Mishpacha contributors share accounts of those special summers disconnected from the grind

When our vacation plans switched from the French countryside to the Catskills, I pictured a dilapidated bungalow with a rickety table and beds, sagging couch, and squeaky porch. My vision wasn’t far off, but in the end, none of that mattered. Who could care, when you were sharing a yard with the gadol hador?

Location: Camp Staten Island, Catskill Mountains

Year: Early 1980s

Shortly after I married my math professor husband, I was delighted to learn that for academicians, the summer months were a professional collaboration opportunity. Be it a teaching position, a conference, or the chance to work one-on-one with a colleague to publish a research paper, the world was our oyster. My late husband, Dr. Eliezer (Leon) Ehrenpreis, had a standing appointment to teach at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for a minimum of one month every summer. The remaining time was open to any one of many destinations, the common denominator being the presence of other mathematicians interested in Fourier Analysis in Several Complex Variables (his first book, published in 1970), The Universality of the Radon Transform (his second, in 2003), or something in a related field.

Our first summer, we visited Japan, and the following year, I found myself pushing a stroller along the paths of Bures-sur-Yvette, a charming little town south of Paris that is home to the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, where my husband met with mathematicians from around the world to share research. Several summers found us in Paris, where my husband lectured at the Sorbonne, a division of the Université de Paris (he was fluent in French).

As our family grew, we had to make some concessions, and one summer when we couldn’t find housing that would accommodate young children in Paris, we rented a charming villa in Massy, a suburb of Paris. My husband took a train to Paris every day to lecture while I tried to figure out how to run a house in an area where very few people, including our landlady, spoke English. My children found Versailles pleasant, but my three-year-old threw a tantrum when he discovered there was no Coke machine in the Louvre Museum and we had just stood in line for an hour in the Parisian summer heat to see the picture of some lady staring at nothing in particular.

Over time, our travels became more domestic. We spent several summers in Berkeley, California, where my husband lectured at the University of California–Berkeley, and our children went to the local Chabad day camp. One of my favorite summers was in Bowdoin, Maine, where my husband ran a conference for the American Mathematical Society. We rented a house from a fisherman who took us out in his fishing boat to an island near the coast, where we saw herds of seals.

But the year that stands out most is the year my husband walked in the door after Rav Moshe Feinstein’s Sunday morning shiur, which he attended for decades, and excitedly told me he had great plans for us.