Genius in the Shadows

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by William Lanouette


  For Leo, who was about to turn four, the move to the villa suddenly surrounded him with new playmates: his cousins the Scheibers. Quickly the children divided by age, with Imre, Otto, and Leo the “Big Ones” and Bela, Gabor, Karoly, and Rose the “Little Ones” They competed for years, usually in a friendly way, over control of the villa’s rear-garden play yards. One battleground was a large, circular lawn ringed by linden trees; the other was a small hill against the back fence, with footpaths running up each side. Leo, the source of all legal arrangements, assigned the hill to the Big Ones and the playground below to the Little Ones. He further decreed that neither group could step on the turf of the other. But one day the Big Ones invaded the playground with strips of roofing slate lashed to their shoes, and when the Little Ones complained, Leo waved away their cries smugly. “We never stepped on your turf,” he announced, “just on our own property—the tiles.”

  In another test of his legal agility, Leo directed a game in which the children sat in a circle and traded individual collections. A stickler for precision, Leo complicated the bargaining with conditional offers. When Bela wanted Leo’s small pocket knife and offered in exchange his most valuable possessions—a dozen beautiful marbles—Leo replied: “If you do not give me the marbles, I will definitely not give you the knife; however, if you give me the marbles, I may give you the knife.” Leo’s cleverness seemed irrepressible even at play. When the Big Ones and Little Ones played Pöce(pronounced “Potze”), a game that involved rolling differentsized cardboard disks, they made each child’s disk proportional to his or her age. But when it was Leo’s turn to make the disks, he scaled them not only for diameter but also for thickness.

  Leo turned his mind to more serious worries as well, often acting as the “conscience” for the Vidor Villa’s children. Soon after moving in, when Leo was almost five years old, the Szilards’ nanny, Auntie Susie, took Bela and Rose to City Park in a baby carriage built for two. This large, oval wicker basket on wheels had seats at both ends for the children to face each other, which prompted Bela and Rose to take turns standing up to make menacing faces at one another. Walking along with his hand in Auntie Susie’s, Leo became alarmed and warned them to stop their dangerous play. When Bela leapt up while Auntie Susie was distracted, she lost grip of the carriage, and it flipped suddenly, spilling the two youngsters to the ground. Bela and Rose crawled out from under it, laughing wildly. But Leo was by now so upset that he ran home to report the mishap to their mother.

  Bela remembers that from the time he could walk Leo took him by the arm whenever they left home, even in the company of a parent or governess. Leo continued to grip Bela’s sleeve, and Rose’s, long after they thought it unnecessary. Leo’s siblings and cousins often chided him for worrying too much, but he seemed unable to stop thinking about every possibility for any situation, especially the potential dangers. When one of the children heard that Australia was directly opposite Hungary on the other side of the earth and they all decided to dig a shaft to reach it, Leo had to ponder every contingency. At first, the experiment excited him. He began by picking the site to dig on a dividing line between the Big Ones’ and Little Ones’ territories so that fame and honor might befall both groups. But when the hole was deep enough to cover Rose, the smallest playmate, Leo began to fret. “If you dig much deeper,” he warned, “the wall will cave in on you.” Leo wanted to halt the project at once, but his playmates ignored him and only abandoned the enterprise when a thunderstorm washed dirt into the hole.

  Leo’s aversion to danger—real and imagined—was matched by a dislike for manual work, and from an early age he considered it his role to think and instruct while others toiled or played by his designs. When Bela, Rose, and the Scheiber cousins enjoyed collecting discarded horseshoe nails from the pavement around a nearby stand for carriages, Leo insisted on having only the new, shiny nails that the coachmen dropped accidentally. He even expected his playmates to wash them before they entered his own “special collection.” The Szilard and Scheiber children also enjoyed collecting horse chestnuts that dropped ripe from the trees lining the Fasor. Leo instructed his playmates to make “chains” of the fallen nuts but never shared in the tedious work of piercing and threading them himself. He merely took credit for the idea.

