Page 47 - Spring 2006

Good books I have read
In a particularly moving chapter entitled “Crucifixion,” he revisits a heartbreaking encounter with his first wife. Having abandoned Weinreich and their two children a year earlier, she has narrowly survived a suicide attempt–and will not survive her next one. The chapter is a meditation on human anguish, and how the Crucifixion offers a saving perspective on suffering that might other- wise prove unbearable.
“Resurrection” deals with Christ’s return from the dead, and with Weinreich’s own near brush with mortality. Just before Easter, 2002, an MRI scan of his brain showed a tumor “the size of a tangerine.” He recounts that in the weeks prior to surgery, “I had ample time for nightmares in which I was having my head cut open while totally pow- erless to resist.” The descent under anesthesia was “the closest experience to sudden death that I can imagine.” Though mostly recovered now, “I can never again climb a ladder, walk very fast, or preach formal sermons without a script in front of me...Yet at the same time my vision of the universe has become sharper and its colors more resonant; the people around me have become more interesting, more beautiful, more challenging to understand; and the simple hope that the sun will rise again tomorrow, far from being a triviality, has become an assurance of faith, of hope, and of love.”
This is a beautiful, valuable book—one that can and should be read more than once.
Joseph Curtin, a violinmaker in Ann Arbor, Michigan, recently received a MacArthur Foundation award. He par- ticipated in the Workshop on String Instruments at the ASA meeting in Vancouver and wrote a report on “What’s New in Violins” in the Fall 2005 issue of ECHOES.
Though readers of ECHOES probably know Gabriel Weinreich best for his contributions to musical acoustics, in this beautifully written memoir he chronicles none of his scientific achievements, focusing instead on his other career–for many years he was both a fulltime physicist and the pastor of an Episcopalian church. Born in Vilna, then part of Poland and a major center of Jewish intellectual life, Weinreich was the son of an eminent linguist and scholar, and his childhood was steeped in secular Jewish culture. By the time he was twelve, however, he and his mother were fleeing the Nazis by train across Russia; they eventually rejoined his father and brother in New York.
Along with science, Weinreich’s enthusiasms included musical composition, and for some years he took lessons with a former pupil of Rimski-Korsakov. After finishing his doctorate in physics at Columbia, he worked for seven years at Bell Labs and then joined the faculty of the University of Michigan. The intellectual, emotional, and spiritual journey that changed him from a Jewish atheist into, well, a Jewish priest is the central narrative of this book.
Though “Confessions” is rich in events, memories, and anecdotes, they are summoned mainly in service of reflec- tions on a wide range of topics. Chapter titles include Ordination, Anti-Semitism, Language, Self-discipline, Religion, Morality, Music, and Faith. In “Science,” he com- pares mathematics to a game of solitaire, while “physics is a game played against Nature as your opponent. You make a move, then Nature makes a move. Thus the physicist is always trying to outwit an opponent who is infinitely more clever, a task that would be hopeless were it not for one thing: Nature does not cheat....” And neither, he argues, does God.
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Confessions of a Jewish Priest by Gabriel Weinreich (The Pilgrim Press, 2005, ISBN 0-8298-1695-X)
Joseph Curtin
few years earlier (and some of us were such newcomers to acoustics that we did not know it either). We did know that Paul was a warm, friendly, knowledgeable and wonderful- ly stabilizing force for all our younger men and women at HUSL.
At the end of the war, Paul and Cornelia returned to Riverbank. Some of the advances made in underwater sound measurements and methodology can be attrib- uted to Paul’s painstaking details and influence. John Kopec’s book The Sabines at Riverbank can provide a
much more thorough description of Paul’s life-time con- tributions to acoustics. His work in underwater sound was only a tiny part of it all. We were indeed blessed to have him with us.
Laymon Miller has had a long and varied career in acoustics at the Texas College of Mines (now UTEP), University of Texas, Harvard Underwater Sound Lab, Penn State Ordnance Research Lab (now Applied Research Laboratory), and Bolt Beranek & Newman.
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