Ticket to America: Making the Cut at Harvard

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971.

Being accepted at Harvard for my PhD in chemistry was perhaps the best ticket I could receive for entry into America. My alma mater has been greatly shaken in recent months, and rightly so, for its tone deafness to antisemitism and its bad policy decisions in fighting it. Yet, while the undergraduate world of 2024 is clearly distant from the Chemistry Department of 1971, controversy has always been part of university life.

Even though Henry Kissinger left Harvard the year I arrived, his support for Pinochet’s coup against Allende in 1972 caused me and many others much anger. Government Professor Samuel Huntington was an outspoken hawk on the Vietnam War, which did not make him too popular. And then there was Cambridge’s Mayor Vellucci. The mayor, who had already announced that if it was up to him, he would pave Harvard Yard into a parking lot, agitated loudly when recombinant DNA experiments started at the bio labs in 1976. He suggested that Harvard would contaminate the city with its monstrous creations.

The climate in Cambridge was always stimulating, with the ever-present chance of unexpected storms. It was there that I became a scientist and, undoubtedly, my passage through Harvard opened many doors.

For my initial accommodations, I rented a room in the basement of Child Hall, the graduate student residence next to Harkness Commons. My home that first year was pretty much underground and when I looked out my window, I could see knees and shoes walking back and forth, and when it snowed, I could see nothing at all. Like so many other places at Harvard, Harkness has a history to awe newcomers. To me, it looked like a drab, square, yellow-brick structure that housed a student dining hall. It happens to be one of the few Gropius buildings in the U.S., including a piece of art by his friend Joan Miró.

I quickly learned that such things were not to be talked of by Harvard students. We were to take them for granted, as if dining in a quasi-art gallery designed by a Bauhaus master was no big deal. These things were to be admired by the visitors wandering up and down the campus, but not by us; no need to gloat. That first day, since I was still a visitor and not a regular, it was OK to feel impressed by Harkness and by me eating there. It was a good introduction to the prevalent reverse elitism.

If you studied at Harvard, it was best to be discreet. I had learned that summer, during a solo backpacking trip that I took around Europe, that mentioning Harvard to new acquaintances could engender unpredictable reactions. They ranged from fawning ("Oh-my-god, you got into Harvard?") to a raised eyebrow ("Oh, really?"). If the question was, “And where do you go to school?” my answer would be, “Up in Boston.” It was the other side of reveling; it was reverse snobbishness. My porteño snobbishness, which I brought from BA, was deep in my DNA so I easily acclimated to the local scene.

Mixed in with the conceit, however, was a trace of apprehension. Together with many other graduate students, in what would today be described as an example of “fraud syndrome,” I felt that perhaps my admission had been a mistake. As far as I could tell, the only ones who thought they owned the place were a few undergrad preppies, whose second word after Maaaama had been Haaaa’vad and who, since childhood, had been groomed, preferably by passage through an exclusive New England prep school, to come to Harvard. There were not too many preppies in grad school, and admissions into the Chemistry Department didn’t seem to have been anything but meritocratic: no legacy, no favoritism. Yet, together with a few others of my new classmates, I hoped the committee had not slipped and let us in when they had meant to reject us. It took some time and a few supportive conversations until we calmed down and felt reassured that we belonged.

My neighbors in that basement of Child Hall were a motley crew of lively characters. There was George next door who, by the time he arrived, had already been in Polynesia doing fieldwork on the Tongan nobility. George, who later became the chair of anthropology at Rice, smoked a corncob pipe, had a cynical view of the world, and a wonderful sense of humor. He treated my Latin American Jewishness more as an ethnological curiosity than as a source of identity confusion. He did not blink when I said that my name was Jorge Goldstein but, thoughtfully and behind a cloud of smoke, said "Uhm, interesting cultural mix."

Down the hall lived Russ, whom we called the "Turtle Man" because of his hobby to exchange turtles with other specialists around the world. He had the disheveled and slightly crazed look of a man who had spent too much time in the jungle. His dorm room was wall-to-wall boxes with live turtles, and I would visit as much for him as for the terrapin feel. Russ would later become a world-renown primatologist and is the only person I know who has a lemur named after him.

Next to Turtle Man lived Arvind, a goatee-sporting economics student from Delhi whose contribution to our lives was to fill our hall with the sharp aromas of curries that he cooked in his room. He later became India's member on the Board of the International Monetary Fund.

