Special Relativity

Sep 25, 2025

Days before she turned 68, my mother learned the truth about her father. Irving was born in 1920, cursed with terrible acne. The treatment for acne in the 20s was radiotherapy. Once a week for six months he’d have his whole body bathed in x-rays, no lead bibs in those days. This high dose of radiation did nothing at all to cure his acne, but it did destroy his body’s ability to manufacture sperm, rendering him sterile, unable to have children. Of course he didn’t know this at the time, had no idea such a thing was even possible, let alone likely.

Irv grew up in Brooklyn, Bed-Stuy, a Jewish neighborhood back then. He played stick ball in the street, went to the movies for a nickel, learned tennis and accounting. His mind was made for numbers. And he was politically active. In 1940 he met Nora, the woman who would become his wife, on a class trip to Washington DC. Somehow or other (we’re not sure how and there’s no one left to ask) they became involved with some secret left-wing political groups, although they weren’t communists. They were couriers in a kind of underground railroad that helped connect women with doctors who would perform abortions, which was 100% illegal in those days, and considered immoral by just about everyone. They risked long prison sentences if they were caught, and the danger fueled their kindling romance. Then Pearl Harbor happened. Irv’s number came up and he went off to the Pacific. He served as a company clerk, I don’t know what company. This was the US Army.

Was it the Army or the Navy?

Do I look like some historian?

Irv never saw combat, but he would’ve been part of the massive infantry scheduled to invade Japan. Japanese soldiers and civilians never would’ve surrendered to a conventional attack, or so the Americans were convinced, and everyone expected to die. Instead, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Japan surrendered unconditionally and there was no need for an offensive invasion. Irv never got over the guilt. He would volunteer at a Japanese art museum in Florida during his retirement years, I think as a way to make amends for the fact that he lived when so many others died. After the war Irv and Nora married, and while they continued to help young women get the care they needed, they also found that they had the opposite problem. They wanted children, but Nora wasn’t getting pregnant. In the 1940s any pregnancy failure was a woman’s fault, and so that’s where their efforts focused, on Nora.

Sometimes, when I think about this family story, I wonder what it would be like to fictionalize it, give it more weight. Does it need more weight? Isn’t the truth heavy enough? I imagine Irv in the army, part of the American occupation of Japan. He meets a woman, falls in love, and they have a passionate forbidden affair as Japan turns itself away from the failures of imperialism and embraces western democracy. Michiko—that’s her name—writes him when he returns to New York. They correspond for months, a fire in letters he keeps hidden, having them sent to his accounting office in Manhattan, not far from Union Square. Eventually—and you’ve seen this coming—she writes that she’s had Irv’s child, can he send some money, which he does, regularly. If we believe this story, it’s because we’ve heard it before.

Michiko writes that the child, Haruka, has Irv’s blue eyes, and what he wouldn’t give for a glimpse of an infant Japanese girl with blue eyes, how rare a treasure. What does Nora ever do but moan and wail and fail again.

What’s wrong with you, Irv thought, or maybe asked. Why can’t you make a baby?

Did Irv ask this question, or did Nora’s mother? Are you sure you’re doing it right? Nora wouldn’t have admitted this problem to just anyone. Did her own mother even know? What could they tell their friends, who were all having several children? Irv could go back to Japan. The army was still there. He could get back his commission, of course he could. He could do what he wanted.

In 1948, as the first images of the concentration camps made their way to mass media, and four years before the real effects of atomic fallout came to be known around the world, Nora sought help from a discrete NYU doctor she’d found through the underground abortion network. The doctor tested Nora for fertility and found nothing abnormal.

“The next step,” Dr. Kleegman said, “is to test your husband.”

What did Nora do? Did she tell Irv? How? What was that scene like? We have to imagine their apartment. This is Stuyvesant Town, August, 1949. A kitchen tight and damp as wet socks. Heat that cooks your tongue. Air thick as soup, breathe it in. Irv comes home from work at 5:18pm. He walks from the office in less than 20, a dream commute, the lucky son of a—lucky? Nora hasn’t prepared any kind of food. She was never a good cook, but she tried to follow the script. On this day, a Wednesday, nothing. So Irv asked, “what is it? Nor?”

