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	INTERVIEW Connecting With Dots Abraham Nemeth has lighted the path for his blind brethren to find their place in higher mathematics—and in the Sabbath service. INTERVIEW BY Blake Eskin Born blind in 1918, Abraham Nemeth grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household on the Lower East Side. Like many children of his generation, he exhibited an early thirst for knowledge, both secular and religious. After developing the Nemeth Code, the pioneering system which became the North American standard for Braille mathematical notation, he earned a Ph.D., then taught mathematics and computer science at the University of Detroit for 30 years. He also transcribes Hebrew prayer books, which are distributed upon request by the Jewish Braille Institute of America. What was your education like? I went to the regular New York City public school system. So I went to arithmetic class and history class and spelling class with all the other kids. But when the other kids had penmanship or art or some purely visual subject, I returned to the resource room. There, my teacher taught me Braille and typing and maybe had a large globe of the world so that I could learn geography. With respect to my Jewish education, I am a prime example of a kid who never went to a yeshiva or a cheder or a Talmud Torah. My grandfather was a kosher butcher on the Lower East Side. He was a very learned gentleman who made sure I learned what I needed to learn. How did you two study? My grandfather would take me to shul of a shabbes afternoon, with nobody else there. And for hours, he would read to me and explain to me and I was receptive. When it came time for my bar mitzvah, I memorized what I had to recite in shul. And when I did the recitation, my father came over to me, put his arm lovingly across my shoulder, and said, "You may be proud of yourself. You made three grown men cry." My father used to make a metaphor between the real Abraham of the Bible and me: "And God said to Abraham, 'Get you out of your community and away from your elders and away from your father's house and go to a land which I will show you.'" And so you gravitated to mathematics? I made a detour first. My counselor at college told me that mathematics was kind of off-limits for a blind person, so I studied psychology. And I have a master's degree in psychology from Columbia University. Some guys like to go out of a weeknight and play poker or pinochle or go bowling. My entertainment years ago was to go to Brooklyn College and take more math courses. This was in 1945 or '46, and the men who were coming home had already taken the first semester of calculus, and they were eligible to take the second course. I'm sure your imagination is fertile enough to imagine how much of calculus they remembered after the war. So we had a room set aside for help, and I would be one of the volunteers. One Friday night I get a telegram—my brother is reading it to me—from the chairman of the math department. One of his staff members had become ill; would I take his classes for the semester? That's how I got my first teaching job. I was just taking recreational math classes. How did you take notes? On a Braille slate with a stylus, poking out dots, using an earlier code that fell apart at the seams right after ninth-grade algebra. It couldn't handle higher-level mathematics; it couldn't hardly handle geometry. You know, the thing is, how a Braille system works is a reflection of what society in general thinks of the capability of blind people. So I would write crazy notation that only I could read. For the first three days you can read your own shorthand, after that you can't read it either. Then I said, How could I make it so it could always be intelligible? I came up with guidelines and then I began to devise symbols. How long did it take you? About three or four years. I wanted a system that would work in every course and at every level. But as far as I was concerned, I didn't have in mind that it would be used by anyone besides myself. Then how did other blind people discover your system? I was working at the American Foundation for the Blind. There was a gentlemen there who had a doctorate in physics from Columbia University, he was blind, and he asked me if I had a table of integrals. I said, "Yes, but you won't understand it." He said, "I'm desperate. Teach me your private code." He was a member of the Joint Braille Uniform Committee—something like the Bureau of Standards—and they had a subcommittee on mathematics. I presented it on a Friday morning and they adopted it on Friday afternoon. Has the Nemeth Code changed much since 1952? It went through four revisions. Every subject has its own jargon and its own notation, there was new notation in chaos theory that is not part of regular mathematics. I also devised a standard system for reading mathematical formulas out loud. It's called mathspeak. It's compatible with the Nemeth Code. How did you learn Hebrew Braille? When I was asked to proofread. The first book they put in Hebrew Braille was the Bible. It was a long project, it spanned the 1930s and 1940s. Before that time, there were Hebrew Braille codes that were indigenous to different communities, but in another community nobody could read it—America versus France, or France versus Germany. Now there's a single international Hebrew Braille code, used