Abba’s quest for emes drove him to turn his back, suddenly and totally, on a life of exceptional success and achievement

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abbi Abba Goldman never spoke about his past. He never talked about his childhood in Newark, New Jersey, or his years as a college student, a researcher, and then a professor. He never mentioned his father’s secular achievements and medical discoveries. Really, he never did.

As his son in-law, I think I fell into a unique space where I felt neither the filial deference of the sons nor the propriety of the talmidim, and toward the end of his life, when it was clear the days for asking questions were dwindling, I began to ask.

I already had some basic information, but it was incomplete. I had known, for instance, that my father in-law had studied philosophy, but not that he was fluent in French, German, and Greek and had learned from original texts.

I knew that my father-in-law’s father, Dr. Lester Goldman, had discovered the relationship of nonmatching blood types between mother and baby, and the treatment for it (used to this day in about 15% of all childbirths) — but not that he had declined both the Nobel Prize and the cover of Time magazine, preferring to work quietly making people better. I knew he had met Einstein, but not that it was for the purpose of creating job visas to get Jews out of Europe during the Holocaust.

We all knew that he had been a psychology professor, but none of us knew what his field of specialization was. He never mentioned Freud or Adler (or Aristotle or Descartes). His children did not even know he had been a psychologist until they were adults. I never heard him mention Mozart or Beethoven, or that he had been a skilled enough classical pianist to play in an orchestra. I never even heard him play. He hadn’t touched a piano in 48 years at the time of his petirah at the age of 82.

My mother-in-law kept some of his old things. Around the time of the shloshim, I asked her if I could look at his dissertations. Apparently, there was one he had written in French. The two she showed me were his master’s dissertation and PhD thesis, comprising together nearly 2,000 pages. They were completely impenetrable to me. I only have a master’s degree in psychology.