ARTHUR PAP: BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Abstract

Remembering the life of Arthur Pap it is necessary to rely on his recounting of his early life in Europe. He spoke quite vividly of his childhood, education, emigration and early years in the U.S. I also remember vividly what he told me about those years, and in these notes have striven for authenticity—there is no invention and where speculating, I have said so. We first met in spring of 1946 when I was his student—an appreciative but lazy auditor—in an introduction to philosophy course at Columbia; we married in June of that year. One is flung back into the vibrant years of a Zurich during World War I and the all too soon rise of fascism in Europe. About 1915, Mina Dorn entered into an arranged marriage with Mathys Pap—a widower and Jewish businessman from Vilna—who in his early years had escaped—during the Russian-Japanese war of 1909 —his forced conscription in the Cossack army. He fled to Berlin, then to Zurich—where he established a cartonage. There their three sons were born, the youngest of whom was Arthur Pap, born on the first of October 1921. Arthur Pap and his two older brothers attended traditional Swiss schools and began piano studies at an early age. Though the parents did not observe dietary laws and Pap later became an atheist, they did send their sons to Hebrew school—preparing them for the Bar Mitzvah. During his teens he read deeply in German literature and progressed in his piano studies. At the same time