An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky

  At the camp outside of Albacete, Joe wrote again: "Today was a rich day. I got three letters from you. I was overjoyed by your desire to come here and work, but I am compelled to say no for the present at least. We have made a decision that no wives are to be allowed to come here unless an emergency arises." But he added, "Personally, I think you'd make a first rate tank-driver." In fact, Joe did agitate to make an exception for Kitty, and a month later he thought she might be able to come: "All the dirty work you did for years, cranking leaflets, passing them out in snow and sun, visiting contacts, etc. was not in vain. Everything we worked for years is coming true in steel."209

  Kitty wrote to Hilda, "Joe is, I gather, although he does not say so, as usual well beloved by his fellows and their leader in thought and action." His fellows did not agree. Joe Dallet was a cultivated man trying to be part of the proletariat, complete with tough-guy accent, expletives and fractured grammar. More than that, his reading of the Communist Manifesto required him to refrain from fraternizing with the men and to ignore their suggestions and complaints if he decided they were not valid. He followed the rules as he understood them, and brooked no exceptions; as a result, many of his men disliked him. Even his good friend Steve Nelson—who was popular with the men—would later admit, "He was trying to do the right thing, but the right thing was wrong. Discipline has to come from political conviction, not from military books."210

  IN 1937, THE WRITING WAS literally on the walls in Germany: Jude Raus (Jew Out). "I had had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany," Robert would explain.211 After his father's death, he helped his Aunt Hedwig Stern, her pediatrician son Alfred, and his wife Lotte settle in Berkeley; his father had left Robert with another part of the family to embrace, and he had also left a substantial inheritance. Robert did not hesitate to use it to help others escape the Nazi threat.

  Soon after Hitler took power in 1933, the Nuremberg Laws were passed, prohibiting employment of all Jews in the civil service. The faculties of the state-run universities in Germany included some of the country's most celebrated scientists, many of them Jews. Some found a way to England, others came to the U.S.; most were in their thirties and forties, at the apex of their powers, a concentrated treasure of scientific knowledge. These included Alfred Einstein, John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, Edward Teller and Leo Szilard. Immediately after receiving his 1938 Nobel Prize, physicist Enrico Fermi and his Jewish wife Laura fled Italy. Oppenheimer regularly donated to a fund established to help his Jewish colleagues—a number of them were men he had befriended in his days as a student in England and Germany.

  WITH THE DEATH OF HER mother that summer of 1937, Jean was stunned by sorrow. Robert too was feeling the strain. He would write a friend, "By the summer I was fairly worn out with a long & in some ways a hard year & thought some weeks in the mountains were more than ordinarily a good idea."212

  The very perversity of the times provided Jean with some extraordinary new friends. She was at Stanford Medical School just when some of the most inspiring refugees would arrive in the San Francisco area. One of these was a medical doctor named Hannah Peters, a young German woman working at Stanford on a research project with Thomas Addis. Jean admired Hannah: She was brave, had strong political principles, and was a compassionate doctor. She had fled Europe with Bernard Pietrkoiwski; when the two arrived in the United States, he changed his Polish name to Peters, and they married. He had been an engineering student in Munich but because of his left-wing politics, the Nazis had forced him into the concentration camp at Dachau. He escaped and then wrote a moving account of the horrors he had witnessed. When they came to the Bay Area, Peters found work as a longshoreman.

  Jean and Hannah became close friends and she introduced Robert to the couple. When he found that Bernard Peters was interested in physics, Robert managed to get him admitted to Berkeley's graduate program as his student. Peters' obvious intelligence, intensity and gravitas impressed everyone. Along with the research at Stanford, Hannah had a medical practice in a poor, racially mixed section of Oakland and became Robert's physician.

