The Noethers

THE NOETHERS tells the story of an encounter (and romance) between a young woman of Italian descent, Emiliana Pasca, and a young man of German descent, Gottfried Noether. Both became Americans in the dramatic circumstances of World War II before establishing themselves in academia-she in the field of modern history, he in mathematical statistics. To tell their stories, the book retraces the parallel lives of "Liliana" and "Friedel" from their births in Great War Europe to their...
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THE NOETHERS tells the story of an encounter (and romance) between a young woman of Italian descent, Emiliana Pasca, and a young man of German descent, Gottfried Noether. Both became Americans in the dramatic circumstances of World War II before establishing themselves in academia-she in the field of modern history, he in mathematical statistics. To tell their stories, the book retraces the parallel lives of "Liliana" and "Friedel" from their births in Great War Europe to their rebirths in interwar America. Further back in time, it recounts a double family saga of grandfathers and grandmothers, mothers and fathers-and formidable aunts. From Southern Italy and Southern Germany to Siberia and Arizona, Liliana's and Friedel's adventures take place against the backdrop of twentieth-century splendors and miseries, Italian emigration and Jewish diaspora, Nazi crimes and Stalinist purges, encompassing a surprising variety of characters, major and minor, venerable and forgotten: from Neapolitan musician immigrants in New York's Roaring Twenties to that famous German physicist refugee in Princeton, Albert Einstein, as the Noethers reconcile the ghosts of their pasts with their promising futures in the New World.