passenger on board the fateful maiden voyage of the
Titanic
, famously insisted on facing death ‘like a gentleman’. Also living at Riverside Drive when the Oppenheimers moved there was Benjamin Guggenheim’s brother, William, notable for publishing an autobiography in the guise of a biography in which he said of himself that anyone who saw his ‘light complexion’ and the cast of his features ‘would not have surmised his Semitic ancestry’.
When they moved into this large and prestigious apartment the Oppenheimers took with them their impressive collection of paintings, as well as Ella’s mother and Robert’s governess. Ella was pregnant at the time and, on 14 August 1912, Francis Oppenheimer was born. Frank (as he was always known) was too young to be a a playmate for Robert, but as they grew up they would become close, and Robert’s correspondencewith his younger brother reveals an intimacy that Oppenheimer was to share with very few people.
Certainly, Oppenheimer had few (if any) close friends at school. He once remarked in later life that it was characteristic that he could not remember any of his classmates. They remembered him, of course. Particularly vivid are the memories of Jane Didisheim (later Jane Kayser), who, fifty years after knowing Robert at school, could recall him in telling detail:
He was still a little boy; he was very frail, very pink-cheeked, very shy, and very brilliant of course. Very quickly everybody admitted that he was different from all the others and very superior. As far as studies were concerned he was good at everything . . . Aside from that he was physically – you can’t say clumsy exactly – he was rather undeveloped, not in the way he behaved but the way he went about, the way he walked, the way he sat. There was something strangely childish about him . . . He was abrupt when he came out of his shyness, but with all that a very polite sort of voice. He never seemed to want to come to the front of anything . . . If he did it was because he couldn’t do otherwise . . . because he was so extraordinarily gifted and brilliant – that just pushed him.
Another classmate remembers him as ‘rather gauche’, adding ‘he didn’t really know how to get along with other children’. Perhaps thinking that he was playing to his strengths, Oppenheimer – who could not become popular through playing sport or by being mature or streetwise – struck many of his fellow pupils as a little too anxious to demonstrate his intellectual precocity. As one of them put it, he had ‘a great need to declare his pre-eminence’. ‘Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek,’ he once remarked to a girl in his class. His maths teacher recalled that he was difficult to teach because he was ‘so far ahead of everybody and very restless’, a view echoed by his other teachers. His grades, however, particularly in his early school years, do not confirm this impression of unreachable genius. They certainly were not bad, but they were mostly A− and B+, rather than the consistent A+ that one might have expected.
Outside of school, his interests were scholarly, solitary and characteristic of a much older boy. ‘When I was ten or twelve years old,’ he recalled as an adult, ‘minerals, writing poems and reading, and building with blocks still – architecture – were the three themes that I did.’ fn3 What he meant by the single word ‘minerals’ was the deep interest he haddeveloped in mineralogy following his grandfather’s gift of a collection of rocks. On walks around New York’s Central Park, on summer holidays in Long Island and on family visits to Germany, Oppenheimer would collect rock samples, which he would then identify and display in Riverside Drive. In pursuit of this hobby, he joined the New York Mineralogical Club, its other members only realising how young he was after they had invited him to present a paper and found themselves listening to
Titanic
, famously insisted on facing death ‘like a gentleman’. Also living at Riverside Drive when the Oppenheimers moved there was Benjamin Guggenheim’s brother, William, notable for publishing an autobiography in the guise of a biography in which he said of himself that anyone who saw his ‘light complexion’ and the cast of his features ‘would not have surmised his Semitic ancestry’.
When they moved into this large and prestigious apartment the Oppenheimers took with them their impressive collection of paintings, as well as Ella’s mother and Robert’s governess. Ella was pregnant at the time and, on 14 August 1912, Francis Oppenheimer was born. Frank (as he was always known) was too young to be a a playmate for Robert, but as they grew up they would become close, and Robert’s correspondencewith his younger brother reveals an intimacy that Oppenheimer was to share with very few people.
Certainly, Oppenheimer had few (if any) close friends at school. He once remarked in later life that it was characteristic that he could not remember any of his classmates. They remembered him, of course. Particularly vivid are the memories of Jane Didisheim (later Jane Kayser), who, fifty years after knowing Robert at school, could recall him in telling detail:
He was still a little boy; he was very frail, very pink-cheeked, very shy, and very brilliant of course. Very quickly everybody admitted that he was different from all the others and very superior. As far as studies were concerned he was good at everything . . . Aside from that he was physically – you can’t say clumsy exactly – he was rather undeveloped, not in the way he behaved but the way he went about, the way he walked, the way he sat. There was something strangely childish about him . . . He was abrupt when he came out of his shyness, but with all that a very polite sort of voice. He never seemed to want to come to the front of anything . . . If he did it was because he couldn’t do otherwise . . . because he was so extraordinarily gifted and brilliant – that just pushed him.
Another classmate remembers him as ‘rather gauche’, adding ‘he didn’t really know how to get along with other children’. Perhaps thinking that he was playing to his strengths, Oppenheimer – who could not become popular through playing sport or by being mature or streetwise – struck many of his fellow pupils as a little too anxious to demonstrate his intellectual precocity. As one of them put it, he had ‘a great need to declare his pre-eminence’. ‘Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek,’ he once remarked to a girl in his class. His maths teacher recalled that he was difficult to teach because he was ‘so far ahead of everybody and very restless’, a view echoed by his other teachers. His grades, however, particularly in his early school years, do not confirm this impression of unreachable genius. They certainly were not bad, but they were mostly A− and B+, rather than the consistent A+ that one might have expected.
Outside of school, his interests were scholarly, solitary and characteristic of a much older boy. ‘When I was ten or twelve years old,’ he recalled as an adult, ‘minerals, writing poems and reading, and building with blocks still – architecture – were the three themes that I did.’ fn3 What he meant by the single word ‘minerals’ was the deep interest he haddeveloped in mineralogy following his grandfather’s gift of a collection of rocks. On walks around New York’s Central Park, on summer holidays in Long Island and on family visits to Germany, Oppenheimer would collect rock samples, which he would then identify and display in Riverside Drive. In pursuit of this hobby, he joined the New York Mineralogical Club, its other members only realising how young he was after they had invited him to present a paper and found themselves listening to
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