The Pope of Physics by Gino Segrè

Author:Gino Segrè
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

25

CHICAGO BOUND

Fermi moved to Chicago at the end of April, but Laura stayed behind in Leonia until the end of June so that the children could finish the school year. Having to move again was hard for her husband, but it was even harder for her. After two years in Leonia, Laura was just beginning to feel settled. The American dream of a house in the suburbs and good schools for Giulio and Nella had become a reality.

The dream continued with the acquisition of a second car. Laura, during a visit from Hans Bethe’s wife, Rose, had bought it as an essential component of suburban living. One can only imagine the car salesman dealing with two beautiful women, one with an Italian accent and the other with a German one. Little did he know they had fled respective Fascist regimes and were the wives of Nobel Prize winners, Bethe’s 1967 prize yet to come. The very capable Rose negotiated smartly, and to Laura’s delight there were unexpected dollars left over. The women had gotten such a good deal that Laura bought a new washing machine, a purchase she proudly announced to Enrico.

As Laura had hoped, the children seemed happy in school. Fermi described them in a glowing letter on April 5, 1941, to Amaldi as “speaking with equal ease Italian and English and being hard to distinguish from the other children in the neighborhood.” As for Laura, nicknamed Lalla since childhood, he wrote, “Lalla has by now become one hundred percent American in both her habits and way of thinking.” These somewhat exaggerated observations were indicative of Enrico’s enthusiasm for his new life.

More candidly, Laura and Enrico carried touches of the paranoia commonly felt by those labeled as enemy aliens. They burned Nella’s old second-grade reader because it was full of photographs of Mussolini. More distressing, Laura and Enrico learned from Leonia neighbors that five-year-old Giulio, apparently trying to show off, had been overheard chanting that “he wished Hitler and Mussolini would win the war.” Some severe family reprimands made sure he never said that again.

Despite their comfortable American existence, Laura and Enrico were preoccupied with the war and its outcomes, their conversations repeatedly turning back to family and friends left behind. Stories about war horrors were reaching them. Their native country was being destroyed, physically and spiritually. After a run of Axis victories, however, Laura and Enrico felt a ray of hope in hearing that Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union was floundering. Launched in June 1941, it had not gone according to Hitler’s plan, and the German army was stalled at the gates of Moscow, just as Napoleon’s army had been more than a hundred years earlier.

Pearl Harbor came as a shock for the Fermis, as it did for all Americans, but they realized that the United States’ entry into the war increased the Allies’ chances of defeating Hitler and Mussolini. This made Laura happier than she otherwise might have been about moving to Chicago. She didn’t know

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