Product Description

The most interesting lives are not always the best-known lives, and this is the account of a truly fascinating person. The stories of Alexander Gerschenkron—his great escapes, his vivid wit, his feuds, his flirtations, and his supremely cultured mind—are the stuff of legend.

Born in 1904 into the progressive Odessa intelligentsia, Gerschenkron fled the Russian Revolution at sixteen and settled in Vienna, immersing himself in the charged civic and intellectual life of another doomed city. Escaping the Nazis in the late 1930s, he made his way to Massachusetts, evolving from a political exile and social outcast into a man referred to by The New York Times as “Harvard’s scholarly model,” and by his peers as “The Great Gerschenkron”—the Harvard professor who knew the most.

Gerschenkron was a dazzling thinker, and his professional theories complemented his personal preoccupations. He was particularly interested in people—and economies—that cleverly overcame the large forces conspiring to hold them back; there were uses, he said, to adversity. Colleagues admired his vigorous ethical code and considered his personality to be perhaps even more original than his work. Gerschenkron was an uncompromising man who feuded with everyone from Vladimir Nabokov to John Kenneth Galbraith, who played chess with Marcel Duchamp, who enjoyed an intimate interlude with Marlene Dietrich, and who was a confidant of both Isaiah Berlin of Oxford and Ted Williams of the Red Sox.