even in Israel. There was a lady in Cleveland, her name was Mrs. Cole, who learned the Hebrew Braille code and transcribed the Bible. And different people who were sort of knowledgeable proofread the material. Now there's a problem with proofreading, because there are some grammatical errors which are traditional and which have to be preserved. And the question is: Which ones are Masoretic errors that have been around for thousands of years and which ones are recently created by a lady in Cleveland? I was familiar with the orthography. Even though I had no way of writing it, I could tell if a word was spelled wrong. My father was holding a standard copy of the Tanach, and I would spell word for word to make sure that every word in the Braille corresponded. I didn't do the whole Bible, I only did the Psalms and the minor prophets. Is Hebrew Braille written like Hebrew? In Hebrew Braille, the symbol for the vowel is not underneath, but follows the letter which it affects. Also, some letters have final form, but in Braille the nun is the same no matter whether it occurs in the middle of a word or the end of the word. After proofreading the Bible, you moved on to transcribing prayer books? I did the High Holiday prayer book. The Silverman version, that's the Conservative version in those days. Now I didn't transcribe it page-for-page into Braille. I organized the prayers in such a way that a blind person should take with him one Braille volume to the service for the particular occasion. For the Kol Nidre service you would take one volume. In the morning he would take with him only what he needed for the morning service, enough to take him through the Torah reading. For Yom Kippur, I needed four volumes altogether. Why so many volumes? Braille is bulky. When I have an occasion to show someone who has never seen a Braille book before, I tell him that it doesn't take many of these books to make a dozen. They're not heavy, but they're big, the pages are separated by the height of the dots. So you may take 100 or 110 sheets of paper, but it may look like the Manhattan telephone directory. What else? I did the complete Conservative prayer book. That's all done, and I'm currently working on the ArtScroll prayer book, that's the Orthodox one. A lady in New York, she gives me the raw Hebrew text. And then I got from the Jewish Braille Institute the English text, and I have to put them together and modify some of the instructions. It's complicated. Maybe I can do five or ten pages a day. I'm also updating the Nemeth Code. And is someone proofreading your work? No. The guy who did some of the proofreading in Israel died suddenly. Nobody known to JBI is competent enough to do it. Can anyone else help you? I told the JBI I really need to train somebody because I'm 85 years old, and I'm very thankful to the Lord that whatever he has done to me, he has not tampered with my mind. They have a lady in mind who's quite knowledgeable in Hebrew, and they want her to come train, watch me work or let her work under my supervision a while, but they haven't arranged that yet. What do you read for pleasure? I don't have much time. I subscribe to Kiplinger's Personal Finance, PC World, and of course I get the Jewish Braille Review. Once in a while, I'm interested in something that's not in Braille, so I'll order it. I got a set of cassettes, the stories of Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish. At the Library of Congress there is a wax cylinder which has the voice of Sholem Aleichem himself reading a paragraph out of Ven ikh bin rotshild—"If I Were Rothschild." So I know what the voice of Sholem Aleichem sounded like. But I'm a dedicated Braille reader. I don't like listening. Listening is not reading. Do you think you're reading when you're listening to the radio or television? It's a different activity. If all you ever did is listen, it would be a long time before you spell Chicago correctly. I can stop and digest a point that I want to think about, or I can skip a paragraph that I'm not interested in. Do you see your work in the tradition of the Jewish scribe? I don't consider myself a scribe. A scribe copies from one manuscript to another, and he's careful in his penmanship, and his format, but that's all. I'm making material available to other people that otherwise wouldn't be available, but that's not my primary function. My primary function is to put the prayers together in such a way that a blind person doesn't have to shlep I don't know how many volumes. When you're on page 30 and the rabbi says, "Turn to page 512," you can't do that in Braille, you know? Does transcribing ever become a form of worship? Sometimes you don't want to read for grammatical correctness, you just want to envelop yourself in the psalm. I have to resist that temptation when I'm actually putting it down in Braille correctly. I must not get emotionally involved in the passages when I'm putting them into Braille. I always think how happy I would have been to have something in Braille when I needed it, and if I can make it available to somebody else, I'm happy to do it. I would like to have the Talmud and the Gemara so I could study with other learned people, but I don't have it in Braille. But you have studied the Talmud? Oh yes. With my grandfather, one-on-one, by mouth to ear. The Oral Law, you know? Blake Eskin is editor of Nextbook.org. Photos by Fabrizio Costantini