Stargazing in the Atomic Age: Essays

by Anne Goldman

Overview

A Kirkus Best Book of the Year

During World War II, with apocalypse imminent, a group of well-known Jewish scientists and artists sidestepped despair by challenging themselves to solve some of the most difficult questions posed by our age. Many had just fled Europe. Others were born in the United States to immigrants who had escaped Russia’s pogroms. Alternately celebrated as mavericks and dismissed as eccentrics, they trespassed the boundaries of their own disciplines as the entrance to nations slammed shut behind them.

In Stargazing in the Atomic Age, Anne Goldman interweaves personal and intellectual history in exuberant essays that cast new light on these figures and their virtuosic thinking. In lyric, lucent sentences that dance between biography and memoir as they connect innovation in science with achievement in the arts, Goldman yokes the central dramas of the modern age with the brilliant thinking of earlier eras. Here, Einstein plays Mozart to align mathematical principle with the music of the spheres and Rothko paints canvases whose tonalities echo the stark prose of Genesis. Nearby, Bellow evokes the dirt and dazzle of the Chicago streets, while upon the heels of World War II, Chagall illuminates stained glass no less buoyant than the effervescent notes of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

In these essays, Goldman reminds readers that Jewish history offers as many illustrations of accomplishment as of affliction. At the same time, she gestures toward the ways in which experiments in science and art that defy partisanship can offer us inspiration during a newly divisive era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820358444
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	01/15/2021
Series:	Georgia Review Books
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

ANNE GOLDMAN's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Tin House, the Guardian, the Georgia Review, the Gettsyburg Review, and the Southwest Review, among other venues. Her essays have been named as notable in Best American Essays, Best American Science and Nature Writing, and the Best American Travel Writing. Nominated for a National Magazine Award, she is the recipient of fellowships from the Ahmanson/Getty Foundation and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She is a professor of English at Sonoma State University.

Editorial Reviews

In celebration of postwar Jewish-American experience and achievement, Goldman brings a keen-eyed sympathy to her indomitable subjects.

author of The Life of Saul Bellow - Zachary Leader

Powerful [and] wildly successful ... shimmers with so much truth, it stops one in their tracks. Goldman engages each of her subjects with an exceptional deftness, alacrity, and energy.

Jewish Book Council - Juli Berwald

Anne Goldman's exhilarating essays show, among many other things, that the most convincing way to write about history and culture is to write from a unique personal perspective. These essays shine a bright light on each of their subjects—scientists, writers, artists, musicians—while the character of the author shines brightly from the page.

Edward Mendelson

In these essays, Anne Goldman identifies nine holy sparks—Jewish thinkers who do no less than anchor contemporary science and culture. Grounding her contemplation of the myriad forms genius can take is a father, who, like the stars in her essays, shrugged off a world into which he did not fit, ignoring the crippling self-pity that dooms innovation of all kinds. Via synthesis, analogy, and metaphor, Goldman’s agile mind moves between ideas about the complexities of being human in keeping with the ones my father, Saul Bellow, packed into his novels.

author of Saul Bellow’s Heart - Gregory Bellow

This is a Book of Wonders. Initially a study of Jewish intellectual influence as represented by a handful of great men, its heart is a story of a young Jewish girl whose indomitable spirit and radiant, hungry intelligence will not be deterred from meeting the world in its full particularities. Part autobiography, part biography, it is in every part a stunningly researched inquisition into cultural formation and cultural inheritance. From Einstein to Mozart, from Rothko to Rhapsody in Blue, Stargazing serves as a matrix of matrices, following threads of ancient Judaic traditions as they manifest in modern music, literature, and science. With an almost cosmic pursuit of tangent and a core belief in trans-generational correspondence, Goldman has given us a true tale of diversity, one tuned to our precise American moment: It’s a glorious encomium to the children (and grandchildren) of immigrants.

author of The Blue Absolute and Flowers & Sky: Two Talks - Aaron Shurin

From Saul Bellow to Marc Chagall, Goldman offers a tour de force of Jewish accomplishment, an unapologetic correction to the narrative of agony, and a lesson on how to press on with light in the face of darkness.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Charles Dunst

★ 2020-12-16
The efflorescence of energy and creativity in Jewish communities in the traumatic 20th century is celebrated in these sparkling essays on Jewish intellectuals.

Goldman explores the lives and works of modern Jewish scientists, artists, composers, and writers, putting them in the context of the war, persecution, and migration to America, which shaped their lives and the larger Western culture in which they were rooted. She probes Einstein’s love of Mozart’s music; the kvetching vigor of the Hebrews as they journey out of Egypt in the book of Exodus; the restless, questioning mindset of Jewish scientists who helped develop the atom bomb; the love-hate relationship of painters Marc Chagall and Mark Rothko with the soulful yet blighted Russian homeland they fled; the resonances between Dante’s vision of hell in The Divine Comedy and Primo Levi’s memoirs of his imprisonment in Auschwitz; the exuberance and vitality of novelist Saul Bellow’s Jewish protagonists; and the strange beauty of fractal equations discovered by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. Throughout the collection, she reminisces about her raucous family, especially her exuberant, exasperating father, Mike, a Harvard public health professor, whom she compares to physicist Richard Feynman for his gleeful iconoclasm in puncturing the pretensions of upper-crust WASPs. Goldman’s essays effervesce with unexpected discursions into everything from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to the art of emergency auto repairs; from this erudition, she retrieves unexpected but insightful relationships, wrapping it all in gorgeously evocative prose. (Hymning the indelible opening of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, she writes, “The clarinet’s chromatic rush up the scale is American as a slide into home plate and Jewish as a village wedding dance, a Fifth Avenue strut with a swashbuckling nudge and wink, a street whistle that deepens into expressiveness as the music climbs upward: the melancholy brightness of klezmer stretched around the swagger of jazz.”) The result is an absorbing excavation of the Jewish experience.

A beguiling meditation on Jewish achievements that shine brightly against a dark background.

Kirkus Reviews