Elio's Memoirs

  • Part 1: Preface, Ch. 1 & Ch. 2
  • Ch. 3 & Ch. 4
  • Ch. 5 & Ch. 6
  • Ch. 7 & Ch. 8
  • Ch. 9 & Ch. 10
  • Ch. 11 & Ch. 12
  • Part 2: Ch. 13 & Ch. 14
  • Ch. 15 & Ch. 16
  • Ch. 17 & Ch. 18
  • Ch. 19 & Ch. 20

Preface, Ch. 1 Body Type, & Ch. 2 The Last Year in Italy

Preface

In one’s crepuscular (now, that’s a word I’ve never used before) phase of life, writing memoirs seems mandatory. Actually, I wrote these some ten years ago, but I was already reaching old age then. My apologia pro labore mea relies on my belief that my first twenty or so years of life were a bit unusual, although far from unique—most of my fellow young escapees from Europe had similar journeys. But this is my story, the one I can best write about. These memoirs end at about the time I left Ecuador for the US. The rest of my tale is not uninteresting, but not as dissimilar from that of my colleagues and friends. Some day, if the spirit moves me and my joints permit it, I may write more. For now, this is what I want to share with you.

Elio Schaechter   2012

To my wife, Edith, and my children, Judy and John,
with love and admiration.

Timeline

1928   Born in Milan, Italy, only child of Victoria (Vicia) Wachsmann and
          Abraham Isaac Schaechter

1940   (September) Left Italy

1941   (January) Arrived in Quito, Ecuador

1950   (January) Left Ecuador for the US

1954   Married Barbara Thompson

1961   Daughter Judith born in Gainesville, FL

1962   Settled in Boston, MA

1964   Son John born in Newton, MA

1988   Barbara died

1994   Married Edith Koppel (Wellisch)

1995   Moved to San Diego, CA


My thanks go to my collaborator, Merry Youle, for her help with this project.

Chapter 1: Body Type

Fig 1_CR-3months parents & me

Me, about 3 months old, with parents.

I was a lymphatic. My mother was told that a thin, spidery, pale eight-year-old like me couldn’t be anything else. At that time, in the mid-nineteen thirties, the belief in body types was as ingrained in Europe as it currently is in some quarters (although the Internet tells me that “lymphatic” nowadays denotes the opposite body type). At any rate, what you do for that condition is to feed the child prosciutto, a great cure for lymphaticism. Never mind that prosciutto is as unkosher as it gets, my mother favored my physical well-being to the spiritual. Fortunately, then, as now, I liked paper-thin prosciutto, with or without melon wedges. Notwithstanding, my mother kept a more or less kosher household. Ambivalence of this sort was typical of my parents, and was caused by a wavering between the Jewish traditions and the desire to assimilate into Western culture. They were not alone in this, as most of the Jews in Western countries were living through a similar process.

Fig 2-6 months

Me, 6 months old, in Milan’s Sforza
Castle (Castello Sforzesco).

My mother was a pretty poor cook, and, for a Jewish mother, had little interest in food. We always had a maid who doubled as nanny. The one I remember was from the country, as most of the servants tended to be. I have a photo of her and me in the courtyard of the Sforza Palace in Milan, showing that she was quite tall. She would sneak me into the church she attended (I assume, unbeknownst to my parents). I once managed to lose my teddy bear there, but, after a frantic search, she eventually found it in a confessional booth, conceivably absolved of his sins. Although the servant did most of the cooking, we ate a fair amount of Jewish food, which my mother must have made. An example is what my parents called "stuffed derma," which was made by taking the neck of a chicken (ugh!) and filling it with a dumpling-like stuffing containing, among other things, chopped hard-boiled eggs. The whole thing was boiled and cut across in slices. We ate lunch (our main meal) in the dining room. The tabletop sat on a large square pedestal and I discovered that I could reach a space between the underneath of the tabletop and the pedestal, which was handy for depositing food I didn’t like. I would just drop what to me was inedible, especially the derma, down into this shadowy space. This worked like a charm, but eventually there were lots of little flies, which prompted my father to discover the cache of rotten food inside the pedestal. I remember my surprise at not getting beaten.

Fig. 5C staristone2_crop

Jewish tombstones in my father's shtetl (hometown),
Stari Sambor (then in Poland, now Staryi Sambir in
Ukraine). By permission from Eric Altenberg. Source.

My parents came from a typical Polish Jewish background, both from shtetls (small towns) in the Southern part of Poland, in Galicia. Their families would now be called Orthodox, although in the shtetls there was no other choice. I know little about my ancestors, other than some family myths about being related on my mother’s side to a whole string of important rabbis. In more recent times, that side of the family has done well. It includes at least one important Jewish historian (Arnold Wiznitzer), an Israeli general, my distinguished molecular biologist cousin Hanna Engelberg-Kulka, and others.

