Coffee and Cake
At the suggestion of a friend I have been reading the autobiography of Stanislaw Ulam, 'Adventures of a Mathematician'. It arrived earlier in the week from a secondhand book seller in the USA. The cover had an enthusiastic publisher's blurb: "Unique for his fundamental contribution to the most abstract and abstruse fields of mathematics". This caused some raised eyebrows and wry smiles in the household, perhaps indicating surprise that I am not the only person to whom 'abstract and abstruse' are attractive prospects in a book.
The autobiography opens with an account of the childhood and student days of Ulam in Lwów, an elegant, sophisticated city, then in eastern Poland and in the cultural and intellectual ambit of pre-war Vienna. As a student he is immersed in the famed Polish School of Mathematics. He and his colleagues meet opposite the university, where Ulam pursues intermittently studies as an engineer, in the Scottish Café (Café Szkocka), drinking, consuming coffee and cake, playing chess, and, of course, arguing about mathematics. The tables in the Café are of a white marble and the mathematicians scribble on them, playing with ideas and problems in set theory, topology and analysis. Each evening the tables are scrubbed clean until the wife of one of the mathematicians purchases a large notebook, the 'Scottish Book', that is kept behind the bar as a permanent record of deliberations. Many of the participants are Jewish, as is perhaps thirty percent of the population of Lwów.
Our knowledge of what is to come hangs over this picture, casting a deep shadow. Ulam, who moves to America and plays a key role in the Los Alamos project, does not dwell on it, Lwów becomes a graveyard, the buildings remain, scarred and neglected, but everything else is destroyed by the Nazis and the Soviets. Even the history is denied, distorted and erased. Some of the mathematicians survive through wartime and exile. Others do not, like the tables, wiped clean in the night. Auerbach. Saks. Schauder. Łomnicki. Kaczmarz. Stożek. Ruziewicz. The record of the Scottish Book and the mathematics is preserved.
I am following the 'Adventures of a Mathematician' with 'The Pity of It' by Amos Elon a beautifully written account of the history of German Jewry from 1743 to 1933. It opens on the front leaf with a fragment of a poem by James Fenton , 'The German Requiem'.
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
It is not the houses. It is the spaces in between the houses.
It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
It is not your memories which haunt you.
It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
It resonated with the account of Lwów and its lost mathematical culture. The poem concludes:
Even the enquirer is charmed.
He forgets to pursue the point.
It is not what he wants to know.
It is what he wants not to know.
It is not what they say.
It is what they do not say.