The Undoing Project

by Michael Lewis

  Again they fled for their lives, this time up the Côte d’Azur to Cagnes-sur-Mer, to a place owned by a colonel in the old French army. For the next few months Danny was confined to quarters. He passed the time with books. He read and reread Around the World in Eighty Days and fell in love with all things English and, especially, with Phileas Fogg. The French colonel had left behind a long shelf filled with accounts of the trench warfare at Verdun, and Danny read all of those, too—and became something of an expert on the subject. His father still worked in the house down the coast with the chemistry lab in it, traveling by bus to see his family on weekends. On Fridays Danny sat with his mother in the garden and watched her darn socks and waited for his father to arrive. “We lived on the hill and we could see the bus station. We never knew if he would come. I have hated waiting ever since.”

  With help from the Vichy government and private bounty hunters, the Germans became more efficient at hunting Jews. Danny’s father suffered from diabetes, but it was now more dangerous for him to seek treatment for it than to live with it untreated. Once again they ran. First to hotels and then, finally, to the chicken coop. The chicken coop was behind a country bar in a small village outside Limoges. Here there were no German soldiers, only the Milice—the paramilitary force collaborating with the Germans to help them round up Jews and exterminate the French Resistance. How his father had found the place Danny didn’t know, but L’Oréal’s founder must have been involved, as the company continued to send packages of food. They erected a partition in the middle of the room so Danny’s sister might have some privacy, but the coop wasn’t really meant for anyone to live in. In winter it grew so cold the door froze shut. His sister tried to sleep on the stove and ended up with burn marks on her robe.

  To pass as Christians, Danny’s mother and sister went to church on Sundays. Danny, now ten years old, returned to school, on the theory that he was less conspicuous there than hiding inside the chicken coop. The students at this new country school were even less able than the ones in Juan-les-Pins. The teacher was kind but forgettable. The only lesson Danny recalled was the one about the facts of life. He found the details so preposterous that he was sure the teacher had been mistaken. “I said, ‘That is absolutely impossible!’ I asked my mother about it. She said it was so.” Still, he didn’t really believe it until one night when he was in bed, with his mother sleeping beside him. Waking up and needing to use the outhouse, he climbed over her. She awakened to find her son on top of her. “And my mother is terrified. And I think, ‘It must be true after all!’”

  Even as a child he had an almost theoretical interest in other people—why they thought what they thought, why they behaved as they did. His direct experience of them was limited. He attended school but avoided social contact with his teachers and classmates. He had no friends. Even acquaintances were life-threatening. On the other hand, he witnessed, from a certain distance, a lot of interesting behavior. Both his teacher and the owners of the local bar, he had to believe, couldn’t help but know that he was Jewish. Why else would this precocious ten-year-old city boy land in a schoolroom filled with country bumpkins? Why else would this clearly well-heeled family of four have piled into a chicken coop? Yet they gave him no sign they were anything but oblivious. His teacher gave him high marks and even invited Danny to his home, and Madame Andrieux, who owned the bar, asked him to help out, gave him tips (for which he had no use), and even tried to talk his mother into opening a brothel with her. A lot of other people quite obviously failed to see them for what they were. Danny remembered in particular the young French Nazi, a member of the Milice, who courted, without success, Danny’s sister. She was now nineteen, with movie star looks. (After the war, she took great pleasure in letting the Nazi know that he had fallen in love with a Jew.)

  On the night of April 27, 1944—that date Danny remembered clearly—his father took him for a walk. He now had dark spots inside his mouth. Forty-nine years old, he looked much older. “He told me I might have to become responsible,” recalled Danny. “He told me to think of myself as the man of the family. He told me how to try to keep things under control with my mother—that I was sort of the sane one in the family. I had a book of poems I’d written. And I gave them to him. And he died that night.” Of his father’s death Danny had little memory except that his mother had made him spend the night with Monsieur and Madame Andrieux. There was another Jew hiding in their village. His mother had found him and he had helped remove his father’s body before Danny returned. She gave him a Jewish burial but didn’t invite Danny to attend, probably because it was so dangerous. “I was really angry about him dying,” said Danny. “He had been good. But he had not been strong.”

  The Allies invaded Normandy six weeks later. Danny never saw any soldiers. No American tanks rolled through his village with GIs on top tossing candy to children. One day he woke up and there was a feeling of joy in the air and the Milice were being marched off to be shot or jailed, and a lot of women were walking around with shaved heads—punishment for having slept with a German. By December the Germans had been driven out of France, and Danny and his mother were free to travel to Paris to see what remained of their home and chattels. Danny kept a notebook, which he had titled “What I Write of What I Think.” (“I must have been intolerable.”) In Paris he read, in one of his sister’s schoolbooks, an essay by Pascal that inspired him to write in his notebook an essay of his own. The Germans were then launching their final counterattack to retake France, and Danny and his mother lived with the fear that they would break through: Danny wrote an essay that attempted to explain man’s need for religion. He began with a quote from Pascal, Faith is God made sensible to the heart, then added, “How true!” He followed this up with his own original line: “Cathedrals and organs are artificial ways of generating the same feeling.” He no longer thought of God as an entity to which he might pray. Later, when he looked back on his life, he remembered his childhood pretensions and was both proud of and embarrassed by them. His precocious essay writing, he thought, was “deeply linked in my mind with knowing that I was a Jew, with just a mind and no useful body, and that I would never fit in with other boys.”

  In Paris, in their old prewar apartment, Danny and his mother found only two battered green chairs. Still, they stayed. For the first time in five years Danny attended school without having to disguise who he was. For years he carried a fond memory of the friendship he struck up there with a pair of tall, handsome Russian aristocrats. The memory was so insistent, perhaps, because he had gone so long without friends. Much later in life, he tested his memory by tracking down the aristocratic Russian brothers and sending them a note. One brother had become an architect, the other a doctor. The brothers wrote back to say that they remembered him, and sent him a picture of them all together. Danny wasn’t in the picture: They must have been thinking he was somebody else. His lone friendship was imagined, not real.

  The Kahnemans no longer felt welcome in Europe and left in 1946. Danny’s father’s extended family had remained in Lithuania and, along with the six thousand or so other Jews in their city, had been slaughtered. Only Danny’s uncle, a rabbi, who happened to be out of the country when the Germans rolled in, had been spared. He, like Danny’s mother’s family, now lived in Palestine—and so to Palestine they moved. Their arrival was sufficiently momentous that someone filmed it (the film was lost), but all Danny would later say he remembered of it was the glass of milk his uncle brought him. “I still remember how white it was,” he said. “It was my first glass of milk in five years.” Danny and his mother and sister moved in with his mother’s family in Jerusalem. There, a year later, at the age of thirteen, Danny made his final decision about God. “I still remember where I was—the street in Jerusalem. I remember thinking that I could imagine there was a God, but not one who cared whether or not I masturbate. I reached the conclusion that there was no God. That was the end of my religious life.”

  And that’s p
retty much what Danny Kahneman remembered, or chose to remember, when asked about his childhood. From the age of seven he had been told to trust no one, and he’d obliged. His survival had depended on keeping himself apart, and preventing others from seeing him for what he was. He was destined to become one of the world’s most influential psychologists, and a spectacularly original connoisseur of human error. His work would explore, among other things, the role of memory in human judgment. How, for instance, the French army’s memory of Germany’s military strategy in the last war might lead them to misjudge that strategy in a new war. How a man’s memory of German behavior in one war might lead him to misjudge Germans’ intentions during the next. Or how the memory of a little boy back in Germany might prevent a member of Hitler’s SS, trained to spot Jews, from seeing that the little boy he has picked up in his arms from the streets of Paris is a Jew.

  His own memories he didn’t find all that relevant, however. For the rest of his life he insisted that his past had little effect on his view of the world or, ultimately, the world’s view of him. “People say your childhood has a big influence on who you become,” he’d say, when pressed. “I’m not at all sure that’s true.” Even to those he came to regard as his friends he never mentioned his Holocaust experience. Really, it wasn’t until after he won the Nobel Prize and journalists started to badger him for the details of his life that he began to offer them up. His oldest friends would learn what had happened to him from the newspaper.