Or was he? Layers of mystery and contradiction are at the core of this brilliantly recreated life, this prism through which we look back across some of the most important and unsettling moments of the twentieth century. With The Fly Swatter, best-selling author Nicholas Dawidoff gives us an intelligent, beautifully written, deeply felt biographical memoir of a real-life American character.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1101084 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-07
• Released on: 2002-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Books in Canada
Harvard economist Alexander Gerschenkron is a household name-if, that is, you happen to be an economic historian. Or, as is the case with the author of The Fly Swatter, a member of the Gerschenkron household. Nicholas Dawidoff is Gerschenkron’s grandson, and he’s written a fine, if impressionistic, biography of his famous grandfather.
Gerschenkron was born in Odessa, Russia in 1904 and grew up to be, in his grandson’s words, “typically Russian... in a nation of show-offs.” Russians are strong as bears, which “led to an epidemic of Russian hernias,” strong talkers and strong intellects. All his life Gerschenkron was reckless, inclined to leaping off, if not tall buildings, then, for instance, high walls, yelling (in Russian, of course), “Two deaths cannot happen to one person and one death cannot be avoided.”
The civil war that followed in the wake of the 1917 Revolution tested even the most reckless of Russians. In Odessa, the civil war lasted from 1918 to 1920, and left the locals grotesquely impoverished. Eventually the Gerschenkrons left Russia for Vienna. A star student in Russia, in Vienna the young Gerschenkron had a little catching up to do, as he knew no German. It took him a of couple years, but Gerschenkron managed to master German well enough to be placed in school with his age group. Before long, he spoke and wrote German like a native: “A German waitress asked him if he came from Austria. ‘I can always tell,’ she said.” Gerschenkron went to the head of his class.
In 1924 Gerschenkron enrolled in the University of Vienna’s program in economics. He had briefly considered studying at the Sorbonne, but he had a problem in Vienna: he was in love with a girl named Erica. After a cold start, he eventually won Erica’s hand; they married in 1928. It wasn’t an easy time: Inflation was ravaging Austria and Germany, anti-Semitism was blossoming in the once peaceable kingdom of Vienna, and, unlike the gymnasium of his high school years, the University of Vienna demanded almost nothing of its students. Vienna in the 1920s was an intellectual cauldron; the right was gaining venomous strength, but the left was also strong and active. A life-long liberal, Gerschenkron studied with some of the great liberal political, philosophical and economic thinkers of the early twentieth century: Max Adler, Heinrich Gomperz, and Karl Müller-not to mention Sigmund Freud and his circle. But the forces of fascism were growing, and, in later years, Gerschenkron would look back and describe his years at the University as years spent in a “mill... a vapid place of crushing dullness.”
The liberal party, the Social Democrats, was suppressed, both through propaganda and through violence, before finally being declared illegal. The Viennese said of the times, things were “desperate but not serious.” By 1938, of course, things got very serious, as Germany annexed Austria. Fleeing Austria was no longer a matter of simply packing up and crossing the border. Greater Germany had become a closed society-and Gerschenkron had a Jewish grandmother, and was in great danger. He sent his wife and infant daughter on ahead, and then, in a story Dawidoff tells with great drama, managed to cross into Switzerland “on a dog visa.”
Eventually, the Gerschenkrons made their way to the U.S., to Berkeley. Alexander worked for a U.C. Berkeley professor, Charles Gulick, and collaborated with him on a book, Austria from Habsburg to Hitler. “It was a very good book,” labor economist Walter Galenson told Dawidoff; “Gulick was no better able to write that book than the man on the moon.... It had all the earmarks of [Gerschenkron’s] work.” Berkeley passed Gerschenkron up for a teaching position, but he persevered. He was on his “third life” and his third “native” language. Word of his expertise in English, and his penchant for hard work spread, and he soon got translating jobs. Meanwhile, Gerschenkron spent his nights reading and writing. Then the U.S. entered World War Two. With his job at Berkeley, as ghost writer and translator, going nowhere and paying little, Gerschenkron went to work in the Richmond shipyards. Later in the war he went to work for the Federal Reserve Board. In Washington, D.C., Gerschenkron encountered for the first time Republicans. He didn’t like what he found: he called them “jellyroll tycoons, the sort of ungracious elite he had despised in Europe.” Worse, he “disliked the increasing propensity through the late 1940s and 1950s among Republican politicians to describe those who disagreed with them in terms of who was a better or more loyal American.” By this time, Gerschenkron was a fiercely loyal American-and he disagreed strongly with the Republicans.
At the Fed, Gerschenkron did some important work on the economy of the Soviet Union. This work resulted in a report that gave him his first brush with fame. The New York Times, the Herald, and other big dailies picked up the story, and Gerschenkron’s name was news. Editors from important economics journals started contacting him, asking for articles. Eventually an offer came from Cambridge: would Gerschenkron like to be a professor at Harvard? “I’m going to be a Harvard professor!” he crowed to Erica. She barely looked up from her knitting, saying, “That’s nice.”
The Harvard years form the bulk of Dawidoff’s biography-cum-memoir, and it was there that Gerschenkron earned the appellation “Amazing.” He wasn’t just an economics historian; he was a polymath and polyglot. He loved literature, and learned languages (perhaps as many as twenty) in order to be able to read a book in the original. While he wasn’t a quantitative economist, like John “A Beautiful Mind” Nash, he was a powerful mathematician: he grasped equations the way he did languages. But “advanced mathematics, computers, game theory-all the many clever mechanisms humankind developed to grapple with its world-could not really compete with what [Gerschenkron] considered humanity’s most absorbing and elusive invention: history.”
Dawidoff is a fluid and accomplished writer (this is his third book), and The Fly Swatter is clearly a labor of love. He spent years collecting stories about his notoriously reticent grandfather from family members and colleagues. Usually Dawidoff indicates, through the use of direct quotes, the source of a story-but not always, and there were times when I wondered, ‘How does he know that?’ The book, alas, has no scholarly apparatus, and no index, so while it blurs the distinction between memoir and biography, it really must stand as memoir, which is a bit odd, considering Gerschenkron died when the author was a teenager. Dawidoff also spends a great deal of time lionizing his grandfather’s liberal politics, especially in a chapter on the eruption of violence at Harvard in the 1960s, but making sure we understand he wasn’t too liberal (in a long speech broadcast live on the radio, Gerschenkron famously chewed out the Harvard radicals). This would be fine if it were balanced by an equal amount of time spent on Gerschenkron’s intellectual output. But, strangely, the economic studies Gerschenkron produced (mostly essays), are mostly only mentioned in passing, as if we wouldn’t be interested. This is strange because Dawidoff claims, and Gerschenkron’s students back him up, that his grandfather was the sire of American economic history studies.
The strength of this book lies in its characterology. The amazing Gerschenkron looms large, affable, and bear-like. His grandson’s love illuminates Gerschenkron’s character. I have to stop and wonder why I have never heard of this man before?
Brian Charles Clark (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
"The last man with all known knowledge" is how one former colleague, New Republic editor Martin Peretz, remembers Harvard economist Alexander Gerschenkron (1904-1978) in this lively tribute to Gerschenkron and to a vanished era of scholarly standards that he embodied. Dawidoff (In the Country of Country) was deeply influenced as a child by his grandfather's affectionate, sometimes madcap tutelage ("Once he handed me a copy of Trevelyan's History of England, pulled out a stopwatch, and clocked me to see how many pages a minute I could manage. It is no small trick to acquaint yourself with Ethelred the Unready while... [a] man with a strong Russian accent is shouting out time splits"); he has carefully pieced together Gerschenkron's life through interviews with surviving family members, colleagues and former students. Gerschenkron was one of the most memorable figures on campus during his tenure in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, respected for his breadth of knowledge (an economic historian by training, he was also offered chairs in Italian literature and Slavic studies) and for being a great conversationalist and all-around "character" who battled mercilessly with Nabokov, John Kenneth Galbraith and every guest lecturer with Marxist leanings. Born in Odessa, Gerschenkron fled the Bolsheviks in 1920 and resettled in Vienna, only to flee the Nazis in 1938. It was the trauma of these upheavals, Dawidoff speculates, that made Gerschenkron refuse to talk about his past, even while his European experiences were clearly the driving force behind his scholarly interests and later his bitter opposition to the student protest movements. Indeed, given that those supposedly close to Gerschenkron Isaiah Berlin, physicist Philipp Frank, even Gerschenkron's sister insist that they hardly knew him, it's to Dawidoff's credit that this finely wrought book is not just a collection of amusing Gerschenkron sketches, but movingly conveys something of the man's inner life.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The biography of an economic historian might not sound like an especially lively read, but the story of Alexander Gerschenkron, written by grandson Dawidoff (The Catcher Was a Spy), is fascinating. Born in Russia in 1904, Gerschenkron fled the Russian Revolution and spent his teens and early twenties in Vienna. He and his wife might have stayed there indefinitely, but the Nazis made that impossible. The couple escaped to the United States in the late 1930s, and Gerschenkron, known by some as "the Great Gerschenkron," ultimately landed a teaching position at Harvard. He became famous on campus for his one-upmanship, his willingness to insult colleagues to their faces, and, most of all, his tireless scholarly habits. In the words of one colleague, "he knew everything, had read everything, and could talk about anything." Dawidoff offers an energetic and balanced study of his grandfather, and his book serves as a wonderful paean to scholarship, teaching, and the life of the mind. Amy Strong, South Portland, ME
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Very good story teller with a good story
Alexander Gerschenkron is the type of man many of us would like to be: smart, charming, interested in the world, charismatic, etc. His grandson, Nicholas Dawidoff, seemingly captured his life in a surprisingly honest and thoughtful manner. I say "suprisingly honest" because one could certainly understand if Dawidoff were to give in to hero worship -- given the important role his grandfather played in his upbringing. But Dawidoff saves the hero worship and the highly personal anecdotes for the opening and concluding chapters. The 300 or so pages in between give a very balanced depiction of a complicated man, and that's the stuff of great biography. The first half of the book is a real page-turner, chronicling Gerschenkron's difficult times as a young man in revolutionary Russia and fascist Austria. How could Dawidoff possibly keep up this pace once his grandfather settles down as an educator at Harvard? Well, he doesn't, through no fault of his own. Dawidoff's depiction of Gershenkron's latter life is beautifully written, but the exciting pace of the earlier pages simply can't be sustained. Dawidoff clearly spent a great amount of time interviewing Gerschenkron's colleagues and students, most of whom (although not all) were effusive in their praise. But the book tended to feel slightly repetitious toward the end with the ongoing remembrances and non-related anecdotes. For one so close to the story, Dawidoff managed to expertly review and analyze Gerschenkron's complicated doting relationship with his wife, Erica. Also, a wonderfully telling anecdote at the end of the book reveals not only Gerschenkron's character, but Dawidoff's patient understanding, as well. Although Gerschenkron was an expert chess player, somehow he managed to lose his queen to the 14-year-old Dawidoff. Gerschenkron swept his arm across the board, spilling all the pieces onto the floor. "Num, num," he said. "Let's go eat lunch."

