The Futurians by Damon Knight

Author:Damon Knight [Knight, Damon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi & Fantasy
ISBN: 9780575111417
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2013-08-29T03:00:00+00:00

Josephine Judith Grossman (later Judith Merril) was born in Manhattan in 1923, the daughter of Samuel S. and Ethel Hurwitch Grossman. Samuel Grossman, usually called Schlomo (for Solomon, his middle name), was the son of a well-known Philadelphia rabbi. Ethel Hurwitch, an immigrant from Russia at the age of five, had grown up in Boston.

“My father was a writer in the Jewish education field,” Merril told me, “drama critic for The Vorwärts, things like that—my mother was an early suffragette, one of the founding members of Hadassah. My mother and father met when they were working for the then-infant Bureau of Jewish Education in New York, in the great golden days of the idealist Zionist movement, into which I was born. My father had encephalitis in the epidemic that followed the flu epidemic in the years after World War I, which meant that he was acutely ill in the hospital at the same time that I was born, and apparently suffered severe aftereffects in terms of a loss not of writing talent but quickness—and certainly confidence—a psychiatric rather than an intellectual loss. And having been up to that point sort of the fair-haired boy of American Jewish writing, he quickly slid out of that position, and within a few years after my birth we had wound up going to live with relatives, since my father was not earning any money. This was in Boston; we were living with my mother’s father, and her sister. I don’t remember when we moved there, I must have been four or five.

“When I was six, he committed suicide at a very dramatic moment. He had been for three months daily submitting a fifteen-minute news broadcast in rhymed verse to a radio station—they wanted a three-month trial period before deciding that he could actually do it day by day—he had a particular talent for doggerel. And he went to the building that day to get a definite yes or no, and they were on the sixteenth floor. And he couldn’t face the possible rejection, apparently, and got out on the fifteenth floor and jumped out the window. And that left a difficult situation all around.

“So my mother and I were poor relations here and there for a while. She took a dietetics course and we began living in various institutions where she worked—orphan asylums and things like that—a summer camp where she was dietitian was near Milford. When I was thirteen she got a job in a settlement house in the Bronx, which is what took us to New York, where I discovered the YPSLs.* I was born a Zionist, in those golden days of socialist Zionism, and until I was in my early teens at least, knew that my future was in a kibbutz: I was preparing for it, and studied Hebrew until I was about fifteen, by which time I had progressed from social Zionism to socialism to the YPSLs, and no longer knew that my future was in a kibbutz.

“When I was

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