The End of My Addiction

studies of “learned nervousness,” where, for example, the offspring of a nervous female monkey will imitate her behavior and themselves exhibit nervous behavior for the rest of their lives. But from observations of my family and others, it is clear to me that nature also contributes—vitally, but to varying degrees—to different family members’ genetic predispositions toward anxiety. For example, no one has more joie de vivre than my cousin Steve, and I could say the same of other Holocaust survivors and children of Holocaust survivors I have known.
    It should be said that anxiety is not necessarily an undesirable trait from an evolutionary point of view. Anxiety about survival helps avoid danger and motivates discovery, invention, and technological development. The question to ask about the allegedly disproportionate achievement of Jews in business, the learned professions, and the sciences is probably not whether they have higher-than-average IQs, which I doubt, but whether they have higher-than-average anxiety about being killed in recurring episodes of virulent anti-Semitism.
    Every human trait exists on a continuum from mild to pronounced. An anxiety response somewhere in the middle of the spectrum that can help alert one to danger and drive an appropriate reaction is surely useful. I believe this was true of my mother’s somewhat above-average anxiety, which she medicated with up to two packs of cigarettes a day. But at the extremes the trait loses its survival value, shading off into delusive overconfidence at one end and paralyzing panic at the other, neither a promising condition for decision-making and action.
     
    Even when we were children, there was a marked difference between my older brother and me. I remember so well a particular moment when Jean-Claude was six years old and I was four and a half. The family was going to the Alps for skiing, something we did regularly. We were going by train, and were all in the station waiting room except for my father, who was seeing to the luggage.
    Jean-Claude asked, “Maman, may I hold my ticket?”
    I piped up, “May I hold mine, too?”
    My mother hesitated for a moment, looking, I thought, more at me than at Jean-Claude. Carefully she gave us our tickets, one little pasteboard rectangle each. “Don’t lose it,” she said as she gave me mine.
    Jean-Claude inspected his ticket happily, and put it in his coat pocket, but I couldn’t let go of mine. I revolved it in my fingers, held it first in one hand and then in the other, with increasing concern about what to do with it. If I put it in my pocket, it might fall out. I couldn’t give it back to my mother while Jean-Claude still had his, and I wondered how he could be so calm.
    My mother was tapping her foot nervously while she held two-year-old Eva in her arms. “What is taking your father so long?” she fretted. “We will miss our train.”
    My mother put Eva down at her side and snapped her purse open, searching for a cigarette. Just then my father came striding up, calmly, with his usual smile on seeing us, and my mother visibly relaxed. She slid the cigarettes back in her purse. We walked to the platform and boarded the train with time to spare. I was calmer, too, when I saw my father, but I still held my ticket tight until the conductor came around, punched the tickets, and handed them all back to my mother. It was only then that I could relax and give myself over to the pure pleasure of our vacation adventure.
     
    I didn’t intend to become a doctor. I loved the piano, and dreamed of becoming a professional musician. My music teachers told my parents that I had enough talent, but that I should not leave school without passing the baccalauréat , the exam that is a prerequisite for university-level study in France. The final year of high school is devoted mainly to cramming for this exam, which takes two to three days to complete and which comes in three forms, depending on the student’s preparation: science and math, economics and social sciences, and literature and philosophy.
    In the middle of my second year of high school, I told my mother that I wanted to take the literature and philosophy baccalauréat early. My mother and I went to see the director of my school, Georges Hacquard. He loved my piano playing, and told my mother, “If he wants to become a pianist, by all means, he should try. He is the best musician we have ever had in the school.” So he wrote to the Ministry of