The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(16)

Shamir was Danny’s first real friend. “The other kids in class felt there was some distance between them and him,” said Shamir. “He wasn’t looking for groups. He was very selective. He didn’t need more than one friend.” Danny spoke no Hebrew when he arrived in Israel the year before, but by the time he arrived at school in Tel Aviv he spoke it fluently, and spoke English better than anyone else in the class. “He was considered brilliant,” says Shamir. “I used to tease him: ‘You are going to be famous.’ And he would feel very uncomfortable about it. I hope I am not reading history back, but I think there was a feeling that he would go a long way.”

It was clear to all that Danny wasn’t like the other boys. He wasn’t trying to be unusual; he just was. “He was the only one in our class who tried to develop a proper English accent,” said Shamir. “We all found that very funny. He was different in many ways. To some extent he was an outsider. And it was because of his personality, not because he was a refugee.” Even at the age of fourteen Danny was less a boy than an intellectual trapped in a boy’s body. “He was always absorbed in some problem or question,” said Shamir. “I remember one day he showed me a long essay he wrote for himself—which was strange, because writing essays was a burden which you only did for school, on the subject the teacher assigned. The whole idea of writing a very long essay on a subject that had nothing to do with the curriculum just because the subject interested him: That impressed me very much. He compared the personality of an English gentleman with that of a Greek aristocrat at the time of Herakles.” Shamir felt that Danny was searching books and his own mind for a direction most children get from the people around them. “I think he was looking for an ideal,” he said. “A role model.”

The war of independence lasted for ten months. A Jewish state that was the size of Connecticut before the war wound up a bit bigger than New Jersey. One percent of the Israeli population had been killed (the equivalent of ninety thousand dead in New Jersey). Ten thousand Arabs had died, and three-quarters of a million Palestinians were displaced. After the war, Danny’s mother moved them back to Jerusalem. There Danny made his second close friend, a boy of English descent named Ariel Ginsburg.

Tel Aviv was poor, but Jerusalem was even poorer. Basically no one owned a camera, or a phone, or even a doorbell. If you wanted to see a friend you had to walk to his house and knock on the door or whistle. Danny would walk to Ariel’s house, whistle, and Ariel would come down and they’d head to the YMCA to swim and play Ping-Pong without uttering a word. Danny thought that was just perfect: Ginsburg reminded him of Phileas Fogg. “Danny was different,” says Ginsburg. “He felt apart and he kept himself apart—up to a point. I was his only friend.”

In just a few years after the war of independence, the Jewish population of what was now called Israel doubled, from 600,000 to 1.2 million. There can have been no time or place on earth where it was easier and more strongly encouraged for a Jewish person newly arrived in a country to assimilate into the local population. And yet, in spirit, Danny did not assimilate. The people to whom he gravitated were all native-born Israelis rather than fellow immigrants. But he himself did not seem Israeli. Like many Israeli boys and girls, he joined the scouts—then quit when he and Ariel decided the group was not for them. Although he’d learned Hebrew with incredible speed, he and his mother spoke French at home, often in angry tones. “It was not a happy home,” says Ginsburg. “His mother was a bitter woman. His sister got out of there as fast as she could.” Danny didn’t accept Israel’s offer of a new prepackaged identity. He accepted its offer of a place to create his own.

What that identity would be was hard to pin down, because Danny himself was so hard to pin down: He didn’t seem to wish to settle anywhere in particular. What attachments he formed felt loose and provisional. Ruth Ginsburg, who was then dating and would soon marry Danny’s close friend, said, “Danny decided very early on that he would not take responsibility. I had the feeling that there was a need within him to always rationalize his unrootedness. A person who does not need roots. To have this view of life as a series of coincidences—it happened this way but it could just as well have happened some other way. You make the best of it within these godless conditions.”

Danny’s lack of need for a place or a group to belong to was especially glaring in a land of people hungry for a place and a people. “I came in 1948 and I wanted to be like they are,” recalls Yeshu Kolodny, a professor of geology at Hebrew University, Danny’s age, whose extended family also had been wiped out in the Holocaust. “Meaning I wanted to wear sandals and shorts rolled up and learn the name of every goddamn wadi [valley] or mountain—and mainly I wanted to lose my Russian accent. I was a little bit ashamed of my story. I came to worship the heroes of my people. Danny didn’t feel that way. He looked down on this place.”

Danny was a refugee in the way that, say, Vladimir Nabokov was a refugee. A refugee who kept his distance. A refugee with airs. And a sharp eye for the locals. At the age of fifteen he took a vocational test that identified him as a psychologist. It didn’t surprise him.* He’d always sensed that he would be some sort of professor, and the questions he had about human beings were more interesting to him than any others. “My interest in psychology was as a way to do philosophy,” he said. “To understand the world by understanding why people, especially me, see it as they do. By then the question of whether God exists left me cold. But the question of why people believe God exists I found really fascinating. I was not really interested in right and wrong. But I was very interested in indignation. Now that’s a psychologist!”