  Leo’s bossiness hid a serious lack of manual dexterity. He had early trouble writing legibly, and in play with his cousins and siblings he could never match their physical skills. As a draftsman, Leo sketched only two things, over and over in a clumsy style: the hand of a man smoking a cigar and a meat cleaver. A favorite pastime for all the children was building dollhouses and rooms, but whenever Leo tried to make furniture from matchsticks and bits of cloth, he dribbled the Arabic gum and crushed his lopsided creations. Instead, he laid out plans and prescribed the furniture’s size. When he ventured to paint some of the inside walls with patterns he designed and claimed they represented wallpaper, his playmates repainted the walls once he had left.

  Leo also refused to join his villa playmates in the wild running games they enjoyed on their daily walks to City Park. Instead, he sat on a bench with their governess and talked endlessly in German. Bela and Rose, who couldn’t understand Leo’s serious behavior, suspected he just wanted to be the first at the bread, butter, and the chocolate milk that the governess brought along for the children’s second breakfast. His appetite aside, it seemed that Leo simply preferred sitting and talking to exercise. The only sport Leo seemed to enjoy was ice-skating, which he and Bela learned with their father at a rink in City Park. Their father decided to learn the sport at the same time and probably gave Leo the necessary example of patience and practice. Father Szilard cut an impressive figure on the ice, moving slowly but gracefully in his long fur coat and tall sealskin cap. As Leo learned to skate on his own, he glided ahead while Bela held their father’s hand. The Szilard children took several tumbles on the ice, but, in their memories at least, their father always glided steadily.

  During his early years in the Vidor Villa, Leo learned little about his mother’s family beyond the lives of her parents. Her father, Sigmund Lustig, whom Leo knew as Dr. Vidor, was an only son born to Jewish parents in Debrecen before 1840. When he was about nineteen, Lustig moved to Budapest to enter medical school. After graduating in about 1865 he married Jeanette Davidsohn, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish couple in Budapest, and on that occasion he changed his last name to Vidor (the Hungarian equivalent of the German lustig, meaning “joyous” or “merry”). In time, through skill and dedication, Sigmund Vidor became one of the best-known ophthalmologists in the capital, a highly respected citizen who directed charitable organizations but devoted most of his free time to the Chess Club. This became such an addiction that on his deathbed Dr. Vidor lamented to his children that he had neglected both them and his profession because of chess and warned his daughters to keep their children from any acquaintance with the game.

  Growing up in the villa, the Szilard children had almost constant contact with their grandparents. Grandpa Vidor was a mild man, respected and revered by both Leo and his mother. Leo also liked the old man’s refined manners and the elegant appearance of his long, neatly combed white beard. Even so, the Szilard and Scheiber children were much closer to their maternal grandmother. They visited her apartment almost daily and many evenings sat at her feet as she darned stockings under a gas lamp pulled down to aid her vision. As she moved her needles, she told the children fabulous stories in her clear and dramatic German. (She, too, spoke only basic Hungarian.)

  In later years, Grandma Vidor tried to teach Leo the piano, an instrument that intrigued him when his cousin Otto began lessons. After months of effort, Leo still failed to appreciate the importance of volume marks as he pounded out all pieces in the same loud and constant style. She stressed that “f” for forte meant loud, “like the voice of a lion,” while “p” for piano meant soft, “like the voice of a mouse,” Leo never learned the difference and before long dropped his lessons.

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sp; Grandma Vidor was better at teaching the children family history; she told many stories about the large circle of Davidsohns living in Budapest, and her sisters and their children were frequent visitors to the busy and friendly villa. The Szilard children were shaken when Grandpa Vidor died suddenly from a brief illness in 1907. After that, the Szilard family moved from the villa’s third floor to the first, sharing a larger apartment with Grandma Vidor. But she became ill in the fall of 1909 with anemia and a heart condition and died early in 1910.

  Leo’s affinity for the Vidors came mainly from a close bond with his mother, nurtured by her continuing ties with her parents and her love of family traditions. Born in Budapest in 1870, the third of five children who survived infancy, Tekla Vidor in childhood and adolescence had been oversensitive, self-doubting, and frequently unhappy despite the affection of her loving parents; in later life she was extremely conscientious about family relationships and often guilt ridden about her affections— or anger—toward relatives. To the end of her life she brooded about once being called a “good-for-nothing” or “useless” child, when, in Hungarian, the same word might only mean “naughty.” Indeed, she surmised that this childhood slur had driven her lifelong mission to be useful.4 She was devoted to her three children and worried about their education. The nanny she employed, Auntie Susie, was a peasant woman with artistic talent and common sense. From her the children learned Hungarian; from governesses they learned German, French, and English.

