the economists looked very pleased. 'But,' my grandfather continued, it is a characteristic of William's mind that he tends to express his opinions in baseball terms.' The economists looked very puzzled. 'And,' my grandfather said, 'as it happens, I can provide you with an example. Do you know who came up during our conversation?' Nobody knew. 'John Kenneth Galbraith did! And at the mention of his name, Williams said to me, "Oh Galbraith! Certainly Alex. I know all about him. A high fly ball to shallow left field." ' "

As amusing as such anecdotes are, there is more to The Fly Swatter than a leisurely stroll through Cambridge obiter dicta. For Dawidoff, in charting his grandfather's escape from Russia to Austria and thence to America, also renders a moving social and cultural history of those who loved their countries but found themselves powerless to stop their countries from hating them. It is the story of a philistine conflagration that, after setting Europe's thin veneer of liberal culture alight, would not stop burning.

Gerschenkron turned his panoptic mind toward the task of understanding the economic causes of these horrors. His forensic analyses of Nazism and Bolshevism, which are abbreviated here, were seminal and remain unsurpassed; yet, for all his brilliance, his relative obscurity reminds us that such gifts are not always penalty-free. Intellect can be so dazzled by an empyrean grasp of complexity that it soars endlessly among the library stacks instead of settling down into print. Driven by such exacting standards, Gerschenkron became, in the words of Harvard colleague Peter McClelland, "a prisoner of his erudition" and failed to create a popular legacy equal to ones left by colleagues of lesser academic ability.

But what a prison! Like the protagonist in Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees (a novel he loved), Gerschenkron was quite happy to dwell among the stacks, nourishing an ambition to read all 3 million volumes in Harvard's Widener Library, while lamenting to his grandson that fate would force him to settle for a lot fewer.

"He was not a fast reader, he explained, and was condemned to finish only five thousand books in his lifetime. But, he said, I could aspire to do better. Once he handed me a copy of Trevelyan's History of England, pulled out a stopwatch, and clocked me to see how many pages a minute I could manage. It is no small trick to acquaint yourself with Ethelred the Unready while an animated man with a strong Russian accent is shouting out time splits. When the minute was up, my grandfather gave me a quiz on what I just read. He asked a question and I answered it. Without letting me know whether I was right or not, he asked me another question, and another. Then he yelled out 'The boy can do it!' and I jumped."

In the end, Gerschenkron calls to mind Tennyson's restless Ulysses -- a "spirit yearning in desire/ To follow knowledge like a sinking star/ Beyond the utmost bound of human thought." Few have ever journeyed so far, and Dawidoff has surely exceeded his remit with this exquisitely written and ennobling epitaph. •

Trevor Butterworth is a research fellow at the Center for Media and Public Affairs.