  In 1937, Siegfeld Bernfeld arrived in San Francisco, and Jean's life took another turn. Bernfeld had a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna; he had studied with Freud (who called him his most gifted student), became a psychoanalyst, and went on to explore, with equal fascination, education and biology. A gifted teacher, Bernfeld embraced both Zionism and Marxism. When he was twenty-seven, in Berlin, Bernfeld had founded a school for some 300 Jewish refugee children from Poland. He came to believe psychoanalysis should be treated as a natural science, based in biology—that there was a genetic connection for mental disorders.213 Jean became his student, and as part of her training in the 1940s, would be psychoanalyzed by Bernfeld. His approach seemed tailored for Jean. His search for scientific answers to psychological problems echoed Jean's search for therapy as "a surgical tool"—a way to find a cure for herself, to be free of the burden brought about by her "overwhelmings."

  ALL THAT LONG HOT SUMMER, letters passed back and forth: Joe to Kitty, Kitty to Joe's mother Hilda in New Jersey, Hilda to Kitty, and both to Joe. Kitty hadn't met the Dallets, but now she inserted herself into the family. In June, she wrote a burbling dispatch to Hilda from England: "We've had two weeks here of the most glorious sunshine—something I had begun to believe never happened in England. At the same time the temperature went up to 78° and once to 83° and as a result the papers are full of headlines about the 'Heat Wave.'. . . I've spent my afternoon lying as naked as my conscience permits—mine only, since there's no one who could possibly see me, and we lock the gate—and whenever I'm nicely warm take a dip in our pool. As a result I'm quite nicely brown already. However I think it's too bad that civilization should have brought anyone to the point where he cannot comfortably lie quite naked when in absolute privacy."214

  On July 11, Kitty wrote to Hilda that she kept asking Joe to get her to Spain, but the answer was always "no." That said, she went on to explain that she needed an operation to remove her appendix, but her father's two sisters were coming from Germany for a three-week visit and she would need to help her mother. And after that her very good friend Zelma Baker would be coming to stay for the month of August. So the surgery would have to wait "until all our guests have come and gone. . . . So i suppose it will be the end of september or more until I can go traipsing off to spain [sic]."215

  Joe seemed unaware of her August plans. In a letter dated July 19, he declared: "Wonderful news. You can come. Get in touch with Jack in Paris, for whom I enclose a note. He will put you through. I love you."216

  IN AMERICA, THE INTENSITY OF the Spanish Civil War had become the rallying cry for the Communists, the progressives and left-wing liberal intellectuals. Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley, who was fond of Frank and Robert, told them it wasn't proper for scientists to get mixed up in politics. The brothers didn't listen. Robert was beginning to enjoy being part of a wider community, Jean sometimes by his side. He joined the East Bay Teachers' Union, the Consumer's Union, organized for FAECT,217 and signed on to the American Civil Liberties Union. He lent his name to any number of organizations that one day would be labeled "Communist fronts" by the FBI. Robert saw himself as a loyal American, eager to do his part.

  JOE WAS EXASPERATED WITH THE war, with the wait, with Kitty's appendix. "Why in God's name does it have to pop now?" he wrote, after telling her how worried he was about her, "Please have it fixed up immediately so you can start your trip here."218

  At the beginning of August, Joe was sure his unit would be sent to the front imminently. He waited now for the letters from Kitty, and fussed when she skipped a week or two. But that month, Kitty and Zelma went to Paris to the 1937 World's Fair—officially the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. There the massive German Pavilion designed by the young architect Albert Speer stood across from the equally gigantic Soviet Pavilion, a giant eagle and swastika on a stone colossus faced
the hammer and sickle. Nearby in the Spanish Pavilion, the central feature was a mural that was to become an enduring and powerful anti-war statement: Pablo Picasso's Guernica, depicting the German bombing of that small Basque town.

  Joe had no real experience in the front lines, so he wrote what others who had been there told him: that some of "best" people crack up here, some of the worst are heroic. He had heard that up front the changes came so fast he wouldn't see them. It was "a bloody interesting war and the most bloody interesting job of all the bloody interesting jobs I've ever had," he wrote to Kitty, was "to give the fascists a real bloody licking."219 And he continued to beckon her to come to Spain.

