The Age of Radiance (13 page)

T
he phone call Enrico and Laura were waiting for that night of November 10, 1938, would affirm his decision to abandon their relatives, their friends, their heritage, the Eternal City, which Laura loved with such a passion, their extremely comfortable life, and the whole of their worldly possessions (including a lemon-yellow Peugeot Bébé convertible with celluloid windows and a hand crank for emergency start-ups, which were frequent). The family would immediately flee, as resident aliens, to the United States. Laura’s most significant previous American experience had been in joining her husband when he taught summer school in Michigan, and regardless of the many charms of Ann Arbor, it was not Rome. During one visit coinciding with America’s Prohibition, the university’s chemistry department had to bury the alcohol it used for experiments to keep it from being stolen and drunk. Enrico, however, regularly discussed emigrating to the USA. Coming back
from one semester accompanied by the Swiss physicist Felix Bloch, the two noted how superior the Burma Shave billboards in Michigan had been compared to Mussolini’s Fascist exhortations along the Roman highways.

But that was one of the few jovial moments outside the lab. In 1936, a month after Hitler occupied the Rhineland, Enrico thought it prudent to supply each member of his family with a gas mask. He wasn’t being fearful, just pragmatic. Nella Fermi:
“For the most part, my father had very little to do with us when we were children, and I think it’s too simple to say that he was too busy with his work and that he had no time for my brother and me. I think he was certainly absorbed in his work, but beyond that, he was a man of reason, and he was a physicist through and through. And he could not relate to us on an emotional level, so it wasn’t until we were old enough (and I quote from him) ‘to talk to’ that he could approach us, and that he could approach us on his own level. With adult hindsight I am convinced that it wasn’t that he lacked emotions but that he lacked the ability to express them.”

Depending on the phone call, Laura and her children would immediately be deserting the culture and refinement of Europe, the magnificence of Rome, and a life of wealth and status, for some backwoods of hillbillies on the other side of the globe. A third-generation Italian cosmopolite, Sra. Fermi felt she could never fit in over there. Her English was rudimentary schoolgirl; her husband’s came from reading Jack London novels. He loved everything about America. She thought otherwise.

Signore Fermi met Signorina Capon when he was twenty-two, and already so prominent as to hold a professorship. She was a mere sixteen. It was a Sunday in the spring of 1924, and a group of friends were taking the air in the countryside of suburban Rome, in a meadow adjoining the fork where the Aniene meets the Tiber. He was dressed in a black suit and black bowler, still in mourning over the death of his mother; yet, he decided that they should all play soccer.

Two years later, the Capons were planning to spend the summer in Chamonix, the French resort shaded by Mont Blanc. But Mussolini’s new monetary policy kept them from being able to get any francs on the foreign exchange, and even Laura’s father, an officer in the Italian navy, could not overcome this setback. Friends recommended the Dolomites instead, and they arrived to find many of Laura’s school chums there for the season, including that acquaintance Enrico Fermi, who was now living with his father, Alberto, and sister, Maria, in Città Giardino, a new suburb reserved for civil servants—Alberto worked for the railroads and sang Verdi arias during
his morning shave—not far from that meadow where Enrico and Laura first met.

On his arrival, Fermi immediately arranged for the group to make a series of hikes and climbs, always using his thumb to measure distances, both on maps and in real life. His great passion besides physics was mountain hiking, and this seemingly odd mix of scholar and athlete would be common among his peers. Niels Bohr was both a famed soccer player in his youth and a Ping-Pong champion as an adult, while Werner Heisenberg spent his lifetime downhill racing, at one point being clocked at an alarming fifty miles an hour. Physicist Valentine Telegdi:
“Fermi was completely devoted to physics, and his whole existence centered around it. He appeared to have very few outside interests such as literature or the fine arts. He engaged in sports, e.g., in mountaineering and tennis, but one often got the impression that it was all for
mens sana in corpore sano
—i.e., to be in the best physical condition for doing physics; it must be added that in sports as well as in parlor games (which he occasionally organized in his home) he liked to win, being fiercely competitive [though he] was totally secure in his own physics talent and almost never displayed jealousy of another. The only exception, as one of his students recalls, was Einstein. More than once Fermi expressed annoyance at the attention Einstein received from the press.” Laura Fermi: “One day that summer I asked Fermi to quiz me and see if I was well prepared for the approaching exam on the two-year physics course. We were at Ostia, and Fermi was sitting cross-legged on the sand, in his bathing-suit, which came up almost to his neck. As he quizzed me, his usual grin faded and his lips tightened. In the end he said: ‘I am sorry, Miss Capon, but you don’t understand a thing.’ What an encouragement!”

Fermi told his friends that the woman of his dreams would be tall, athletic, blond, with ancestors from the countryside and no thoughts of religion—practically the opposite of Laura, who was descended from urban Romans for many generations, unathletic, and relentlessly brunette. Laura:
“Fermi had always said he wanted to do something really exciting and outstanding. Either buy a car or get a wife. So when he bought a car I was a little disappointed, although I didn’t have any real idea of getting married. But then he was more extravagant and got both a car and a wife. . . . I remember a sense of not even knowing whether he had asked me to marry him or whether he was posing a theoretical question of what would happen if I got married to somebody and he at the same time would get married to somebody else.”

