Read Online The Mathematician’s Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer - Free Book Online

giving birth, where the mind can purposely forget all the pain so that you will do it again. It’s not like that at all. Pure hunger is never forgotten. The memory of that feeling is placed in a part of your brain that allows for perfect permanent storage and almost instant recall. You never want to experience such a sense of deprivation again.
    It can get worse than this, the retardation of everything, the numbing of your fingertips to go with the dull feeling in your belly. There is hunger beyond what I’ve described. I’ve never felt it, but I know people who survived the war under even worse conditions than my father and I did. They have told me what happens next. Even in the presence of food, the brain doesn’t respond. Everything completely shuts down and your mind simply waits—without even the energy left for dread—for the time when everything expires.
    As I’ve said, my body never shut down quite completely like this. We would have something to eat every day, just never enough. When I saw any food, a few crumbs of stale bread, some heated water containing the thinnest hint of something, even when that water was heated only with bones, my mind would spring up again. My purpose day-to-day was to eat and to have the sensory ability to find something that could potentially be edible.
    When did this happen? We were near the Barents Sea during the war, north of the Arctic Circle. My father worked in the mines every day. There were clearings in the woods where the Soviets had built quarters for the miners and their families. There were no fences to keep us in. Where would we have gone?
    In every clearing there were about six low-lying structures, long sheds. They possessed no windows. These sheds, covered in tar paper, had been broken up into four single-roomed living quarters, each with a wood-burning stove. The beds were made of louse-covered cloths filled with straw on wooden frames. The floor consisted of rough planks of wood. To keep the lice down—but certainly not to eliminate them—we’d put each leg of our beds into a cup and then fill that cup with kerosene. It was a trick that someone taught us early on. Before then, I can’t begin to describe the agony of the itching and bites.
    At first, we suffered tolerable deprivation mixed with an almost unbearable loss of dignity. It would get worse, although we couldn’t imagine how. I had grown up so fast in just two months, had lost the demanding princess inside me. Unlike my mother, I completely stopped crying. It’s not that I didn’t want to do so. I just couldn’t. The feeling of hurt would come to my eyes, I could definitely sense it, but nothing would happen. I had been transformed into a hardened adult, someone fully accepting of tragedy and disappointment. I understood the limitations present in the world. I could cope with anything, or so I thought.
    One can, I suppose, invent silver linings just because they provide some sort of meaning to tragedy and make the horrible palatable. But I don’t think I’m doing this when I say that without those days above the Arctic Circle I wouldn’t have accomplished much. I know exactly what direction my life would have taken without the war. I would have remained a spoiled child, growing up in my provincial Polish town with my little dog walking beside me on my visits to the town square.
    The ties to my Christian friends would have been magically cut in my early teens, just like they had been cut with my mother and her friends at that age, and I would have accepted this change as inevitable and somehow natural. I would have lived my comfortable Jewish life with the overarching sense that it was my destiny.
    The world of Jewish privilege in my hometown was available, of course, only to a few. There were twenty thousand Jews in my sthtetl, and what did I know of them? Our own house, lovely, one of the most beautiful in town, was made of stone. A wall of that same stone, perhaps three meters high, surrounded