  * * *

  The Kahnemans had arrived in Jerusalem just in time for another war. In the fall of 1947 the problem of Palestine passed from Britain to the United Nations, which, on November 29, passed a resolution that formally divided the land into two states. The new Jewish state would be roughly the size of Connecticut and the Arab state just a bit smaller than that. Jerusalem, and its holy sites, belonged to neither. Anyone living in Jerusalem would become a “citizen” of Jerusalem; in practice, there was an Arab Jerusalem and a Jewish Jerusalem, and the residents of each continued to do their best to kill each other. The apartment into which Danny moved with his mother was near the unofficial border: A bullet passed through Danny’s bedroom. The leader of his scout troop was killed.

  And yet, Danny said, life didn’t feel particularly dangerous. “It was so completely different. Because you are fighting. That is why it is better. I hated the status of being a Jew in Europe. I didn’t want to be hunted. I didn’t want to be a rabbit.” Late one night in January 1948 he saw, with a palpable thrill, his first Jewish soldiers: thirty-eight young fighters gathered in the basement of his building. Arab fighters had blockaded a cluster of Jewish settlements in the south of the tiny country. The thirty-eight Jewish soldiers marched off from Danny’s basement to rescue the settlers. Along the way, three turned back—one who had sprained an ankle, and two others to help him walk home—and so the group would become known for all time as “The 35.” They’d intended to march under cover of darkness, but the sun rose to find them still marching. They met an Arab shepherd and decided to let him go—at least that is the story that Danny heard. The shepherd informed the Arab fighters, who ambushed and killed all thirty-five young men and then mutilated their bodies. Danny wondered at their disastrous decision. “Do you know why they were killed?” he said. “They were killed because they could not bring themselves to shoot a shepherd.”

  A few months later, a convoy of doctors and nurses under the Red Cross banner drove the narrow road from the Jewish city to Mt. Scopus, the site of Hebrew University and the hospital attached to it. Mt. Scopus lay behind Arab lines, a Jewish island in a sea of Arabs. The only way in was through a mile-and-a-half-long narrow road over which the British guaranteed safe passage. Most of the time the trip was uneventful, but on this day a bomb exploded and stopped the lead vehicle, a Ford truck. Arab machine-gun fire raked the buses and ambulances that followed. A few of the cars in the convoy were able to turn and speed off, but the buses, which carried passengers, were trapped. When the shooting stopped, seventy-eight people were dead, their bodies so badly burned that they were buried in a mass grave. Among them was Enzo Bonaventura, a psychologist imported from Italy nine years earlier by Hebrew University to build a department of psychology. His plans for a psychology department died with him.

  Whatever threat Danny felt to his existence he declined to acknowledge. “It looked very implausible—that we would defeat five Arab nations—but somehow we were not worried. There really was no sense of impending doom that I could pick up. People were killed and so on. But, for me, after World War II, it was a picnic.” His mother evidently did not agree, as she took her fourteen-year-old son and fled Jerusalem for Tel Aviv.

  On May 14, 1948, Israel declared itself a sovereign state, and the British soldiers left the next day. The armies of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt attacked, along with some troops from Iraq and Lebanon. For many months Jerusalem was under siege, and life in Tel Aviv was far from normal. The minaret on the beach beside what is now the Intercontinental Hotel became an Arab sniper nest: The sniper could, and did, shoot at Jewish children on their way to and from school. “There were bullets flying everywhere,” recalled Shimon Shamir, who was fourteen years old and living in Tel Aviv when the war broke out, and would grow up to become the only person ever to serve as Israel’s ambassador to both Egypt and Jordan.

  Shamir was Danny’s first real friend. “The other kids in class felt there was some distance between them and him,” said Shamir. “He wasn’t looking for groups. He was very selective. He didn’t need more than one friend.” Danny spoke no Hebrew when he arrived in Israel the year before, but by the time he arrived at school in Tel Aviv he spoke it fluently, and spoke English better than anyone else in the class. “He was considered brilliant,” says Shamir. “I used to tease him: ‘You are going to be famous.’ And he would feel very uncomfortable about it. I hope I am not reading history back, but I think there was a feeling that he would go a long way.”