Fig 5-jacob wachsmann

Jakob Wachsmann, maternal grandfather.

My maternal grandfather, Jakob Wachsmann, made a nice living in Vienna publishing books consisting of compound interest tables. I still have some of these books, but they don’t make for very good bedtime reading. Before there were calculators (leave alone computers), they were used to look up how much the interest was, say, on 1000 schilling after 7 1/2 months at 5.25% interest. I’m told that he conceived the idea while in jail in Poland for avoiding service in the Army. If so, he must have had enough time for the calculations. We visited Vienna a few times and I remember that my family lived in a fancy apartment house they owned near the grand-sounding shopping street, Mariahilfer Strasse (Mary’s Helper Street). I wish I knew what my grandfather had done in the shtetl and what got him into this obscure but profitable business. His son, my uncle, was said to have been a gifted engineer who published a couple of technical books (which I also still have). He did himself in, due to a broken heart, it is said.

Fig 3B-me and nanny_crop

Nanny and me.

For my father’s side, I have a sort-of-genealogy dating back to the 16th century. I do not place much trust in it because the descendants are not listed continuously. It was commissioned by a family member in the thirties while traveling in Poland and is full of adulatory references to famous scholars. Still, I would like to think that my family included illustrious rabbis, gaonim, and other kinds of notable scholars. Both families, paternal and maternal, left the villages because that region of Poland became a World War I battleground between the Austrians and the Russians. They surely didn’t need much of an excuse to leave that part of the world.

Fig 4-grandma mother me_crop

Me with mother and maternal grandmother.

My mother was largely the product of sophisticated Vienna. She had spent some twelve years there and had become thoroughly immersed in Central European culture. She spoke refined German without an accent and learned Hebrew at a Zionist institute, the Herzl Gymnasium. Her Hebrew pronunciation was exemplary, the sort spoken by the founders of modern Hebrew (but soon to be mutilated into the current usage). Her spoken Hebrew was so unusual that later on in Israel people would almost line up to hear such a pure version of that language. She served as the Hebrew teacher for the Jewish kids in Quito (where we later ended up), which is likely the reason why I never learned much of that language myself. My mother was quite liberal, both by personality and experience, and religion to her was more of a tradition than a spiritual matter. She believed deeply in Zionism, and in Quito served as president of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO).

My father had a thinner coating of Western culture. He did not have the linguistic facility of my mother and his speech was somewhat unrefined. I was told that as a child I said: “When mommy speaks, the words come out round but daddy’s come out square!” In some ways, my father was cultured, but seemed to be uncomfortable showing it.

Fig 4B cute me_crop

Me, about 1½ years old.

Mainly, he was adventuresome. Migrating to Italy after World War I was in itself an unusual thing to do. Young Polish Jews went to Austria, Germany, or the United States. At that time, Italy was as unusual a destination as the headwaters of the Amazon. The number of non-Italian Jews in the country was perhaps 10,000, not much more. When he first got to Italy, my father traveled as a salesman. During this phase, which lasted a few years before he settled down and married my mother in 1926, he experimented with various spiritual beliefs, including Theosophy or Anthroposophy, I’m not sure which. These are now somewhat obscure factions, but I believe they were quite popular in the 1920’s. They certainly weren’t connected to Judaism in the least, but they must have appealed to my father’s craving for unconventional answers. Eventually, he returned to the fold, embracing Judaism more as a social than a spiritual matter. He cared a great deal about being a respected member of the community and almost constantly preached to me on the importance of having a “good name.” He once told me that he wouldn’t see anything wrong if Judaism were to disappear, as long as all other religions did too. An interesting concept that, atheism for all or for none.

Fig_21_fathers service book_sm

From my father's service book. One entry
says: For unmilitary behavior towards a
Sea-cadet, 14 days of shipboard arrest.

My father was quite impetuous and irascible. Here is an early memory: I used to love to eat boiled potatoes cold (and still do, with a little salt). One day, when I was perhaps three years old, I started to scream aloud that I wanted “raw” potatoes, which is what I called them (“patate crude”). My yelling awoke my father from his nap and, mad as hell, he went into the kitchen and came back with a raw, unpeeled potato, and stuck it in my mouth. Much later in life, I learned that my mother had run back to Vienna six months after getting married. The reasons given were that Milan was no Vienna, but above all, that my father’s behavior included losing his temper in public places such as restaurants. He went back to Vienna and obviously persuaded her to return to Milan.

Fig 7B_CR strolling with mom

Strolling with mother.

He could also be very fatherly, protective, and much concerned for my well-being. We used to go on bicycle rides together and, on Sunday morning, ceremoniously went to a special stand in the city to buy bananas. Although I remember often being in fear of him, I remember that he inspired trust and authority. In the words of Goethe, “From father I got my build and my earnest way through life; from mother dear, my nature, and the passion to tell stories.” ("Vom Vater hab ich die Statur, des Lebens ernstes Führen, Vom Mütterchen die Frohnatur und Lust zu fabulieren.")

