Nicholas Dawidoff -- And "Shura"

(c) 2009 F. Bruce Abel

Read on. This is not boring, really. Really. (Or maybe it is.)

Nicholas Dawidoff, the author of the lead article on a great scientific thinker, Freeman Dyson, in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, is someone who himself struck us (Glendale Literary Club) as quite remarkable.

Remember this name: Nicholas Dawidoff.

I will later write that in finding this article today, confirms my belief that everything in the world relates to everything else. Personally, and to each of us. In our case (Glendale Literary Clubbers) two of the personalities, Dawidoff and John McPhee (in last week's New Yorker) are "relatives" of people in the Glendale Literary Club, Ted Carman, Sr. and Mary Stewart, respectively. Or it was Ted Carman Sr.'s funeral that brought "Nicky" to Glendale and into our consciousness.

Glendale Ohio, for heaven's sake, here in the middle of the eastern middle-west, not Cambridge, Massachusetts!

First, before going on (and on) talk amongst yourselves or join with me while I finish reading the subject article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine:


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?hpw

Next, here are my minutes of the February, 2004 Glendale Literary Club meeting where Snowden Armstrong gave his paper on Dawidoff and the books that he has written, including one on "Shura" of Harvard:

Snowden’s tale began at Ted Carman Sr.’s funeral in 2001.

By the way, I remember that day. I foolishly looked out at the Presbyterian Church standing in my kitchen at 885 Greenville, realizing too late that I had been too lazy to go to that funeral (50 yards away) because of some other “pressing” matter, or the effort it would take to shower and otherwise clean up. Never again. Oh to have had Snowden’s rich encounter with Dawidoff! As well as paying tribute to a great man himself, Ted Carman Sr.

Back to Snowden: at the reception at the Glendale Presbyterian Church he was standing next to a man a generation younger than he, named "Nicky." Nicky stood at the Presbyterian Church reception as a New “Yawker;” and was a teller of goofy jokes.

Snowden began to realize Nicky was smart, not a smart-alec. He turned out to be one of the most accomplished persons Snowden had ever met.

Let us peel back this particular artichoke of the man and author "Nicky" the way Snowden so beautifully does in his paper:

Nicky was married to Ted Carman Sr.’s daughter Rebecca, Nicky and Rebecca having met at Harvard.

Nicky was an author of the book "In the Country of Country," a book about country musicians from the perspective of their home places and friends.

Snowden wrote

"I thought: how could one so ethnically removed and urban know anything about 'country.' I asked him how he had gained an interest in country music. He replied simply that an uncle had liked country music."
Nicky had also written a book ("The Catcher Was a Spy") about Moe Berg, a Princeton grad, and professional baseball player who had been a spy during World War II; and another about Nicky's grandfather, a distinguished professor at Harvard University: "Shura."

At dinner with Ted Carman, Jr., a day after the funeral, Ted told Snowden that Nicky had spent more than two years trekking the Appalachians and flats of Arkansas visiting with the country musician performers and their relatives.

But his most recent book was about his grandfather, Alexander Gerschenkron, (easy for you to spell!) known affectionately as "Shura," at Harvard, (Snowden gave me a copy of this book, since I went to Harvard Law School, and I have ½ finished it and it is absorbing.)

(FBA ed. note: My best friends at Harvard when I was at the law school in 1961-64) were graduate students in the economics department: Philip and Elmer Schaefer, "whiz kids" from Chicago, and Henry Nejako. The name Gerschenkron I am sure, was bandied about by them, although I couldn’t swear to it today.)

Alexander Gerschenkron had escaped from Russia in 1918; lived in Vienna and thrived there as a professor; had escaped the Germans in 1939 to go to England.

This from Harvard Magazine:

"Being a professor at Harvard enabled Shura to become fully himself, allowed him to decide who he wanted to be and to fashion himself into that man. As a member of that community, Shura found himself in the greatest country in the world, 'the finest thing' in which was Harvard, the best part of which, in turn, was the economics department. Here was both 'a realization of personality and reconstruction.'”

One of the book’s major points is that Russians are show-offs. They may appear to do elaborate things for long-range effects but it is always to get attention at the moment. Shura was interested in anything and would delve into it exhaustively. As Snowden points out he never wrote one great work, but plenty of short great works. He created the economic concept of “Backwardness” as being an advantage to Russia and other countries trying to emulate England’s industrial revolution. While working for the secret service on a project he merely stared at the Soviet Union’s five-year plan numbers and, after months of staring, figured out they were fudging the numbers, and exactly what it was that drove the fudging.

Shura wrote, after spending some semesters in California:

“don’t ever live in California; it’s too beautiful. You’ll spend your afternoons playing chess and gazing out into the Pacific.”

Shura, a Russian, was a show-off but he was so accomplished that Harvard knew he was the king, and all loved him openly.

Nicky, the grandson of "Shura,"standing at the Presbyterian Church -- while less than 50 yards away I was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at 885 Greenville Avenue and missing the experience -- is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Berlin Prize Fellow.



Respectfully submitted


F Bruce Abel