Amy Wallace - The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America’s Greatest Child Prodigy

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

FOR JOSEF MARC

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011

http://www.archive.org/details/prodigyOOwall

I

am especially grateful to the following people, whose unremitting encouragement and support made this book possible: Irving and Sylvia Wallace, Helena Sidis, Dan Mahony, Jannika Hurwitt, Joseph Kanon, and Ed Victor.

For their work researching, editing, typing, and photographing, I would like to thank: Helen Ginsburg, Elizabethe Kempthorne, Mark Malkas, Liz Vaughan, and Paul Duffy.

For granting me their time, memories and materials, thanks go to the following people and institutions (in alphabetical order): Muriel Burbank, Julius Eichel, Clifton Fadiman, William Fadiman, Ann Rab Feinzig, George Gloss, Dr. and Mrs. Jack Goldwyn, Harvard University, Margaret McGill, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Mandell, Bill Rab, Isaac

Acknowledgments

Rabinowitz, Rice University, B. C. Robison, David Sachs, Dr. and Mrs. Elliot Sagall, Dr. Paul Saunders, Shirley Smith, Dr. Abraham Sperling, Grace Spinelli, and the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

Contents

10 May Day 134

11 Rebellion, Romance, and Reversibility 147

12 In Search of Solitude 165

13 The Peridromophile 181

14 The Double Life 191

15 The Tribes and the States 200

16 Friends and Relatives 210

17 Invasion of Privacy 225

18 The Pacifist and the Transfer Wars 237

19 "America's Greatest Brain" 251

20 A Superior Spirit 271 Epilogue 282

INDEX 287

TEN PAGES OF ILLUSTRATIONS FOLLOW PAGE 146.

You know the old saying"As the twig is bent the tree's inclined." Parents cannot too soon begin the work of bending the minds of their children in the right direction, of training them so that they shall grow up complete, efficient, really rational men and women.

BORIS sidis, 1909

The newspapers never missed a chance to try and prove that he was insane, or psychotic, or simply a freak. In truth, Billy was a completely normal child in every respect.

SARAH sidis, 1952

It is possible to construct figures of the Fourth Dimension with a hundred and twenty sides called hecatonicosihedrigons, or figures with six hundred sides called hexacosihedrigons. I attach great value in the working out of my theories to the help given by polyhedral angles of the dodesecahedron which enter into many of the problems. Some of the things that I have found out about the Fourth Dimension will aid in the solution of many of the problems of elliptical geometry.

william james sidis, age 11, 1909

I often tried to talk to him about the fourth dimension, mathematics. I was interested in mathematics myself at the time. I was about seventeen, he must have been about twenty-three. And he would turn upon me furiously, he scared me, saying, "I don't want to talk about that, I don't ever want to talk about that kind of thing!"

CLIFTON FADIMAN, 1983

B

oris Sidis was born in 1867 in Berdichev, a town near Kiev in the Russian Ukraine. His lineage could be traced back eight hundred years, and it was the family legend that each generation produced one brilliant man. Boris Sidis, his kin said, was that man.

Boris was one of five children born to Moses and Mary Sidis. Moses was a well-off merchant, and an intellectual who read Darwin and Huxley. The boy showed intellectual promise early. At eight, he knew several languages, was well read in history, and composed poetry that was put to music by the townspeople of Berdichev. Boris's early years were pleasant, or as pleasant as life could be for any Jew growing

The Prodigy

up in the terrible climate of anti-Semitism that pervaded the Ukraine of the 1800s.

At the time of Boris's birth, Russia was under the severe, autocratic rule of Tsar Nicolas II. The Ukraine, a portion of southwestern Russia with a population of nearly twenty million, was part of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, established by Catherine the Great in 1791. Nearly two million Jews inhabited this area, and few were allowed to move "beyond the Pale."

By the mid-1800s the prevailing attitude of Russians toward their large Jewish population was intensely hostile. A long history of persecution made the Jews easy prey for mass hysteria whipped up by the government; Jewish economic success and land ownership was a threat to many Russians, who claimed that the Christian population was being exploited. Rumors circulated that Jews used the blood of Christian babies in their religious ceremonies.

In 1881, under the rule of the reactionary Tsar Alexander III, the wave of hatred broke. The first of a vicious series of pogroms occurred in southern Russia. Jews were assaulted in the streets, robbed, raped, and murdered.

The pogroms spread, and in 1882 the Tsar ordered anti-Jewish tribunals, ultimately passing the notorious "temporary" May Laws. These forbade Jews within the Pale to leave their villages, and forced multitudes of other Jews into the dense, overcrowded cities. Existence for the average Jewish family was at best a struggle. The situation grew increasingly grim, with little hope of improvement. The Russian authorities were pressing Jews to emigrate, and Jews were anxious to leave. America was now the promised land.

It was in the midst of this tumult that Boris Sidis grew up, though his own town, Berdichev, had not suffered a pogrom. As a handsome, healthy, intense teenager, Boris had already developed the values that would guide his lifea hatred of ignorance and tyranny, a passion for learning and teaching. His friends nicknamed him "The Little Father." Although it was strictly against the law, at sixteen Boris orga

*]

The Little Father

nized a small group of friends and embarked on his first mission teaching peasants to read. Compared to the Russian population as a whole, the Jewish literacy rate was high, but not high enough for these idealistic boys, who were willing to assume a great risk in the service of their ideals. When Boris was seventeen he and his friends enrolled in a preparatory schoolthe equivalent of junior collegein Kesh-nev, south of their hometown. There they continued teaching peasants, trekking to the countryside every Sunday afternoon.

After only three weeks in school, their rooms were raided by Tsarist police. Their landlady, sympathetic to their work, heard of the raid in advance and burned all the books she could find in Boris's room, destroying anything else that might implicate him. To no avail. The twelve boys were arrested. Two were hanged as an example to the others. Nine were marched barefoot in the snow to Siberia. Boris, who was discovered to be the leader, was clapped in a dungeon.