Fig 7C_CR me in fancy clotheres

Me in fancy clothes.

What did my father do for a living? Early in his life in Vienna, where he spent a few years at the onset of World War I, he went to a technical school to learn drafting. During the war, he enlisted in the Austrian Navy, which now sounds like a joke, Austria being landlocked. However, at the time, the Austrians commanded part of the Adriatic coast and had something of a real navy. My father was assigned to a small ship and, according to a service book I still have somewhere, was once put in the brig for insubordination towards a cadet, but was also once awarded a medal. Legend has it that the medal was given because while on watch he spotted some floating objects that turned out to be casks half full of wine. After the war, he tried to work as a draftsman in the office of an Italian Jewish patent lawyer, Aldo Jarach. This didn’t last long, but they kept in touch and Jarach became my godfather. See, I had an Italian godfather! After traveling around Italy, my father settled down in Milan and sold Swedish vacuum sweepers and floor-waxing machines. He had a shop at home, where workmen repaired the machines. One of the employees built me a toy submarine, which consisted of a tube with cones soldered at the end and a propeller that was wound up by rubber bands inside. I took it to a park where there was a pond, let it go, and it sank almost immediately. No jokes about the Italian Navy, please.

Fig 9-dadski with mom

Me about 12 years old on the slopes
with mother.

I am not sure why my father moved us to Turin when I was eight, but it was certainly for business reasons. He opened a store that sold raincoats, then called “paletót” in Italian, which were still something of a novelty at the time. In the winter, he also sold ski clothing, which allowed him to take the family to Sestriere, a ski resort in the Alps near the French border. There he rented a horse-drawn sled, which he festooned with ads and paraded through the town with me on board. That part was fun, trying to learn to ski was not. I felt cold, despite the ski clothing from my father’s store, and was pretty clumsy and never learned the skill.

We lived comfortably in Turin, in an apartment house in the suburbs. It was quite spacious and modern for the day. The store must have been doing rather well and we lived a nice middle class existence. We always had a maid. My memories of Turin center on the neighborhood where we lived. Around the age of 10, I joined a small group of kids who lived nearby. There was an empty lot next door with a half-finished building. Left behind was a wooden molding used in construction, roughly in the shape of a sled. On snowy days, we dragged this up a small mound of rubbish, perhaps 10 foot high, and “sledded” down the slope. More exciting was that there was a park nearby with grassy areas bordered by metal wire. We soon learned to break this wire, which may have been 1/4 inch in diameter, into four-to-five foot lengths. There was trolley line nearby, and we left the ends of the wires on the track for a passing trolley to flatten into something like a spear head. We played with these until somebody got hurt.

Fig 5B-4th  grade diploma_sm

My second grade diploma.

Hanging on the wall of my office is a diploma I received in primary school. It says that I was awarded a Second Degree, whatever that is, in the fourth grade. The edge has a lovely design of flowers, urns, books, a lyre, a sprig of laurel leaves tied together with a ribbon with the words: “Scholarship, Work, Order, Diligence.” Prominently displayed at the top is the seal of Fascist Italy and below, in Hebrew, the words “Talmud Torah” (school) and the Star of David. The year on the diploma is 1938 and 5699 on the Jewish calendar. My teacher’s name also appears, Quinzia Amar (not that I remember her).

 

 

Chapter 2: The Last Year In Italy

Fig 6-Milan_Cathedral

Milan cathedral. Source.

First, let me recap a few facts. I was born in Milan in 1928 and lived there until I was eight, when we moved to Turin for three years. In 1939, we traveled to Genoa, intending to go to Australia. Here’s why we never got there. Our trunks were loaded onboard ship and up the gangway we went. Although we had a Polish passport as well as a valid visa to Australia, my father was soon called away and told that we couldn’t leave. The reason? The passport (not the visa) would expire ON THE WAY BACK. No matter how unlikely, the cruise line authorities didn’t want to take the chance that we could be denied entry into Australia, in which case they would have to bring us back without a valid passport. My father’s vehement arguments did not prevail and our trunks were unloaded, which is why I did not become an Aussie. My father decided to tough it out and stay in Italy, at least for a while. After three months in Genoa, we went back for a year to Milan, which was more familiar to my father. We eventually left for Ecuador in September, 1940, a few months after Italy entered the war.