  But Kitty was enjoying herself in Paris and chattered on in one of her letters to Hilda, describing the Paris office, which acted as a clearinghouse for the international volunteers: "There is an amazing number of fine young fellows there from America and England—university students, young scientists, all kinds. We went out with them several times and enjoyed ourselves tremendously."220

  On August 26 in Germany, the doctors operated and discovered that Kitty didn't have appendicitis after all. She gave the details to Joe's mother: "They burned out about 15 or 20 tiny ovarian cysts and sewed the uterus into place; it was almost upside down." Which meant she was being forced to spend another three weeks doing nothing, to give her uterus time to become firmly anchored. She was, she said, dreadfully disappointed. The doctor had told her that she should have a baby within the next two or three years, "so I'll have to see what I can do about it!" Released from the hospital, Kitty and her mother traveled to a spa in Wildbad in the Black Forest. Kitty supposed she might as well take advantage of being there. She wrote to ask Hilda, "I wonder if you've heard anything from Joe lately. Naturally, being here I haven't."221

  On September 15, Joe wrote to Kitty to say that he'd received several letters and cards from Paris, and "I'll be glad when I get a letter which assures me that you are well and getting ready for the trip." He was writing in an olive grove by candlelight with artillery and avion bombing in the distance. He ended with: "It is all quite picturesque. Much love, Joe."222 But he was having problems that he would not likely divulge to Kitty or his mother. The men of the battalion—antagonized by Joe's unwillingness to divert from a strict Communist line—were on the verge of rebellion. Commissar Dallet had finally gone too far when he'd accused one of his men of malingering, and threatened reprisals. The men's anger resulted in a meeting that lasted into the night. For eight hours Dallet was battered with complaints; at last, a good Comrade, he experienced a "personal transformation" and apologized, then offered to resign as commissar.223 It was too late. They were called to the front. For redemption, he needed to prove himself in battle.

  In the offensive against the town of Fuentes de Ebro, Joe would lead First Company over the parapet. At 1:40 P.M. on October 13, 1937, he was first out of the trenches, directly into returning fire. Within yards he was hit by machine gun rounds; he began to crawl back to the trenches, waving off the first-aid men. The battalion's machine gun commander watched helpless as Joe struggled in terrible pain, until a second burst of enemy machine-gun fire silenced him.

  15

  KITTY DECIDES WHAT TO DO, ROBERT TALKS OF MARRIAGE, AND JEAN SINGS, "SHE NEVER TOLD HER LOVE, BUT LET CONCEALMENT, LIKE A WORM IN THE BUD, FEED ON HER DAMASK CHEEK"

  On October 18, 1937, Kitty was back in England, unaware that Joe had been killed five days earlier. She wrote a breathless three-page typewritten letter to Hilda, not taking the time to capitalize words: "i hadn't heard from you for a long time and was beginning to worry lest something had happened to you. and now I haven't written to you for ages either and feel quite bad about it, but I've been rather depressed since I got out of hospital and didn't feel like writing to anyone at all." It had been rainy and cold at the spa at Wildbad and at the end of two weeks, she could no longer stand Germany "with its dreadful feeling of tension. . . . no one dares to talk to a stranger, in fact no one dares speak at all except of the most trivial matters. and its heil hitler all over the place. . . . everyone seems to believe that everyone else except his most intimate friends is a spy. i shall certainly never go back as long as the nazis are in power."224

  Kitty was now ready to go to Spain, she wrote Joe's mother, but when she went to the office in Paris for Spanish War volunteers to make arrangements she was told she couldn't go immediately. She had waited in Paris for a week, and "would very much liked to have stayed in Paris" had there not been "complications." Kitty explained, "two of the chaps there had fallen for me which made it rather embarrassing and tended to spoil the good time i could otherwise have had with them."225

  Not knowing her words were pointless and painful for Hilda to read, Kitty rattled on: "i'm back in claygate, still waiting. heaven knows now when i can start, or if i will ever be allowed to go." She confided that her family had felt she would be foolish to go, but then "joe is waiting for me and will be worse than disappointed if I don't come. besides which i can't believe that he would allow me to come if he thought i wouldn't be all right." She added petulantly, "also i hear seldom from joe because he is expecting me all the time and no doubt thinks it useless to write."226

  On October 25, she learned that Joe had been killed.

