Ulric Neisser

perhaps not even overtly, but with feeling. Hans and Charlotte had foreign accents, scholarly
interests, European cultural values, academic friends. I would have none of all that; their ways
were not for an American boy like me. This deliberate rejection was successful, and I became
100% American in thought and deed. But success came at a price: not wanting to have anything
to do with grown-up culture, I essentially wasted my adolescence. It is in high school that kids
begin to read novels, play instruments, write poetry, form political identities, fall in love. I did
none of those things. I never even went to New York City, which was only an auto-plus-subway
ride away from Floral Park. In later years I have tried to catch up on what I missed in
adolescence, but I'm still a bit behind.
Another factor may also have been important. I knew myself to be a smart kid, but my
father the German-educated professor was even smarter. On one occasion when a school
assignment required looking things up, I asked my mother why we didn't have an encyclopedia
in the house as other families did. Her answer was simple: "Because your father knows
everything." (Half a century later, I'm still not sure if she was joking.) One way to avoid that
particular competition was to stick to things outside Hans Neisser's expertise - baseball, for
example.
In many other ways, however, it was a good life. As the spoiled younger brother of an
older sister, I was indulged and rarely criticized. My parents never tried to indoctrinate me in
anything. On the contrary: for some reason that I don't yet understand, they were surprisingly
reticent. This was the 1940s, and yet there were no discussions of socialism, communism, and
democracy in our house. Did I just not listen? Whatever the reason, I grew up with almost no
views on such matters. An even stranger example concerns the Nazi persecution of the Jews,
which had determined the course of our own lives. To the best of my recollection, we never
talked about it. One consequence of this silence was that I didn't even know my father was
Jewish! Thus I also didn't know that I was Jewish myself (at least by the Nazi criteria), and that I
would surely have ended in a concentration camp had we not left Germany. This seems an odd
thing not to know, but to the best of my recall I learned it only years later, in reminiscent
conversations with my mother.
In contrast, I knew quite a lot about my mother. Although she had rejected Catholicism in
her youth, Lotte still retained a strong religious sensibility. (Perhaps for that reason, my sister
and I were formally christened just before our Atlantic voyage.) Once settled in America she
became a Presbyterian, joining a church in Swarthmore and then another in Floral Park. To
please her I joined them too, though I was fairly dubious about the God hypothesis. My father
never accompanied us to church; I took it for granted that he was some kind of non-churchgoing
Lutheran.
As far back as I can remember, it was assumed that I would become a "scientist." Where
this strong conviction came from I do not know; certainly not from knowledge of science itself. I
had a chemistry set, but was never very interested in it. The science courses at Sewanhaka were
not exciting. Popular accounts of Einstein's theory of relativity were available, but I had no real
grasp of it. In my senior year I read up on atomic bombs and nuclear fission as part of a science
competition, but was quite aware that I didn't really understand the material and unsurprised
when I failed to win. As for psychology, I don't think I had ever heard of it.
Senior year was marked by the acquisition of a first girl friend; we smooched in a clumsy
sort of way, but I was still socially awkward. Soon it was time to apply to college: Harvard was
my first choice. I took the SAT and the Miller Analogies Test, getting a perfect score on the
latter. I applied to the Harvard Club of Long Island for support, and was interviewed by the radio
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