In contrast to my neighbor Ray from the E-Dorms at RPI, who had confessed that he was never good in geography, none of these guys had to be told that Argentina was a different country than Brazil. Russ and George had already lived in countries that I did not even know existed. Compared to all of these folks, I, with my love of organic chemistry, felt plain ordinary. The thing about Harvard, and I did not always know it when I was there, was that pretty much everybody felt the same way: that the other guys were better. All of us were a bunch of overachievers who felt like we were not good enough.

My American family, Uncle Jack, Aunt Bertha, and Grandmother Rachel, were as delighted as they could be. They came to Cambridge as soon as possible my first year and, when I was visiting them in New Jersey, wanted to hear all about it: famous professors, historical buildings, and the rest of the legends. I had lost both my parents in BA during adolescence, and my proud New Jersey folks reminded me what it meant to have a loving family. They were my only remaining relatives – at least until I discovered unbeknownst Italian ones on Dad’s side; but that is a tale for another day.

I do want to tell you a priceless story from my Harvard years that involves my maternal grandma, Omi as I called her. Omi was born and raised in the late 19th century in Rohatyn, a Shtetl - a “Fiddler-on-the-Roof-type” small Jewish village. The Shtetl was in Galicia, which until the end of the First World War, was a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Rohatyn is in today’s Ukraine, about five hundred miles northeast of Vienna. Omi was short, built like the peasant that she had once been. She was plump, with a bosom extending out from her body straight down to her waist. Her skin was weathered and wrinkled, her sharp eyes sparkled with wit, and her mouth sported a permanent grin. Her humor and laughter were legendary among those who knew her.

We were sitting around dinner one weekend and she became curious as to exactly what it was that I was studying.

“Chemistry, Omi,” I said, to keep it simple.

“Vat? . . . You’re not going to be a Dokter or a lawyer?” she asked in her mix of Yiddish, German, and English.

“Well, not a medical doctor, but, yes, I'll become a doctor.”

“Ah!” she smiled proudly. “Und vat kind of a Dokter?”

“A doctor in chemistry.”

“Chemistry . . . chemistry . . . vat kind of a Dokter is that?” she asked, definitely skeptical.

“I’m studying the chemistry of living things, and how they use enzymes.”

She looked at me for a while, confused. I decided that I should explain some more.

“You see, Omi, all things in life are made of basic molecules, like proteins or sugars.”

“Sugar? . . . I know, sugar . . . But proteins? Wus sind proteins?”

“Proteins? Let's see . . .”  I said, trying to find a simple analogy. "Meat . . . Fleisch!" I said,

"Meat is made of proteins. Pastrami, corned beef, all made of proteins.”

"Meat . . . I see," she said and, looking at her son Jack, added "Fleisch." Jack nodded.

"Und mol-eh-kuls? Wus ist dus?" she asked in Yiddish.

"Well, all things are made of molecules. If you take a piece of Fleisch and you cut it, you get two pieces and if you cut those, you get four, and then cut some more, you get eight, then sixteen, and so on. Verstehsts?" I asked in one of the few Yiddish words I knew. She smiled and nodded understanding.

"And there comes a moment when you can't cut the Fleisch anymore. You get to the smallest piece, and it can't be cut." She kept nodding and smiling.

"That," I said triumphantly, "is a molecule! You cut, and cut, and cut, but that’s the smallest piece of meat that you can't cut anymore!"

"Aha!" said my Omi, grinning and delighted with her grandson, the future Dokter.

A few months later, back in New Jersey, I went to pick her up to go to the movies. Omi lived in a small apartment, which she shared with her roommate, Mrs. Newman, both of them in their late eighties. Mrs. Newman let me into the living room and told me that my grandmother was getting ready and would be out in a minute and how excited she was to be going out with me and what nice weather we were having for this time of the year. Then, abruptly, with a serious look and without a hint of irony, she said, "So, your grandmother tells me that you’re at Harvard studying to be a butcher, eh?"

I smiled with happiness. I had made the cut with Omi. The road from enzymes to corned beef to Mrs. Newman's ears had been rocky, but there is no doubt that it was paved with grandmotherly love.  

***

Here’s Omi ca. 1974, a year before she passed away, making a point: