Experiment Eleven (2 page)

By the middle of October, he had confirmed that 18-16 and D-1 were indeed behaving like good producers of a new antibiotic. On October 19 at two o'clock in the afternoon, he placed a culture of his
Actinomyces griseus
in a test tube and sealed it for posterity by heating the end over a Bunsen burner and twisting the glass shut. That weekend, he wrapped the tube in
cotton wool, put it in his pocket, and caught the train from the Rutgers University town of New Brunswick to Newark, then the bus to Passaic, where his parents lived in a working-class section of the textile town on the Passaic River. There, he showed the test tube to his father, Julius, and his uncle Joe and presented it to his mother, Rachel. She had not finished grade school and had no real idea what the test tube represented. He told her that he had found a new medicine that might eventually fight the infectious diseases, maybe even tuberculosis, that she had seen too often destroying the lives of her friends and neighbors. That she could understand.

The schatz family came from the
peasant class in the old Russia, and their entry into America is an immigrant story of the kind often told at the turn of the twentieth century. Albert's grandfather, Shlomo (Sam) Schatz, was a butcher, and his grandmother's family, the Tunicks, were known for their physical strength and much revered in the community for forming
local vigilante committees
to defend Jews during the pogroms. Sam himself was a strong man who once, legend has it, leaped on a bull that was running amok through the village and wrestled it to the ground. But Russia was a barren and hostile place, especially for Jews, and Sam left his village on the outskirts of Minsk in 1899 and immigrated to America, leaving his pregnant wife, Rose, and their five children with her father, Ephraim. He arrived at Ellis Island and moved in with a cousin on Manhattan's Lower East Side. It took him five years, working as a house-painter, to save enough money to bring his family, including Albert's father, Julius, to New York.

The family lived in a walkup, and soon after their arrival one child died of a weak heart. They moved into a Brooklyn tenement, and Sam and Rose had six more children, but the man who could wrestle a bull grew weak from
heavy smoking
and living in the putrid city air. When doctors told him he should leave for a life in the country, the Jewish community had just the answer.

Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a German-born Jewish banker, gave mortgages to immigrant Jews to enable them to build their own barns and homes. He also set up the small Woodbine Agricultural College in New
Jersey to produce “intelligent, practical farmers.” With the help of Hirsch funds, Sam Schatz bought a dirt farm in Fitchville, Connecticut, joining other Jewish settlers in small communities across the state. On most of these farms the soil was poor, exhausted by Yankee farmers who had abandoned it to move west or, in some cases, for better jobs in the cities.

The Schatzes were the first Jewish family at Bird's Eye View Farm, a stone house, two wooden barns, and a manure pit built on a rise known as Cannonball Hill. The family scratched a living from a dozen milk cows and some chickens. They sold vegetables in the spring, and in the summer they took in boarders from the city. While the urban renters lived in the farmhouse and enjoyed the great outdoors, the Schatz family lived in tents. Julius joined the U.S. Army in World War One, and after he returned, he was delivering vegetables by horse cart to nearby Norwich one day when he met a pretty, dark-haired young woman named Rachel Martin who worked in a bakery. They soon married. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland who had come to America via Britain.

On February 2, 1920, Albert Schatz was born in a Norwich hospital. The family stayed on the farm until he was three, when they moved to Passaic, New Jersey, where Julius's sister Rebecca and her husband, Abe, had a grocery store. They lived in a wooden three-story house with six apartments, three at the front and three at the back. Two girls were born, and the family moved back and forth from Passaic to the farm, wherever there was work. As soon as he was able, Albert helped out on the farm. He learned how to sharpen farm tools, milk cows, make butter and cheese, and drive the horse cart. When he was older, he shot groundhogs, mended his own clothes, and darned his socks. He attended the local one-room school-house, which had one teacher and twenty students, grades one through eight. The building was twenty by twenty-five feet and had two entrances, one for boys and one for girls. Albert wanted to be a farmer, like his father and grandfather.

During the Great Depression the family lived mostly in Passaic. They joined other immigrants from Eastern Europe—Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and Russians. Albert witnessed much poverty and sickness, people fighting for scraps on the garbage dumps and dying from infectious diseases, like pneumonia, diphtheria, and, of course, tuberculosis. It was a raw and sometimes violent period. One of the young boy's lasting memories was of the bloody police charges that ended the fourteen-month-long Passaic
textile workers' strike involving fifteen thousand workers, in 1926–27. The police dispersed the strikers with horses and water cannons, and schools were often closed. Despite the disruptions, Albert managed to stay in classes and was a consistently promising student at Passaic High School.

Albert Schatz, age twelve, with his mother, sisters Sheila and Elaine, and his maternal grandmother on the Connecticut farm in 1932.
(Courtesy Vivian Schatz
)

In his junior year, in 1936, when he was sixteen, he contributed three paragraphs to the school newspaper about his “life's ambition,” to be a farmer. He did not seek wealth “for I should not know what to do with it.” He wanted to “sweat by honest labor” and to “roam the open fields.” He wanted to chop wood until his muscles ached. “
I want to LIVE
.”

