Free In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel Page B

came from a long line of rabbis and scholars and had trained as a rabbi in Poland. He left Poland when he was twenty-one years old and went to Caen in Normandy, France, where he studied mathematics and engineering. Although he became an agnostic and stopped going to synagogue, he kept an impressive collection of Hebrew religious texts in his large library, including the Mishnah and a Vilna edition of the Talmud.
    The Bystryns stayed in France throughout the war. Denise’s mother helped her husband escape from a French concentration camp, and they both survived the war by hiding from the Nazis in the small town of St.-Céré, located in the southwest. During a good part of that time, Denise was separated from her parents, hidden in a Catholic convent in Cahors, about fifty miles away. Denise’s experiences, though much more difficult, paralleled mine in a number of ways. Over the years, our memories of our individual experiences in a Europe dominated by Hitler proved to be enduring for each of us and brought us closer together.
    One incident in Denise’s life made an indelible impression on me. In the few years she spent in the convent, no one but the Mother Superior knew that she was Jewish and no one put any pressure on her to convert to Catholicism. But Denise felt awkward in relation to her classmates because she was different. She did not go to confession, nor did she take holy communion at mass every Sunday. Denise’s mother, Sara, became uncomfortable about her daughter’s standing out in this way and was afraid that her true identity might be uncovered, which could endanger her. Sara discussed this dilemma with Denise’s father, Iser, and they decided to have Denise baptized.
    Sara traveled on foot and by bus the almost fifty miles from their hiding place to the convent in Cahors. When she arrived at the convent, she stood in front of the heavy, dark wooden door and was about to knock on it and announce her presence, when at the last moment she could not bring herself to convey the fateful decision. She turned around without entering the convent and walked back home, certain that her husband would be furious that she had not lessened the danger to their daughter. When she entered the house in St.-Céré, she found that Iser was immensely relieved. All the time that Sara had been gone, he had obsessed about the error he had made in agreeing to allow Denise to be converted. Despite the fact that Iser did not believe in God, he and Sara were very proud to be Jews.
    In 1949 Denise, her brother, and her parents immigrated to the United States. Denise attended the Lycée Français de New York for one year and was admitted to Bryn Mawr College as a junior at age seventeen. On graduating from Bryn Mawr at nineteen, she enrolled as a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University. When we met in 1955, she had started research for her Ph.D. thesis in medical sociology with Robert K. Merton, one of the great contributors to modern sociology and a founder of the sociology of science. Her thesis was a study of the career decisions of medical students based on an empirical longitudinal survey.
    A few days after I graduated from medical school, in June 1956, Denise and I married (figure 3–4). After a brief honeymoon in Tanglewood, Massachusetts, where I spent some time studying for the national boards in medicine—a point that Denise has never allowed me to forget—I started a one-year internship at Montefiore Hospital in New York City while Denise continued her doctoral research at Columbia.

     
    3–4 Denise at our wedding in 1956. She was twenty-three and a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University. (From Eric Kandel’s personal collection.)
     
    Denise sensed, perhaps more than I did, that my idea of examining the biological basis of mental function was original and bold, and she urged me to explore it. I was concerned, however. Neither of us had any financial resources, and I thought it essential to