Eighty-Seven Birthdays

Some Paragraphs About My Favorite Subject

   My last birthday in Heidelberg, the terminus a quo, was on February 12, 1939, my twelfth.  It took place, uncelebrated, in a house denuded of the furnishings that had been stowed into so-called lifts for shipment to New York.  Number 13, in New York, was the overture to my Bar Mitzvah at a rump German-Jewish congregation that assembled every Sabbath in the Audubon Theater where, much later, Malcolm X was murdered.  I was a star performer, chanting much more than required, singing out in a way that foreshadowed my later quasi-career singing in various choruses.  My presents: altogether $13 in cash from various people plus a few fairly useless items.  While I, ignorant of relevant customs, had no expectations, my mother, with European practices in mind, was furious at what she took to be the stinginess of our relatives.  (Inflation has made today’s equivalent sound more generous, since those thirteen dollars would now come to more than two hundred.)

   Some people sensibly stay put for most of their lives, at least after college.  Not me. I hope the following overview will not be too boring.

   While I did not permanently leave New York until almost exactly twenty years after arriving, that stretch of birthdays, to 1959, was twice interrupted—for one of them in the US Navy, aboard ship in the China Sea, while the next birthday away from New York, #24, took place in Paris, a way station during  my close friend Carl Hovde’s and my travels in Europe on fellowships from Columbia College.

   Nor did I go through graduate school—also at Columbia, starting in 1951—without interruption, since I had two birthdays while I was a “fellow” at Mortimer Adler’s Institute for Philosophical Research in San Francisco.  The work we did there left no discernable mark on philosophical or any other scholarship, but living in San Francisco induced a strong desire in Fannia and me to return there if it were at all possible.  

   And possible it turned out to be. After receiving my PhD in 1959, a couple of months after I turned 32, and with the help of friends we had made at San Francisco State, I became an assistant professor there.  The trip that summer, leaving New York and Columbia for the West, was a veritable second Bar Mitzvah.  Since I was a freshman at Columbia until I got my last degree, I saw myself regarded as “good old Rudy,” never knowing what my professors really thought of my work.  “Today I am a man” is the cliché opening of the Bar Mitzvah speech.  You get the idea.

    Our happy San Francisco stint was pleasantly interrupted by a Guggenheim in Florence, the locus of my 38^th birthday; but it ended, alas, some months after my 41^st.  I will not give an account of the “time of troubles” at SF State; books have been written about those unhappy years.  Suffice it to say that I felt caught on the horns of a dilemma.  I was unable to disengage myself from the College’s stormy politics (as departmental chair, Senate member, part of an ineffectual president’s kitchen cabinet, and, at night, as haranguer of students to stay out of the way of tactical police) and stick to just teaching my classes.  But I was also gloomily pessimistic about the outcome of those ugly clashes.  Getting out from under, we left SF State and, sadly, San Francisco.

   My 42^nd through 47^th birthdays were spent in Poughkeepsie, teaching at Vassar, one year excepted, when we lived in Oxford on a sabbatical augmented by a fellowship.  But after #48 came a radical change.  In 1974 I became arts and sciences dean at Northwestern, beginning a career as administrator, thirteen years as dean and two further ones as provost at the University of Pittsburgh.  My last birthday as administrator, in 1989, was #62. 

   I stayed on in Pittsburgh, teaching and chairing the philosophy department before retiring around No. 68, finally leaving that city after I had turned 85, making the quarter of a century in Pittsburgh the longest stretch I had lived anywhere.

   The terminus ad quem was Mexico City, where I arrived in plenty of time for Number 86, to live in the home of (daughter) Ellie, her husband, Miguel and teenage children—and my grandchildren—Max and Eva.  So, the locus of Number 87 is a truly splendid haven that, emphatically, is not a retirement place for ancients.  We celebrat with a long lunch at a superb little French restaurant within walking distance of the house, serving meals we could not have afforded were that bistro located in Manhattan.  And in Mexico City I hope to remain for whatever subsequent birthdays there might yet be.