Serendipity: Harvard Law School
SERENDIPITY: A MEMOIR
Harvard Law School
I arrived for my first semester at Harvard Law School (“HLS”) in September of1964 with my mother’s blessing as she labored in the Selwyn Theater. I needed a place to live. Therefore, I got together with a few friends and classmates from Princeton who likewise had come to Cambridge. Among them was Lewis Engel. Lew attended Tufts Medical School in Boston, while I attended Harvard Law in Cambridge.
It was a cheap but well-located apartment at 187 Beacon Street in Somerville, just at the border between Somerville and Cambridge. It took me only about fifteen minutes to walk to the Harvard campus. I designed and printed letterhead for my roommates and me with the comic designation: “Ship of Fools.” Only three blocks away was a gourmet grocery store by the name of Savenor’s. It was run by a family whose matriarch, Dora Savenor, had immigrated from Russia, as did my paternal grandparents. We shopped there only for special occasions since it was quite expensive.
On my first day of law school, I felt somewhat overwhelmed. The first-year class was greeted by HLS Dean Erwin Nathaniel Griswold, who fit the prototype – at least in my mind – of a crusty old Yankee. The members of the class were seated randomly. Fate and good fortune put me next to one of the very few women in the class – a New Yorker named Nancy Neveloff. She was a year older than me because she started out in a doctorate program in New York, then switched to law due to her budding interest in medico-legal ethics.
Dean Griswold started out his greeting with his traditional opening: “Gentlemen: I extend my greetings and welcome all of you to Harvard Law School.” At that point Nancy turned to me with a sour expression and asked rhetorically: “Am I invisible?” That moment started a life-long friendship that ended in late May of 2024 when she passed away in her and her husband Professor Walter Dubler’s Manhattan apartment. It was one of the saddest moments in my life when I paid a shiva [Hebrew for condolence] call to the New York apartment of Nancy’s daughter, a Hebrew school principal named Ariela Ruth Dubler and her husband, Manhattan-based United States District Judge Jesse Furman. Present as well was Nancy and Walter’s son, Professor Joshua Dubler.
I knew a few students who had arrived with me from Princeton – Richard (“Dick”) Asche being one. But essentially, I was a Brooklyn kid at Harvard – almost the same feeling of isolation I’d felt at Princeton. But then I ran into Prof. Alan Morton Dershowitz, sometimes referred to by his friends and colleagues as “The Dersh.”
Alan was a real Brooklyn boy, and so we hit it off immediately. Back in New York, someone like Alan who was born and raised in the Boro Park section of Brooklyn had little in common with a kid like me who was born in Bensonhurst, but in the alien wilds – or so it seemed – of Cambridge we were like brothers. We shared a distinctive Brooklyn accent. Alan was interested in criminal law with a sub-specialty of psychiatry and law, as was I. Alan was more than a bit ornery; I was a touch ornery.
In other ways we were different. He had gone to Brooklyn College, while I had gone to Princeton. But on the law school level we were much the same: He had gone to Yale, and there I was at Harvard. A major difference was that Alan, although only four years older than me, was already married to his childhood sweetheart from Brooklyn, Sue. He already had two sons, Elon and Jamin. I was always surprised that he’d married so young.
I could barely afford Harvard Law. I had a modest scholarship and a modest loan. I worked two jobs to make ends meet. Things were even more difficult in my second year when I started what turned out to be a two-and-one-half years long course of three mornings a week of on-the-couch Freudian psychoanalysis. I was able to afford it only because I got a very low hourly rate through the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute that linked me up with an analyst-in-training. Psychoanalysis felt like a half treatment and half learning experience. It proved very helpful in helping me to understand my life until that point as well as my future life plans.
I met some students and faculty members with whom I became friends, although no faculty members were as close to me as Dershowitz. That blossomed into a life-long friendship. He resided in Cambridge with his wife and sons. I stayed in Cambridge where I courted and soon moved in with Elsa.
After I graduated, and when Alan’s admittedly bold mouth got him into trouble, I more than once came to his rescue, and the reverse was true as I began my somewhat tumultuous career. We viewed each other almost as brothers, although each of us had an actual younger brother – Nathan Z. Dershowitz and Samuel H. Silverglate.
My three years at Harvard Law ended in 1967. I skipped graduation because I had to go to work that day. HLS mailed my diploma to me. By then I was exhausted from the routine. I’d barely slept. And on quite a few days – more than I care to remember -- I pulled all-nighters: I went to classes during the day, worked in the evening, and then stayed up all night studying. When I needed a library in which to study, I’d head down Massachusetts Avenue to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT”) where the library was open 24/7. And all of this was mixed in with occasional trips to the Selwyn Theater. Still, I survived, but it forever affected my definition of hard work.
I worked for Crane, Inker & Oteri for only one year. Then I met Norman Zalkind.