In both Milan and Turin I went to a Jewish school, but I can’t say that I felt particularly Jewish before 1938. I felt quite Italian. In 1938, Italy enacted the racial laws (the Manifesto of Race), overtly because Mussolini yielded to pressure from Hitler. This condenses in one sentence a long and intricate story about how Italy went from being relatively free of anti-Semitism to having highly discriminatory laws. These laws mandated, among other things, that all the Jews who had resided in Italy for less than 20 years had to leave. By my reckoning, my father had lived there about 18 years, if that long. In addition, Jews were forbidden from holding offices or attending public schools, and were severely limited in their professions. I tell the story, without vouchsafing for the accuracy of my memory, of seeing a person on the street reading the newspaper headlines about these laws and asking: “What race are they talking about? Jews aren’t black or yellow or red.” True or not, the point is that many Italians did not think that Jews were a really distinct people. On the other hand, many Jews, especially in the professions, were hard hit. Some of my schoolteachers were ex-university professors who had lost their jobs and took on whatever work they could find to make a living. Their sentiments are well expressed by the first sentence we had to learn in our first Latin class. The teacher wrote on the board: “Homo homini lupus” (Man is a wolf to man).

Fig 6B-dadclass_replacement_sm

My Jewish grammar school class. Don't the teachers look
professorial?

Kristallnacht took place in the fall of 1938 and I am sure that my parents knew all about it. We had several relatives in Vienna who were themselves keenly aware of what was going on in Germany. In fact, my cousins Hanna and Moshe came shortly afterwards, with their parents, to Turin and stayed for a year with us. I can only surmise how far back my parents worried about Hitler, but I am reasonably sure that they kept up with the news and must have been worried all along. My father was interested in current affairs, especially as they related to the Jews. It is unthinkable that he ignored the Nazis and what was going on in the North. I assume that, like many others, he had a hard time believing that the Italian Fascists would turn on the Jews. Basically, this is why he decided to return to Milan after our Australian debacle. He was confident that in Italy “there is always a way,” by which he meant that bribery and cajoling was possible. As in all things related to their marriage, my mother was quite passive and is not likely to have had a serious role in decision-making. I imagine that my father discussed matters with her, but that she probably agreed to whatever he planned.

Fig 7-summer camp italy_sm

Jewish Summer Camp on the Adriatic. I am at the first at the
left in the front row.

My memories during our last year in Italy are more vivid. Our apartment in Milan was small, two little rooms plus kitchen and bath. My father was scared enough that he didn’t venture out into the streets much. However, I continued to go to school and don’t remember having had to take any precautions. We were frequently visited by refugees, mainly from Austria, who were also afraid to be seen on the street and who played endless chess games in the apartment. There were increasing signs that the Fascists meant to cause at least some trouble to the Jews, such as deporting them to small towns. I don't believe that there were ever concentration camps in Italy, at least until it was taken over by the Germans in 1943. In this atmosphere, the sharing of facts and rumors was a way of life for this group. This surely included knowing which consul could be bribed to grant a visa that day (the “consul de jour”) and which ports one could enter without visas. These were chiefly Tangiers, Shanghai, and the Dominican Republic, but none of these were seen as desirable destinations as one could not work there. I was well aware that the atmosphere was very tense, and that everyone was scared. Years later, when I saw the movie Casablanca, some of the café scenes struck a chord with me. On the other hand, I surely did not pay constant attention to what was going on.

I have been asked on occasion how my parents reached the decision to leave Italy, but they never discussed it openly, so I can only surmise it. At that time, my parents probably knew few people who wanted to stay in Italy and must have been swept along by the exodus they were witnessing. Business was not going to be as usual. My father surely must have known that sooner or later he would lose his store. Leaving had been a major option for over a year and at times must have seemed like the only viable one. Feeling that they had little choice must have helped overcome the energy barrier required for the resolve. There is nothing in my memory to suggest that this was a difficult conclusion to reach, although surely it must have felt like a grave and scary thing to do.

Fig 7D

My encyclopedia.

What kept me most busy at that time was reading a children’s encyclopedia (Enciclopedia dei Ragazzi), a set of 10 hefty tomes. I read it volume by volume, going from A to Z and practically memorized it. It served as the font of all sorts of loose facts that are still rattling around in my brain, especially regarding history and geography. I was not exactly studious and did only above average work at school, but had an intense passion for a mishmash of facts.

My father was something of a hero because he acted the part of the “Italian expert,” knowing the circumstances and even some of the people in the police. While we lived in Genoa, he participated in helping Jews escape by boat into France. On at least a couple of occasions, he traveled with them, which was certainly a perilous undertaking. I seem to remember that these trips were all done at night, under the cover of darkness. Knowing the language and the ways of the locals would have made my father quite helpful. I knew about these activities and was appropriately scared. On the other hand, I had the feeling that my father was invulnerable, as well as infallible, which contributed to my relative sense of calm. I had no doubt that he would pull us through, as he indeed did. This must obviously have been very helpful for my state of mind.

Fig 10-map ecuador

Where is Ecuador? Source.