  Even keener than Tekla’s concern over education was the worry that her children be honest, truthful, and considerate—qualities she admired in her father. She was, however, uneasy preaching the many virtues she hoped they would adopt and resorted, instead, to delivering moral precepts in stories whose protagonists led only sterling lives. These tales formed a continuous string of informal lessons, most often recited as she washed her three children at bedtime. Years later, the children forgot most of their mother’s stories but remembered the washings vividly, as she always rubbed their naked bodies with cold water. This washing and storytelling was her special effort to be close to her children, since most upper-middle-class families in Budapest left all daily child care to household employees.

  Neither the Szilard nor the Vidor families were actively religious, despite respectful attendance at Jewish weddings and funerals. Turn-of-the-century Budapest was a center of cultural ferment, a crossroads of old and new, East and West. Most members of the Jewish middle class relaxed in this setting and abandoned their religious traditions. For the Szilards, this “assimilation” was rapid and total.

  Leo’s paternal grandfather had been a weak believer in the Jewish faith, but he and his wife still had observed all the traditions with their sons. Around the villa, Louis and Tekla Szilard maintained an acquaintance with the social, if not the spiritual, aspects of their Judaism by sharing the conventions of her parents. As they left home, however, the three Szilard children quickly lost these social traditions, but even before that, Louis Szilard had become emphatically irreligious and resented that his sons were required to attend the synagogue once every two weeks, as part of the public high school curriculum. Leo was unaffected by this compulsory education, as his religious teacher, a young rabbi, discovered when he asked, “Do you possibly have not even a mezuzah at your door?”

  “No, sir,” Leo answered. “My parents do not like to show off.” Leo never bothered to learn the Hebrew letters, let alone the required readings of simple Hebrew texts. To him, organized religion was just another convention from which he should be “different” and “independent.”

  Leo’s mother and her family were also nonbelievers, although her father was a director of several Jewish organizations in Budapest. Tekla Szilard never attended Jewish services, but instead practiced what she called her “natural religion.” These ideas she based loosely on the teachings of Jesus and explained to her children many times, but they seemed unable to understand just what she meant. As a result, all three Szilard children grew up with no personal religious beliefs or traditions, yet from their mother they did acquire strongly held ethical values. Leo nurtured these from childhood training, evolving an instinctive “sense of proportion” that guided his life’s decisions.

  Although Tekla spent much of her time with Rose, whom she nicknamed “Rozsika,” it was clear to the rest of the family that she was mostly concerned with Leo, whom she called “Lajcsi.” Like his mother, Leo was sensitive and was considered “different”—a child often preoccupied and fervently involved with abstract ideals, such as honesty and loyalty. He was also independent minded and defied social conventions. Yet he looked to her as a model of self-reliance. Both Louis and Tekla were active in the Masonic Reform Lodge, and after she had put the three children to bed, they enjoyed meetings and parties there.5 The Szilards went often to the theater. And they frequently attended dinner parties among a large circle of friends. Once a week Louis Szilard spent an evening at the National Association of Engineers, a prestigious group that he had cofounded in his bachelor years. But whenever the Szilards left home at night, Leo acted unhappy, became moody, and sometimes could not fall asleep until his parents returned.

  More squeamish than his brother, sister, or cousins, Leo feared not just the sight of blood but the mere threat of violence. When Rose tried to imitate the Big Ones by leaping off the high step of a fake well in the villa’s front yard and instead flopped into the bushes and cut the corner of her mouth, Leo ran to help her, carried her indoors, and then fainted on the floor. Leo complained when his cousins killed earthworms in the garden and was just as squeamish about mistreating inanimate things.

