Martian's Daughter: A Memoir Read Free Page A

parents, and particularly my father, also played a crucial part. The example he set by his life, the environment in which he embedded my adolescence, his expectations of me, and my responses to those expectations were all critical in shaping my own life.
     
    Were it not for his oft-repeated conviction that everyone—man or woman—had a moral obligation to make full use of her or his intellectual capacities, I might not have pushed myself to such a level of academic achievement or set my sights on a lifelong professional commitment at a time when society made it difficult for a woman to combine a career with family obligations. If I had not grown up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a family dinner table around which gathered some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, I might have been less attuned to the economic and political relationships among nations that became the focus of my academic career. And without the example of my father's immersion in the affairs of government, I might not have felt the pull of Washington strongly enough to uproot my family and move there for three different government assignments in the space of three years.
     
    Yet perhaps the most powerful motivator of all was my determination to escape from the shadow of this larger-than-life parent, my desire to prove him wrong in his fear that my early marriage would thwart his hopes and ambitions for my own future. I was determined to prove that his expectations for my intellectual and professional success and my own for marriage and children with the man I had fallen in love with while still a teenager need not be mutually exclusive. With every new achievement in my life, with every barrier broken, came an overwhelming urge to say to my father, “You see, I defied you by doing what I wanted, but I'm also doing what you wanted me to, after all.”
     
    The evidence of his mental disintegration that overwhelmed me in that hospital room brought home the finality of my father's untimely disappearance from the scene just at the beginning of the computer age that owed so much to him. It was also the moment that catapulted me into adulthood, into a life whose shape bore the strong imprint of my heritage and the expectations it carried with it.
     

The Golden Couple
     
    My parents first met as small children. According to family lore, Mariette Kövesi rode into Johnny (in Hungarian, Jancsi) Neumann's life on a tricycle at the age of two and a half, as a guest at the fourth birthday party of one of his younger brothers. Unfortunately, there is no record of my father's reaction; he was just eight years old. The Neumann and Kövesi families (the hereditary nobility bestowed by the Austro-Hungarian emperor on my banker grandfather, Max Neumann, which allowed my father to add von to his surname, came later, in 1913) were friends and summertime neighbors, both members of the Jewish but highly assimilated Hungarian haute bourgeoisie, which flourished in Budapest in the years preceding World War I. These families, and others like them, were at the heart of the brief, shining moment when Budapest was not only co-capital, with Vienna, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but also vied with its sister city for the title of intellectual capital of Europe.
     
    Both my parents spent their childhoods in the privileged, warmly protected environment of highly educated, professionally successful, affluent, and close-knit families. Both families lived during most of the year in large, elegant apartments in the heart of the Pest—or more commercial—side of Budapest. The apartment my father grew up in occupied one floor of a building purchased by his grandfather, who used the first floor for his agricultural implements business and installed each of his daughters, their husbands, and their children on oneof the floors above. And both families spent summers in elegant “country” homes in the Buda hills overlooking the flat Pest area. The distance between the summer