As Jews, their families left Russia to escape the poverty and the antisemitism.
From Martin Lewis Perl
My parents were determined to move into the middle class.
A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.
The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.
This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.
They wanted me to play more sports because they were acutely sensitive to their children being one hundred percent American, and they believed that all Americans played sports and loved sports.
I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.
It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.
2 perspectives
1 perspectives