Getting a visa to any place had become quite difficult as almost no country was eager to admit more Jews. I wish I could tell you that I felt distinct relief at the news that we had a visa to Ecuador, but I don’t remember it. My father came home and told us that we were finally leaving and that he didn’t really know where Ecuador was (or cared much at that point). I piped up that it was on the West Coast of South America and that the capital was Quito (pronounced in Italian “kweeto,” rather than the Spanish “keeto”). Unlike in Germany, Jews were permitted to leave Italy taking both possessions and money. Our possessions were packed in a big wooden crate the size of a small room. For some reason, the crates were referred to as “lifts,” don’t ask me why. Into our lift went some of our furniture, rugs, down-filled comforters, and nine of the ten volumes of the encyclopedia. I could not part with all of them, so I carried one, I don’t recall which, with me in a small green suitcase all the way to Quito. Does this mean that my database is skewed towards certain letters of the alphabet? Incredibly, the “lift” not only arrived in Quito but also got there at about the expected time. When you think about its tortuous path, this seems miraculous indeed. Shortly after we arrived there, I found that I had outgrown the encyclopedia (or is it that I had it just about memorized?) Eventually, we sold the whole set, without regrets.

I remember having friends in Turin but don’t recall any in my final year in Milan. I also have only sparse memories of our last few days there. We must have taken a train to Genoa in order to sail to Barcelona but I don’t recall this or the process of packing and leaving the apartment. Most likely, there were no unexpected events to impress me. I wish I could tell you that I was happy to leave, as surely I must have been, but I cannot base it on actual recollections. We left in September, 1940. I was twelve and one half years old.

I went back to Italy nineteen years later and have returned several times since. In 1959, my late wife Barbara and I were spending a two-year sojourn in Copenhagen. We traveled extensively to many places in Europe, including a major trip to Italy. I purposefully left going to my native city, Milan, to the end. The reason is that I wanted to just enjoy the sights on the rest of the trip whereas going to Milan would be a personal pilgrimage and I didn’t want to mix the two. Sure enough, my godfather, Aldo Jarach, was still alive there. I contacted him and we had a lovely lunch with him and his wife.

Fig 3-Castello-Sforzesco3

Milan’s Sforza Castle Source.

Memories of my life in Milan came back to me on this visit. For the first eight years of my life, we had lived in an apartment in a three or four story building very close to the center of the city. I remembered it, including the address. Barbara and I found ourselves in the main square of the city, the Piazza del Duomo, and I told her that I was quite sure I could find my way to the old house. As we walked on a wide street coming off at an angle from the square, I recalled that there had been a theater on the other side of the street, which used to have a live lion in a cage in the window. Sure enough, there was a movie house albeit sans lion. We walked on and I remembered that there would be a Y in the road and that we had to go to the right, which indeed proved to be Via Cesare Correnti. As we came nearer to No. 8, we found that instead of a house, there was a big space there. I tried to find out what had happened by poking my head into shops in the adjacent houses, which were in good shape. Somebody told me that my house had been bombed out, one of the few to suffer such a fate in that neighborhood. The person I was talking to said that she had moved in recently and didn’t know much about what had happened, but she thought that the son of the old concierge was still living nearby. She sent somebody to find him and, sure enough, a man in his mid-forties showed up. He was blind, his eyelids open and his eyeball facing upwards. No sooner had he come up to us and heard me say “hello” than he blurted out: “But you are Elio!” (Ma Lei é Elio!) I had been eight years old when we left that house. He then told me where our apartment had been, that I played in the courtyard with a girl called Anna Maria, that I had wanted to become a naval engineer. I could barely hold my tears back yet we couldn’t find much we could talk about, so we left. Twenty-three years had passed since I had lived in Via Cesare Correnti No. 8.

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Ch. 19 Mushrooms and Me & Ch. 20 My Family

Chapter 19: Mushrooms and Me

In my 40’s, I acquired a hobby, looking for and studying wild mushrooms. This became a serious avocation, enough to make me want to write a book, “In The Company of Mushrooms”, which was published by Harvard University Press in 1997. Why not share bits of its prologue and epilogue?  Somehow, bringing up a nearly lifetime hobby feels like a good way to end these memoirs.

Prologue: The Hunt

Like most people, I first got interested in wild mushrooms with eating in mind. I was tantalized by the prospect of being able to gather specimens of rare taste scarcely available by other means. I still delight in foraging for edible species, but my horizons have expanded as I have discovered that there is more to mushroom hunting than just looking for those that are good to eat. By now, I have become convinced that a mushroom collector searching only for provisions for the table would be comparable to a bird watcher looking only for quail, ducks, or pheasants. Going on a mushroom walk fulfills all sorts of other yearnings besides the gratification of foraging for natural food. I am excited by the zest of the hunt, challenged by the demands of identification, pleased by the encounter with species that have a special meaning to me, and charmed by especially handsome specimens.

A blue mushroom with a brilliantly purple underside.