  It was clear to all that Danny wasn’t like the other boys. He wasn’t trying to be unusual; he just was. “He was the only one in our class who tried to develop a proper English accent,” said Shamir. “We all found that very funny. He was different in many ways. To some extent he was an outsider. And it was because of his personality, not because he was a refugee.” Even at the age of fourteen Danny was less a boy than an intellectual trapped in a boy’s body. “He was always absorbed in some problem or question,” said Shamir. “I remember one day he showed me a long essay he wrote for himself—which was strange, because writing essays was a burden which you only did for school, on the subject the teacher assigned. The whole idea of writing a very long essay on a subject that had nothing to do with the curriculum just because the subject interested him: That impressed me very much. He compared the personality of an English gentleman with that of a Greek aristocrat at the time of Herakles.” Shamir felt that Danny was searching books and his own mind for a direction most children get from the people around them. “I think he was looking for an ideal,” he said. “A role model.”

  The war of independence lasted for ten months. A Jewish state that was the size of Connecticut before the war wound up a bit bigger than New Jersey. One percent of the Israeli population had been killed (the equivalent of ninety thousand dead in New Jersey). Ten thousand Arabs had died, and three-quarters of a million Palestinians were displaced. After the war, Danny’s mother moved them back to Jerusalem. There Danny made his second close friend, a boy of English descent named Ariel Ginsburg.

  Tel Aviv was poor, but Jerusalem was even poorer. Basically no one owned a camera, or a phone, or even a doorbell. If you wanted to see a friend you had to walk to his house and knock on the door or whistle. Danny would walk to Ariel’s house, whistle, and Ariel would come down and they’d head to the YMCA to swim and play Ping-Pong without uttering a word. Danny thought that was just perfect: Ginsburg reminded him of Phileas Fogg. “Danny was different,” says Ginsburg. “He felt apart
and he kept himself apart—up to a point. I was his only friend.”

  In just a few years after the war of independence, the Jewish population of what was now called Israel doubled, from 600,000 to 1.2 million. There can have been no time or place on earth where it was easier and more strongly encouraged for a Jewish person newly arrived in a country to assimilate into the local population. And yet, in spirit, Danny did not assimilate. The people to whom he gravitated were all native-born Israelis rather than fellow immigrants. But he himself did not seem Israeli. Like many Israeli boys and girls, he joined the scouts—then quit when he and Ariel decided the group was not for them. Although he’d learned Hebrew with incredible speed, he and his mother spoke French at home, often in angry tones. “It was not a happy home,” says Ginsburg. “His mother was a bitter woman. His sister got out of there as fast as she could.” Danny didn’t accept Israel’s offer of a new prepackaged identity. He accepted its offer of a place to create his own.

  What that identity would be was hard to pin down, because Danny himself was so hard to pin down: He didn’t seem to wish to settle anywhere in particular. What attachments he formed felt loose and provisional. Ruth Ginsburg, who was then dating and would soon marry Danny’s close friend, said, “Danny decided very early on that he would not take responsibility. I had the feeling that there was a need within him to always rationalize his unrootedness. A person who does not need roots. To have this view of life as a series of coincidences—it happened this way but it could just as well have happened some other way. You make the best of it within these godless conditions.”

  Danny’s lack of need for a place or a group to belong to was especially glaring in a land of people hungry for a place and a people. “I came in 1948 and I wanted to be like they are,” recalls Yeshu Kolodny, a professor of geology at Hebrew University, Danny’s age, whose extended family also had been wiped out in the Holocaust. “Meaning I wanted to wear sandals and shorts rolled up and learn the name of every goddamn wadi [valley] or mountain—and mainly I wanted to lose my Russian accent. I was a little bit ashamed of my story. I came to worship the heroes of my people. Danny didn’t feel that way. He looked down on this place.”