  “Stop! Stop!” Leo screamed as Bela set about to convert one of Rose’s blond dolls into Hercules. Leo was queasy when Bela blackened the doll’s hair with India ink and painted on sideburns and a menacing mustache. Leo cursed angrily when Bela and Rose poked out the doll’s shiny blue eyes. But Leo’s sharpest discomfort came as Bela and Rose replaced the doll’s eyes with shiny black ones painted on paper. To do this they had to cut open its head, glue in the new eyes, and continue to open and close its skull for adjustments by lifting the wig.

  Because physical violence so frightened and upset him, Leo spent much of his time with his siblings and cousins berating them for their enjoyable but destructive pursuits. He complained as they dug an underground hideaway in the villa’s garden, covered the entrance with a trap door, and camouflaged the door with sod, fearing that an unsuspecting adult might fall in. He fumed when they toppled a tall outdoor jungle gym to snatch a birds’ nest from its top rungs. He complained when they pried off the boards of the garden fence and roamed through the “wilderness” of adjacent, overgrown lots. He ordered them to stop their experiments with a cat, shouting orders they ignored as they dropped it from higher and higher steps of the villa’s staircase to see whether it would still land on its paws. And while Leo joined his playmates in slapping down stag beetles as they flew around the garden, he cursed the children for trapping them under flowerpots; this, he insisted, was “unnecessary torment.”

  In his recollections, Szilard considered himself a “Very sensitive child and somewhat high-strung.” He also wrote in later life: “I couldn’t say that I had a happy childhood, but my childhood was not unhappy either.” In fact, as he thought about it, Szilard concluded that his childhood continued to be a part of his adult life, especially as it impelled his scientific imagination. “As far as I can see,” he wrote in 1960, “I was born a scientist. I believe that many children are born with an inquisitive mind, the mind of a scientist, and I assume that I became a scientist because in some ways I remained a child.”6

  If Szilard’s childish social development troubled his parents, they were still proud of his early intellectual adventures. He spoke and read German and French by the time he began formal education at age six and studied English a few years later. His early instruction, by private tutor, gave him both the challenge and the freedom to pursue personal discoveries and qu
estions. And, sensing his own success as a student, he spent his spare time tinkering with scientific gadgets. And reading.

  One book Szilard read as a child amazed him and later in life shaped his mental and moral speculations. From it he also gained something that neither religious nor family influence had provided: a personal sense that his own life had some transcendent, global purpose. In 1860 the Hungarian poet Imre Madach completed The Tragedy of Man, a long and dramatic epic in iambic pentameter. The work is often compared to Goethe’s Faust, for it concerns the Devil’s temptation of Man and his redemption by faith in God. A theological spectacle in fifteen scenes, Madách’s play involves a bizarre cast that includes a Choir of Angels, the Lord, the four Archangels, Lucifer, Adam, Eve, a Slave, Eros, two Demagogues, the Roman poet Catullus, a Monk, Witches, a Skeleton, the Emperor Rudolph, Robespierre, a Showman, a Trollop, two Hucksters, a Gypsy Woman, a Mountebank, a Scientist, the Voice of the Spirit of the Earth, Luther, Plato, Michelangelo, and an Eskimo. It is the Eskimo that Szilard remembered best.

  The Tragedy of Man, with its stilted poetry and its compressed array of philosophical and ethical concepts, is hard reading for adults. Yet while Szilard was only ten when he first discovered the poem, he found some of the scenes riveting and in later life considered it “apart from my mother’s tales the most serious influence” on his life. “I read it much too prematurely and it had a great influence on me, perhaps just because I read it prematurely,” he later wrote. “Because I read it, I grasped early in life that ‘it is not necessary to succeed in order to persevere.’”

  Szilard remembered vividly scenes in which Lucifer shows Adam the future of mankind. He recalled, in particular, a scene in the frozen north, with the sun slowly losing its heat and the earth gradually cooling. In the end, only Eskimos are able to survive on the frozen planet, and even they must confront the problem of too few seals to feed their population. Yet in their behavior and despite a prophecy of doom, the Eskimos show that mankind can maintain a sense of hope. It is this “narrow margin of hope” that Szilard would refer to, quote, and depend on during his own struggles to create a more livable world.7

 

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