Lactarius indigo (Wikipedia).

Mushrooms, growing on the ground or sticking out from tree trunks as brackets, seem to color the motif of the forest. Many mushrooms are lovely to look at, varied in hue and shape, smell and texture. As resplendent as flowers, they present us with a range of shades, from forceful brights to subdued pastels. The shiny, lacquer box red of certain bracket fungi, the violet of the eastern Cortinarius iodes, the royal blue of Lactarius indigo, or even the spotless white of deadly amanitas feast the eye of the passerby.

When I lived in Boston, I enjoyed mushroom collecting in the collegiality of a few fellow devotees. Picking wild mushrooms is not the common occupation in North America that it is in most parts of the world where mushrooms can be found in abundance. Still, this is a growth industry: more and more people are getting into mushrooming, especially in northern California and the Pacific Northwest. Because of the abundant rainfall and extensive forests, these are some of the best picking regions on this continent. There seems to be a great deal of latent interest elsewhere as well; I find that laymen, people who never expressed the urge to look for wild mushrooms before, often respond to my passion with curiosity.

A tall white mushroom with some brown spots on its head, growing out of tree-roots.

The Destroying Angel, Amanita virosa. (Wikipedia).

I am often asked if I have ever been in trouble from eating mushrooms. The questions seem to arise mainly from curiosity, but occasionally there is also concern. Some people worry about me, perhaps from an ingrained belief that eating from the wild is a reckless thing to do, akin to keeping poisonous snakes or tarantulas in the house. Many others, however, are truly interested in the topic and ask me, sometimes insistently, to include them in a future mushroom hunt. Often, I am told of grandparents, usually of European or Asian origin, who used to pick wild mushrooms both here and in the old country and who tried to teach this art to their grandchildren, usually with little success.

In many ways, mushroom hunting is very much like another that tends to attract avid followers, namely, bird watching. Both call for a love of the outdoors, considerable zeal, and the ability to put up with frustration. In my mind, however, there are advantages to mushrooming. First of all, the specimens don’t fly away; you don’t have to be quiet to have a successful hunt; and you need not fear aerial bombardment. On the other hand, starting out on the path of identification is harder for mushroomers than for birders, one reason being that the novice begins with a smaller base of reference. Every fledgling bird watcher knows that sparrows are songbirds, sea gulls shorebirds, and hawks raptors. Most people are more limited when it comes to identifying mushrooms and may be able to discern only that a specimen is of the cap and stem variety, a puffball, or a bracket fungus.

Once hooked, however, mushroom hunters pursue their avocation with enthusiasm, some with an intense passion. They sometimes talk about mushrooms in a charged, nearly poetic language. Here are the words of Larry Stickney, a San Francisco mushroom lover: “Early in the season, hunting in the cool, magnificent redwood forests can produce both many choice edible mushrooms and an exquisite sense of beauty, tranquility, and exultation from the deep silence and sheer size of the trees. Right next to a thousand-year-old, three hundred foot giant, you can find tiny, fragile, elegant Lepiotas, Mycenas, which can set your sense of proportion and perspective atingle.”

A round golden-brown mushroom, in green grass.

Porcini (Boletus edulis), highly prized for its taste.
(Amazon).

My sentiments exactly. I wrote this book to share such sentiments for the hunt, for nature, for biology. My expectation is that by telling you stories about mushrooms and the people who study and enjoy them, you too will share my enthusiasm.

Mushrooms surprise us in many ways. Do they in fact burst forth like mushrooms? Are they friend or foe? All of us know that some mushrooms are food, some are poison, and some alter the mind, but many are not aware of the essential role they play in the perpetuation of life on earth. The study of mushrooms is not an unassuming subject. Each encounter with a mushroom is a singular event. Every specimen makes demands of me: Do I know it, and, if not, should I collect it and try to find out what it is? Should I bring it home for the kitchen? Am I to share it with fellow mushroomers? Should I photograph it, sketch it? Should I guess how long it’s been around, how long it will last, whether or not it will come back the next week or the next year? What role does this particular species play in human affairs? Has it, or one of its relatives, been used for food, or, in malevolent hands, for poisoning someone? Was it used for altering the mind, for understanding the present, for divining the future?

In this book I present mushrooms as more than a source of food, even though I find that an interesting and rewarding matter. I am intrigued by how mushrooms have been viewed through time and by different cultures. As a biologist, I find the ways they grow and reproduce unique and fascinating. As a lover of nature, I am fascinated by the different niches in which mushrooms and other forms of fungi are found. Ants and termites, for example, have evolved an intriguing

interdependence with fungal life. And, lastly, I have found that the people who share my hobby are second in interest only to the mushrooms themselves.