  She fired a cable to the Dallet family in New York: NEWS TODAY JOE KILLED / DON'T KNOW WHEN /STOP/ COMING BACK IN FEW MONTHS IF I CAN THINK OF SOMETHING TO DO/ ALL LOVE KITTY.227

  The Dallets had been the first to hear of their son's death. It was two weeks before Hilda responded to Kitty, who wrote back: "evidently you knew about it before i did. that was because nobody here had the courage to tell me about it, since they all knew me personally, and they put if off as long as they could."228 More likely, his parents were listed as next of kin.

  When Kitty learned that Steve Nelson was passing through Paris, she arranged to meet him. Nelson would later remember that "She literally collapsed and hung on to me. I became a substitute for Joe, in a sense. She hugged me and cried." When Kitty pleaded with him to tell her what she should do, he impulsively suggested she return to the States and move in with him and his wife Margaret—Maggie—in Brooklyn, for a time.229 Kitty considered her options. She despised wet and dreary England, where her father was contracted to stay for at least another year, and she had no place else to go—nor anything to occupy her—elsewhere in Europe. Worse yet, her father seemed to be putting some financial constraints on her. She wrote to Hilda: "i am returning to the u.s. next week. for one thing the only possible way I could please joe is by staying as a good communist and anti-fascist . . . as it is possible for me to be. for another, my home is in america and not in this god-forsaken country." She wrote that before Joe, she had planned to be a chemist. Now she was returning to get a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, but "the only trouble is managing the money end. . . . i remembered the other day that joe said he still had some money with you, and that if anything happened to him i was to have it." She said it was painful for her to ask, "but i'm going to be in a position soon where i have to earn my own living and any little bit that will help me on the way is necessary to me. so i hope we can fix it up when i get to new york, although i know in advance that i shall be terribly embarrassed."230

  The Dallets kept an apartment in New York, as well as a home on Long Island. It seems doubtful that she was ever given the chance to be "terribly embarrassed" when asking for the money. Hilda must not have responded because Kitty moved into Steve and Margaret Nelson's cramped Brooklyn apartment and stayed for two months.

  She would turn twenty-eight that August and was still financially dependent on her father. Joe became a celebrity in certain circles: a committed Communist Ivy Leaguer who had become a hero in Spain. Kitty offered his letters for publication, and the Party had them printed with the title "Letters from Spain by Joe Dallet American Volunteer, TO HIS WIFE."

  As Kitty had told Joe's mother in her telegram, she now had to think of something to do.

 
ONE SUMMER DAY IN 1939, Jean put the top down on her roadster, picked up two friends and headed north toward Mendocino, a small fishing and lumbering village perched above the sea. One of the friends, Edith Arnstein, was a year younger than Jean. The two had earned their radical credentials at the same time and their mothers moved in the same circles.

  Edith would write that they sang their way up Highway 1, tracing the coastline, hair flying in the ocean breeze. Edith taught them Orlando Gibbon's famous madrigal, "The Silver Swan."

  "The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note,

  when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.

  Leaning her breast upon the reedy shore,

  thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:

  Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes!

  More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise."

  In turn, in her strong contralto, Jean sang a few lines from Twelfth Night: "She never told her love, but let concealment, like a worm in the bud, feed on her damask cheek."231

  JEAN AND EDITH HAD DISCOVERED the metaphysical poets at about the same time, but for Edith, all the music and poetry ceased when she became totally immersed in the Communist movement. She explained, "I am not sure Jean was ever so doctrinaire, though we shared the same political beliefs." There was much that Jean did not share, Edith admitted: "Jean was private about her despair. She had always been close about her life and her decisions, so that although I was surprised when she told me as a fait accompli that she was registered in medical school, I felt the decision came from some place in her that I never had presumed I knew. When I saw her after her first year, she had already decided to become a psychiatrist."232