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became the basis for a lifelong fear of abandonment.
    By 1938, the year Lisa was torn from the life she loved, my father had escaped from his world of poverty and betrayal to the world of college intellectuals. Intelligent, enterprising, and seemingly confident, Laurence now lived far away from the coal town of his youth. He stylishly joined the Socialist party and, for the first time in his life, met educated Jewish émigrés. He aspired to one day join the world of the bourgeoisie.
    In 1940, Laurence was introduced to Miss Lisa Philip, the physical therapist at Penn State’s Student Health Services. I believe it was my mother’s cultured and affluent background that enchanted the young doctoral candidate. Lisa, a beautiful German, lent legitimacy to my father’s own endeavors. Her distinguished lineage (her cousin, James Franck, won the Nobel Prize in Physics; her uncle, Oscar Hirsch, was a world-renowned Viennese brain surgeon) provided impressive credentials to the ambitious student from West Virginia.
    Desirous of making a life with promising roots for herself, Lisa began to date the Ph.D. candidate and in 1941 they became engaged to be married. But my father, who had remained chaste, was very troubled that his fiancé had been intimate with another man before him. Her culture and experience cast a shadow on his fragile self-esteem.
    However, Lisa believed if they truly loved one another, her past could be forgotten. Fearful of any more upheavals in her already tumultuous life, my mother became apologetic, outwardly meek, and obedient. On October 18, 1941, their marriage of thirty years began.
    Unfortunately, Lisa would never be able to bury her past enough to calm the demons inside her innocent country boy’s head. In 1943, she made the following entry into her diary:
There is one thing that is causing me to be more desperate and unhappy than I ever thought I could be, living as well as I do, having a perfect little son and a good husband. It is the opinion another person one greatly cares for has of one … I would have repented and tried to be as good a person as I could, but now things seem to be pulled out from under me. There is nothing. I see, no ground to stand on …
    A few months later, she wrote a letter to her husband:
Dear Larry,
There is neither a going back to, nor a future. All I have ever hoped for seems to be denied to me … I want a home and children … I want to feel part of you. When things are all right between the two of us, my love for Tom is happy, and it fills me with contentment and a feeling of security to see him play and feel good. But when things are the way they have become now, my love for him is not a real, true unselfish love, because I try to regain from my love for him, what I have lost in you. And since this is not possible … my love becomes desperate … You cannot believe my feeling toward you, because you cannot feel it. You are a prisoner of yourself, because selfishness prevents you from overcoming your limits …
    With three little children under the age of four, she was washing diapers and sheets by hand and hanging them outside on a clothesline to dry. She was weary, having to manage without servants and without the loving support of her own family. Her isolation grew when she could no longer share her thoughts with her German friend Annelise, as it was forbidden to communicate with anyone in an enemy country. Finally, when the war ended, Lisa excitedly wrote to Annelise. But the reply was devastating: Annelise and her baby had been killed in a British bombing raid. Lisa’s only remaining lifeline to Hamburg and her past was severed.

    As a child I was mostly unaware of my parents’ troubled marriage. If my mother was a mystery to me, I completely knew my father, or so I believed. There was never any doubt in my mind that my father was fiercely proud of his little “Bugsy,” his nickname for me, his small and energetic youngest child. I was sure of what pleased and