 

Epilogue: The Biologist as Mushroom Hunter

During a vacation taken while I was just putting the finishing touches on this book, my wife Edith and I were walking a trail near Oregon’s Crater Lake. She pointed out to me a small collection of mushrooms that were growing out of a shallow snowbank. Edith’s ability to spot mushrooms is legendary in our household but finding them in this habitat seemed unusual. The specimens were respectable in size, about an inch across the cap and two inches tall, rosy pink in color, and covered with a shiny layer of slimy material. Baby mushrooms were still entirely encased in the snow. I identified the specimens as belonging to the wax caps (Hygrophorus goetzii), a species that is one of the few known to grow in snowbanks.

Two pink mushrooms sprouting from a hole in a snowbank.

The Snow Bank Mushroom (Hygrophorus goetzii)
(Mykoweb)

The realization that life can be sustained at unexpected extremes of temperature has generated much excitement among biologists. Life at high temperatures has generally attracted more attention than that in the cold. Bacteria have been found growing at temperatures as high as 113˚ Centigrade, about 23˚ Fahrenheit above the boiling temperature of water at sea level. Obviously, for water to reach such high temperatures without boiling, it must be under high pressure, such as is found in the depths of the ocean. How can life exist, and even thrive, at such extreme conditions?

Few answers are available to date. It turns out, however, that these “extremophiles” are not just a biological curiosity. They have industrial applications as well. The enzymes of these organisms are themselves resistant to high temperatures and can be expected to be employed in a variety of technological processes. One of these enzymes is used in the reaction that amplifies DNA, known as “polymerase chain reaction,” or PCR, a technique that is now used for Covid-19 testing. This particular enzyme, a DNA polymerase, is derived from a bacterium isolated from a hot spring at Yellowstone Park.  Our view of what we call extreme conditions is anthropocentric. Any circumstance that we ourselves cannot tolerate is considered extreme. It takes bacteria, mushrooms, and other fungi to show us that this is a parochial view of life.

On the hike with my wife, I had no way to measure the highest temperature to which the mushrooms were exposed in the snowbank. It may well have risen above freezing in their vicinity, at least for short times. However, cold these specimens were. Perhaps the slimy layer that surrounded the specimens served as their antifreeze. It may not be a coincidence that many mushrooms that grow at low temperatures are in fact slimy. Whatever the mechanism, ours was an unexpected sight. I felt reassured that, given such prowess at survival in an unfriendly environment, mushrooms are probably here to stay.

Just as I started it, I end this book on a personal note. I have known all along that the subject of mushrooms is a rich one, as our discovery of the mushrooms in the snowbank illustrates, but I have nevertheless been surprised as this book unfolded that there is so much to write about it. As I was working, more and more interesting material kept appearing. Sometimes this was in the form of stories, either discovered in books or told to me; sometimes it was experiences of my own that came to mind. I ended up reaping a greater harvest than I had expected, for which I am obviously glad.

I am a microbiologist by profession, now near the completion of my career. When I collect and study mushrooms, however, I do not act as a professional biologist. Most of what I love about mushrooms and how they fit in people’s lives is far remote from my research and teaching. My life in science has been spent at the laboratory bench: I study how bacteria make their DNA as they grow. I am of the generation that witnessed the beginning of molecular biology and its offspring, genetic engineering. It was only after my career was established that I stepped into the world of forests, pastures, and mushrooms.

The distance between these two interests—microbiology and mushrooms—may not appear to be very fundamental to a non-scientist, but it is in fact quite considerable. It is true that biology is biology, in the sense that the basic question is always the same—What is life?—but at the level at which we participate in the profession of biology there are marked differences in attitude between those who study living things in the field and those who work in laboratories.

This gap is of recent origin—it was unknown until the nineteenth century—and, happily, it gives signs of closing. On the one hand, biologists who study the evolution of living things and their place in the environment are coming into the laboratory to take advantage of modern molecular tools. On the other hand, those who study the functions of living cells have found great opportunities in probing the wondrous diversity of the natural world. The rift between the field worker and the lab worker, in the questions they ask and the attitudes they convey, is narrowing, and we can welcome the fact that biology is reemerging as a unified science. It is worth noting that the “history” in “natural history” is derived from the Greek word for “learning by inquiry,” which today we would name “science.”

For most of my professional life, however, the distinction between “field biology” and “laboratory biology” was quite substantial. My colleagues seemed content to study one or two kinds of bacteria under laboratory conditions and only rarely seemed concerned with the “real world.” The view has been put forth that different personalities are attracted to the two approaches to biology. To overstate the point, the “naturalists” are seen as more caring, more accepting of their role as stewards of living things, whereas the “experimentalists” are thought to be more analytical, interested mainly in how things work.