On July 19, 1928, they were wed, honeymooning in the Alps, hiking through the shadows of the Matterhorn, which Enrico thought was a perfect opportunity to turn Laura into a physicist . . . but when she refused to accept the mathematical proof that light was electromagnetic radiation of waves and particles, he gave up. Together, though, they wrote a physics textbook for Italian secondary schools, which brought the family income during their lean salad years. Laura:
“The next winter was the coldest on record in Rome and we began talking of storm windows. Fermi pulled out his slide rule, calculated the effects of drafts on the inside temperatures, misplaced the decimal point, and we froze all winter.”

Fermi had wanted to leave Italy ever since the government had passed the Manifesto della Razza on July 14, 1938—the Italian version of the Nazis’ Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which prevented Jews from government jobs and meant that, as European higher education was civil service, the Universities of Berlin and Frankfurt had, overnight, lost a third of their professors. Though Fermi and the children were Catholic, Laura was Jewish. As a result of the new decrees, Laura’s father, practically of Roman nobility from his decades in the navy, was dismissed from active duty and placed on reserve. Even so, Laura was convinced that the Razza was a minor legal kerfuffle, a temporary annoyance. Italy’s 1870 nationalist movement had freed Jews from the ghettos and given them full equality; they were now so few in number and so thoroughly assimilated that they were practically invisible. A third of them were Fascist Party members; Mussolini’s own mistress was Jewish. Just after the law was announced, Laura overheard one man on the street ask another,
“Now they are sending away the Jews. But, who are the Jews?” Mussolini received a telegram from a Sicilian mayor: “Re: Anti-Semitic Campaign. Send specimen so we can start campaign.”

But Fermi clearly knew the history behind these laws. When astronomers confirmed Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity on November 7, 1919, Berlin’s
Illustrierte Zeitung
transformed its entire front page into his photograph, calling his ideas “on a par with insights of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton.” But by February of 1930, students interrupted his lectures, with one screaming,
“I’m going to cut the throat of that dirty Jew.” On August 24, 1930, Nazi scientists Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark held the first meeting of the Working Group of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure Science at Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall, attacking relativity as “Jewish physics” and Einstein as a plagiarist and charlatan.
Einstein attended, watching from a private box, saying nothing. He was eventually compelled to renounce his German citizenship for a second time and leave for England, and then Princeton. When he arrived in New York harbor on October 17, 1933, he was smuggled ashore in a tugboat to ensure his safety. Three months later, he was spending a night at the White House with the Roosevelts. After the 1935 Nuremberg decrees, gangs regularly gathered outside his Berlin home to scream insults about “Jewish physics,” and a magazine included him on a list of enemies of the state—with the notation
“not yet hanged”—and a $5,000 bounty promised to his successful assassin.

Knowing all this, while the Fermis returned to vacation in the Dolomites that summer of 1938, Enrico had written to four American universities that had previously offered him posts, vaguely explaining that his earlier reasons for not accepting were no longer in effect. He then mailed these letters from four different towns to avoid suspicion and received five offers, accepting Columbia’s. In his follow-up letter to the school’s dean on September 4, he explained the precautions needed to leave Axis Rome and tried to help other
ragazzi Corbino
reach safe harbor:

For reasons that you can easily understand however, I should like to leave Italy, without giving the feeling that this is due to political reasons. I could manage this much more easily if you could write me officially to teach at Columbia through the Italian Embassy in the U.S. Of course you need no mention, or stress, in this request, that it would be a permanent appointment.

In order to get a non-quota visa for myself and my family, I should need besides an official letter from Columbia stating that I am appointed as professor and mentioning the salary. In case that you cannot write me through the Embassy, please send me only this second letter. And in any case please do not give unnecessary publicity to this matter until the situation in Italy is finally settled.

I shall take the opportunity that I am writing to you from Belgium, in order to give to you some information about the situation of the Italian physicists that have lost their positions on account of racial reasons.

They are Emilio Segrè, whom you already know. He is now at Berkeley and has, so far as I know, a small research fellowship for one year from the University of California. I don’t think that I need to inform you about his scientific work.

Bruno Rossi, formerly professor at the University of Padova (married with no children; age about 32). He is one of our best young physicists, his work on the cosmic radiation is probably known to you. He has lately acquired some experience on high tension work, since he had built in Padova a one million volt Cockroft Walton outfit, that was just now being tested.

Giulio Racah, formerly professor at Pisa (not married; age about 30). He has a very extensive knowledge of theoretical physics. Has published many papers on atomic physics and quantum theory; in particular he has obtained independently and published only a few days after Heitler and Bethe equivalent results on the theory of the emission of high energy gamma rays from cosmic ray electrons colliding against nuclei.

Enrico then notified the Fascist government that he was planning a six-month visit to New York, and he would be accompanied by his family. He had to use all of his influence to keep his wife and children’s Italian passports secure. The Americans, meanwhile, were so impressed by his stature that even the family maid was approved for a visa.

There was, however, an unresolved practical matter. At an industry conference in Copenhagen that fall, Niels Bohr had taken Fermi aside to reveal he was on the Nobel short list. Before the rise of Hitler, laureates were never informed in advance, but the Swedish Academy had then seen scientists living under dictatorships get harassed and attacked for the prize and wanted to make sure that Fermi wouldn’t be embarrassed by it. He would in fact be embarrassed, but additionally if the Fermis returned to Italy with his Nobel winnings and then left the country, the family would only be allowed to take fifty dollars with them. Enrico decided that if he won, Laura and the children would accompany him to Stockholm for the ceremony, and then they would leave directly for a Southampton sailing to New York. Even considering the generous terms of the award, they would still be abandoning an extremely comfortable life in Rome. In May of 1938, for one example, baby Giulio and the housekeeper, out to get some fresh air in the park, had come across Il Duce taking the sun with Hitler.