An Amazing Story From a Grandson
Maybe you had a grandfather who was quite wonderful, but you did not have a grandfather who was wonderful like Nicholas Dawidoff's grandfather was wonderful. Dawidoff's charming biography of his grandfather, _The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World_ (Pantheon) starts with his own memories of Alexander Gerschenkron. For instance, Gerschenkron, known as "Shura" within his family, had an arsenal of fly swatters, each of just the proper color and heft for its particular target. The baby blue flyswatter was just the thing for his particular enemy, the wasps, because they were vicious, and the mild color would make them let down their guard. If he were successful in swatting the wasp (not often), he would give "lengthy disquisitions on swatting technique." He would never allow the insect body to be cleaned up, for he "claimed they were deterrents, that other yellowjackets would encounter their unfortunate colleague and feel inclined to keep away themselves."

Shura was, to be sure, a character. But he was also brilliant in an obsessively academic way. He mastered some two dozen languages, but his field of expertise was not language. He was able to discourse on (and write academic treatments of) _Hamlet_ and _Dr. Zhivago_, but he did not teach literature. He was an economist, a quintessential Harvard professor who left a lasting mark on economic thought with his theory of "economic backwardness." He had a rather exciting early life, fleeing the Russian Revolution, and then fleeing the Nazis, before he found himself in the economic department of Harvard that was to be his academic home. He was a natural show-off. He could certainly be obnoxious and overbearing, and his students often felt they were not measuring up to his superhuman standards, but none of them forgot him, and he left a strong mark on the next generation of economists. Dawidoff makes the case that his standards were so exacting, and his sense of the overwhelming complexity of history and economics so complete, that he constantly spent time in library stacks gaining more information, but was intimidated about committing himself in print. He did, however, play chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp, disparage Vladimir Nabokov for an inept translation of Pushkin, and charm Marlene Dietrich to give him her phone number.