That’s the theory, at least. I have always had a hard time with this notion because it seemed, at best, to describe people at the extremes. I feel that I straddled these two worlds. Strange as it may sound, I have developed, if not a love, at least a personal closeness to the bacteria I study. The strains I have worked with are, by and large, harmless to people. To me, they are living things, not just bags of enzymes and DNA. They are, in other words, as alive to me as mushrooms are—and as trees and animals are. So, is the jump from the lab bench to the woodland glade as big as all that? In both places one can find, or make, the opportunity to study nature, to experience life, and it is my hope that this book will lead you at least part of the way toward that end.

 

Chapter 20: My Family

I wrote about my parents in chapters 1 and 2 of these memoirs. You can read about my first wife Barbara in Chapter 13 and 18, and my current one, Edith, in Chapter 18. Here I write briefly about the rest of our families, both mine and Edith’s.

My two children are Judith and John. Neither is married and both are childless, thus I have no grandkids on that side. Judith is a highly renowned stained glass artist. She has pieces in major museums, including the Smithsonian, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, London ‘s Victoria and Albert, Saint Petersburgh’s Hermitage, and many others. She lives in Philadelphia, where she teaches in several art schools. She not only practices art, but also thinks about it in insightful and philosophical terms. Parental modesty aside, I am, of course, immensely proud of her. Besides her talents, she is captivatingly unpretentious and caring.

A red stained-glass piece with a dying unicorn in the lap of a sad, crowned man, against a backdrop of animals, leaves, and two brilliantly colored mandalas.

Judith’s "My One Desire”, stained glass. 52″ × 35″, 2007.
Private collection.

Judith, wearing a black blouse and a necklace, at a gallery with some of her stained glass pieces.

Judith.

















John, swinging from a metal structure like monkey bars, over a river.  In the bottom right, there is a 'Savage Race' logo inscribed with 'Boston 07.13.19'

John in action.

I am equally proud of my son John, who is a sensitive and thoughtful individual. For some 30 years, he has worked at the Boston Zoo, where he lovingly prepares the food for the animals (which makes him an essential worker). He is also an avid and highly competent rock climber and obstacle competitor, both outdoors and in gyms. To know him is to like and admire him.

My near family is rounded up by two cousins in Israel.  Hanna Engelberg-Kulka who is, of all things, also a microbiologist. She is an eminent and bemedaled professor at the Medical School in Jerusalem. Her brother Moshe is retired from being the prominent hernia surgeon in Israel. He and his wife Henia have two daughters, Sharon Nachmani who is a psychotherapist specializing in anorexia and a lecturer at the University of Haifa, and Orit Engelberg, a curator of Jewish Heritage who is currently writing her PhD thesis on the Environmental History of the Dead Sea.

Edith, curled up on a couch, wearing a robe, reading a book.

Edith at ease.

The tiny size of my side of the family is made up by Edith’s. She has 3 children, each with 3 children of their own.  But it stops there. At time of writing (in 2020), we have only 2 great-grandchildren, so there will be no geometric progression (27 great-grandchildren would be some handful!). Edith’s oldest, Tom, lives in the Washington, D.C. area, and so does her youngest, Steven. The middle one, Jeanny, is in Los Angeles, so she and her kids are the ones we see most often. I have bonded nicely with all of them, but of course this is a work in progress. Geographic distance does not make this easy, neither does the pandemic. But all of them are lovable people, exceptionally smart and accomplished. I claim that they take after me!

A family photo with seven people, one of whom is a baby on his grandmother's lap.

Tom and his family. (front to back) Grandson Eitan,
wife Pam and Tom, son Josh and his wife Zahvi, son
David, daughter Rebecca.

A curly-haired toddler in pajamas holding a baby in pajamas on his lap.

Our great-grandchildren Eitan and Raya.

A family picture with two daughters and a son and their mother.

Jeanny and her family. Daughters Arielle and Zoe and
son Daniel. Jeanny on the right.

A family photo: a mom in academic regalia, a dad, two daughters (one teenaged, one seven or eight) and a son (also teenaged).

Steven and his family. Daughters Erin and Mia,
Steven, wife Monique, son Amit.







































One Last Word: My Life in the Social Media

For the last 10 years or so, I have had a new career, if you can call it that. I have been involved in a blog and a podcast. The blog, Small Things Considered, was mentioned already in Chapter 18. I share it with some most capable colleagues, Roberto Kolter, Christoph Weigel, Janie Kim, and Daniel Haeusser.  This blog continues to grow strong and has a steady and varied readership. We state: “The purpose of this blog is to share our appreciation for the width and depth of the microbial activities on this planet. We will emphasize the unusual and the unexpected phenomena for which we have a special fascination.” I get a tremendous pleasure from digging into beguiling, sometimes remote  comers of the microbial world.

The podcast, This Week in Microbiology, is run by a most proficient podcastmaster, Vincent Racaniello (a master of the trade, he has 4 or 5 other such endeavors) plus Michael Schmidt and Michelle Swanson. It’s a lot like discussing paper over a beer with good friends. I also enjoy this greatly, even without the beer.

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