Aged eighteen, Albert won a scholarship to the Rutgers' College of Agriculture, the first in his family ever to attend an institution of higher learning. In his second year, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, a rare achievement for an “aggie.” The head of the Department of Soil Microbiology, Dr. Waksman, was another Jewish immigrant of Russian descent. He was always on the lookout for bright young graduates, and was happy to accept Albert as a Ph.D. candidate.

SELMAN ABRAHAM WAKSMAN,
the man behind the intense wartime hunt for antibiotics at Rutgers, was no ordinary soil scientist. Like the Schatz family, Waksman had arrived in America at the beginning of the twentieth
century, but he came from a different social order and had achieved much in the New World.

He was born on July 8, 1888, according to the old Russian calendar, in the small market town of Novaya Priluka, in western Ukraine, two hundred miles from the regional capital of Kiev. He wrote in his memoir that it was “
a mere dot
in the boundless steppes,” surrounded by chernozem, the fertile black earth on which wheat, rye, barley, and oats flourished, as long as the rains came. Without them, famine swept the land. The inhabitants of the small towns and villages of Western Ukraine were recently freed serfs who scratched a living from smallholdings, and Jewish artisans and tradesman who marketed the farm and forest products.

His life there was simple, but not uncomfortable. His father was the relatively well-off son of a coppersmith and had inherited property. His mother was the daughter of a successful businesswoman who ran a dry goods store, a “
prominent merchant
in the community.” His mother had inherited the store, and together his parents were able to pay for Selman's private tutors.

Immediately after marriage, his father had been drafted, like all able-bodied men, into the czar's army for five years, leaving Selman's mother to carry on her business and fend for herself. When his father had returned from service, Selman had been born, but his father showed little interest in being with his son, most of the time living twenty miles away in the nearest large city, Vinnitsa, where he had inherited property. Selman was brought up by his mother, several aunts and maiden cousins, and his maternal grandmother, who had eight daughters. Selman was the son of the youngest daughter. Inevitably,
he was spoiled
.

His mother taught him to read and sent him to the local heder (private school) and then to private tutors. She also made sure that he studied the Bible and the Talmud. The young Selman quickly learned Hebrew and Russian literature, history, and geography. And he was frequently picked as the one to read a chapter from the Bible or deliver the blessing on the initiate at a bar mitzvah.

Jews and Ukrainians lived side by side in Novaya Priluka. The Waksmans lived in the wealthier part of town. His mother gave birth to a daughter when Selman was seven, but the daughter died less than two years later of diphtheria.

In the Waksman household there was usually money left over to help
a needy niece or nephew, or the less fortunate on the town's poorer side. Encouraged by his mother, Selman gave free lessons in Hebrew and Russian, and later private lessons to the sons of the wealthier inhabitants and the richer peasants.

The first Russian uprising of 1904–05 did not affect little Novaya Priluka, but revolution was in the air. Selman's friends were divided on the future. One believed that socialism was inevitable, and another, the Zionists, looked for salvation in a new homeland in Palestine. Selman was uncommitted, with divided sympathies—on the fringe of the two groups. Instinctively, he favored the revolutionaries, but he disliked the fierce arguments over the form of a future government, should a revolution be successful. He was more interested in pursuing a higher education, but the way was blocked because he was a Jew. He could not enter the gymnasium or go on to university without passing a special competitive exam.

In 1908, he left with four friends for Odessa to be coached, at a price, for the crucial exam. He passed “with
flying colors
” and returned home a hero now set to attend university in Odessa. But suddenly he suffered a terrible blow. In the summer of 1909, his mother died of an intestinal blockage. During the seven days of mourning, he read and reread the Bible, “
perhaps for the last time
.”

He returned to Odessa to find new political barriers. Candidates for the university had to have been born in Odessa or have spent the last twenty years there. Selman managed to bribe a government official to give him the necessary papers, but when his friends were refused admission, they all decided to leave Russia for good. He thought briefly of going to Switzerland, a destination favored by his father, but his cousins in Philadelphia, having heard of his mother's death, urged him to join them.

In October 1910, Selman and a group of five young people from Novaya Priluka, three men and two women, left by train for Bremen, and thence for America. They landed in Philadelphia on November 2.

BY THE BEGINNING
of the twentieth century more than three million Russians had immigrated to the United States. Waksman, now aged twenty-two, went to work on his cousin's five-acre farm near Metuchen, New Jersey, thirty miles from New York City. He helped with the hens, learned how to make compost from stable manures, and planted vegetables in the
spring for local markets. His cousin was a great teacher, and at the end of his first year Waksman published an article in the
Rural New Yorker
titled “How I Raised a Flock of Chickens,” for which he was paid his
first ten dollars
.