One of the great strengths of this engaging book is that it makes Shura's wide-ranging academic endeavors almost as exciting as his flights from political oppression. The love of reading and the love of learning just for the sake of exercising one's mind could not have a finer exemplar. And while most people would regard a life in libraries as unexciting and unromantic, Shura was fond of living his life as fully as his capacious mind would allow. After he had recovered from a cardiac arrest in the foyer of the Harvard Faculty Club, he used to bring his students to the very spot where he had temporarily died. "You know, there was nothing. No beautiful colors. No castles. No bright lights. Nothing. So, if there are things you want to say and do, don't wait. Say them and do them. You won't get the opportunity after you're dead." During decades devoted to learning, this comprehensive biography makes plain, Gerschenkron drove himself to a life which for all of its time in an ivory tower was full of exuberance and courage.

Gerschenkron's world
Growing up Nicholas Dawidoff had a talkative and demonstrative larger-than-life maternal grandfather who had lived in, to paraphrase the Chinese curse, interesting times: his home town Odessa during the Russian revolution and Vienna (where he had to start over, learning German as a student) during the rise of Nazism. Alexander Gerschenkron (called Shura) had married a fellow student, Erica Matschnigg, in Vienna, whom he would deem "perfect," and who was his lifelong intellectual sparring partner. To save their lives they emigrated to the US. After a time Shura found work at UC Berkeley, The Federal Reserve Board in Washington DC, and then at his favorite place ever: Harvard. In addition this brilliant and cultured grandfather was kind and funny, educated, eccentric, and more than willing to act as a sort of a dad for his grandson, whose own father was mentally ill.

The one thing, though that Gerschenkron couldn't, or wouldn't, provide for family, friends, or colleagues - or his beloved and loving grandson - was so much as a shred of concrete information about his childhood, his youth, and anything remotely resembling his feelings. No one got into his inner life, and those who tried (and there were many) learned that it was at all times off-limits. So this book is a memoir but also a work of informed conjecture and detection.

Dawidoff, an insightful man and a compassionate reporter, draws a careful and reasoned portrait, "a biographical memoir, a work of reconstruction" that is a pleasure to read. The "dismal science," economics, has never seemed so vitally important and downright interesting as it does in this book.

Gerschenkron was hyperactive; he gave up reading the newspaper in middle age, citing the number of books he had yet to read and reasoning that the time the papers took from this was objectionable. He loved to argue and to win, but he was courtly, too. He practiced what he called "French manners," combining recognizable rules of European etiquette with extreme chivalry. He could be exasperating, but he was generous and possessed astonishing depth and breadth of knowledge (in many areas, not just economics) which he more than willingly shared with the world. Gerschenkron developed theories of economic behavior that are classics, now, and some which were of great importance to US policymakers' understanding of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and of developing nations' economic behavior. He was a prolific essayist and loved literature. Rather than read translations, he taught himself entire languages. He worked out chess problems without a chessboard. He was a character, and became something of a curmudgeon in later life.

Gerschenkron was also fiercely loyal to certain things - countries, colleagues, ideas, people, and the most ordinary stuff of his life. Dawidoff takes pleasure in this information, and I did, too Of Shura he writes. "[He] had a party (the Democrats); a team (the Red Sox); a player (Ted Williams); a board game (chess); a breed of dog (Labrador retriever); a flower (pink rose); a lower body haberdasher (he sent to a Vienna tennis shop for white linen trousers); an upper body haberdasher (he ordered his wool plaid lumber jackets and matching caps from a hunting supply outfit in Maine); a brandy; a chocolate bar; an aspirin; a bullet; a pencil; a shaving soap; a foreign bookstore; a domestic bookstore; a barber; a newsstand (he would go miles out of his way to buy his periodicals from Sheldon Cohen at Out of Town News); and a weekly news magazine (L'Espresso)." And of course he had a school, Harvard, which he loved beyond all measure. Gerschenkron's calculus was simple: the US was the best nation on earth, and Harvard its best school. He thrived there. Dawidoff claims that Harvard "made his personality possible."

Gerschenkron dominated people and gatherings and enjoyed contact, but also required and demanded great blocks of solitude. Sometimes he hurt those he loved. He insisted that his young daughter practice her flute when he wasn't at home, because the sound annoyed him. He disappointed his daughters often and had some stormy relations with friends and colleagues.

There's hardly a dull moment in this account of a life and the many lives that Gerschenkron touched, and Dawidoff has provided enough interesting tangential information to serve as jumping-off points for a lot more reading and inquiry.

There are Source Notes and Acknowledgements. The books lacks an index, which is a real shortcoming. There are hundreds of interesting and important people, places, and works of art and scholarship in this book and its publisher ought to have splurged on something so essential as a good index. Gerschenkron (a lover of notes, acknowledgements, appendices, and indices) would agree.