Does he ask so tenderly? I don’t think so. He’s blind. Try that line again:

“Where’s diner?”

She doesn’t know where to begin. She hasn’t told him anything. About NYU, about the testing. What to say?

“I’ve been seeing a doctor.”

Does she realize what she’s said? Does Irv?

His shoulders sink, the first time he’s relaxed in weeks. A thousand wayward thoughts pass through. She’s always wanted a doctor, what Jewish woman wouldn’t. With some quack she’s stepping out? It’s so hot in here, not even a glass of water. A lot of good he’s done, for her problem, a lot of good. Wait, is that why… she’s been… with him, this quack, is he one of them who… is he the reason why…

Of course, Irv thinks. It all makes sense. And this is the ticket, now I can get back to Michiko, to Haruka. He stares out through the kitchen door, into the living room. The piano is dusty. He can see it from here, the dust. How can she let it sit like that.

He should be purple with fury. Nora can’t refuse a divorce now.

“We have options,” Nora says.

“We’ll have to make some changes, that’s for sure.”

“She says we both take tests.”

“She who?”

“This is real science, Irv. New York University.”

“She who? What test?”

“You remember. We never knew her name. It’s Kleegman. We sent that girl to her, that girl from Bayside, but we never knew her name.”

“Kleegman who?”

“Doctor Sophia Kleegman. She’s a fertility specialist at NYU. I’ve been seeing her.”

“Seeing… her.”

“Irv. We have options. She wants to meet you.”

Where are those blue eyes now?

I can’t find the moment, not yet. Was there one single moment, a clear distinction, a before/after one-way gate? Before this moment, Nora was a barren woman. After this moment, Irv was a sterile man. How did the power dynamics shift in that apartment, in that marriage? Did Irv lose all standing all at once? Did it take weeks for Nora to realize what she had now gained?

Was there disbelief? Denial? Blame? Shouting? Name-calling? What was Irv thinking? When it finally came out, the word “sterile,” what did he think? You must be mistaken, I have a child, Haruka, in Japan. She has my eyes.

Michiko? This whole time. Haruka? There is no Haruka.

AND

How could you do this to me? Everything was going so well. How could you do this?

Here’s what I know for sure: In 1947 Irv and Nora had been married for two years and had no children. In 1950 my mother was born. Somewhere in that three-year period pioneer physician Sophia Kleegman (we think it was her) determined that Nora was not barren, as they had assumed, but that Irv was sterile, due to childhood radiation exposure. Nora agreed to undergo a brand new experimental illegal treatment that wasn’t yet known as in vitro fertilization. The only thing Sophia shared about the sperm donor was that he was a Jewish medical student with blue eyes. Nora became one of the first women in the world to successfully conceive via IVF. Three years later she did it again, a different donor this time, and my Uncle Stan was born.

Apparently the med students’ motivation for donating sperm was the staggering death toll of the holocaust, just becoming known around the world.

There’s plenty to play with here. Kleegman, who died in 1971, needs exploration, and there are a few good sources. A German called Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen accidentally discovered X-rays in 1895. Irv and Nora are buried together in a Long Island cemetery right next to jazz band leader Count Basie, whose most famous album is titled Atomic Basie. I’d love to know more about Einstein and special relativity and how that theory made the bomb work. In the meantime, though, there’s something that bugs me.

Does the story work better with Michiko or without her? I like that she gives Irv hope and a few moments of joy, which god knows he needs. I like that she gives him a chance to push back on Kleegman’s suggestions. At the same time she feels like a race fantasy. I don’t see that as a moral problem so much as a cheap narrative cheat. Blue-eyed baby? You buy that?

So I’m not part of the story?

Sorry, love, no. You’re not.

Late in the game to cut me out. What about Haruka?

Like Irv said. There is no Haruka.

You want to know what I think?

How are you still here?

It’s not Irv who’s in love with an imaginary Japanese girl.

This is just great.

I’m going nowhere.

Special Relativity

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