On October 28, 1964, when I was 26 years old and in my first semester as an instructor in Columbia University’s English Department, my father called and asked if I’d read an article in The New York Times that morning about I. I. Rabi. I had not. “Well go and read it,” my father said, “because I. I. Rabi teaches at Columbia, and was born in the shtetl of Rymanow, which is where my parents—your grandparents!—and my six older brothers and sisters were born, so call him and tell him you come from the same shtetl—that you’re landsmen!”
I protested that Professor Rabi was a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, and I was just a part-time instructor, but my father would have none of it. “You both went to Columbia,” he said, “and you both teach there, and he was born in Rymanow—where our family comes from—so I don’t see why you can’t call and get together with him.”
My father
