Paul I Verba
Paul Verba
(Born Ilya Zekhtser, Odessa, Ukraine in 1948)
I was born three years after the war had officially ended, though in truth wars do not end; they sediment. They sink into the unconscious of families and reappear as temperament, silence, and compromise. My mother, already widowed by history and burdened with a daughter, remarried under persuasion that was less romantic than strategic. It was a marriage of insistence, not of desire. Regret, that most faithful of companions, soon followed.
Thus my earliest environment was a small domestic theater of incompatibility. The structure was formally intricate but biologically innocent. One might say that Eros was absent but Ananke—necessity—presided. I learned early that families are systems of tension, and that identity is something one negotiates between the demands of survival and the murmur of inward resistance.
I grew up a proper Soviet boy: Pioneer, then Komsomol. The rituals were secular liturgies. Dies irae, dies illa—not as prophecy, but as atmosphere. At thirteen I entered technical college and worked full time in factory and port. Manual labor did not humiliate me; it clarified me. The body tires, but the mind remains available for speculation. I discovered that thought can survive in any regime.
After three years of military service—another initiation into hierarchy and obedience—I enrolled in the night division of Odessa State University and earned a Master’s degree in Mathematics. During these years I married, and in 1974 my son was born. By 1977, however, the psychic air of the USSR had grown unbreathable. Emigration became not only a political act but a psychological necessity.
For a brief historical moment—thanks to Carter and Brezhnev—the gates opened. We departed “for Israel,” paused in Italy for four months of bureaucratic limbo, and entered the United States. Columbia, South Carolina became our first station. I worked as a programmer; my daughter was born; I earned a second Master’s degree, this time in Computer Science.
New York followed, then Bell Labs, then consulting, then doctoral studies at CUNY. I completed the requirements for a PhD in Computer Science but did not defend my dissertation on neural networks. Illness intervened, and life demanded adjustment. The dissertation remained a deferred desire—un désir ajourné, one might say—not extinguished but displaced.
In 2022, after the sale of a software company of which I was a principal, I retired from formal employment. Retirement, however, is merely a shift in cathexis. I study, I write, and I observe the unfolding drama of artificial intelligence with something between scientific curiosity and metaphysical suspicion.
If one must summarize: I was formed by war’s afterimage, disciplined by labor, educated by mathematics, and increasingly persuaded that beneath every system—political or computational—there persists a lacuna. And from that gap, meaning insists on being born.
Address: Hoboken, NJ, USA
(Born Ilya Zekhtser, Odessa, Ukraine in 1948)
I was born three years after the war had officially ended, though in truth wars do not end; they sediment. They sink into the unconscious of families and reappear as temperament, silence, and compromise. My mother, already widowed by history and burdened with a daughter, remarried under persuasion that was less romantic than strategic. It was a marriage of insistence, not of desire. Regret, that most faithful of companions, soon followed.
Thus my earliest environment was a small domestic theater of incompatibility. The structure was formally intricate but biologically innocent. One might say that Eros was absent but Ananke—necessity—presided. I learned early that families are systems of tension, and that identity is something one negotiates between the demands of survival and the murmur of inward resistance.
I grew up a proper Soviet boy: Pioneer, then Komsomol. The rituals were secular liturgies. Dies irae, dies illa—not as prophecy, but as atmosphere. At thirteen I entered technical college and worked full time in factory and port. Manual labor did not humiliate me; it clarified me. The body tires, but the mind remains available for speculation. I discovered that thought can survive in any regime.
After three years of military service—another initiation into hierarchy and obedience—I enrolled in the night division of Odessa State University and earned a Master’s degree in Mathematics. During these years I married, and in 1974 my son was born. By 1977, however, the psychic air of the USSR had grown unbreathable. Emigration became not only a political act but a psychological necessity.
For a brief historical moment—thanks to Carter and Brezhnev—the gates opened. We departed “for Israel,” paused in Italy for four months of bureaucratic limbo, and entered the United States. Columbia, South Carolina became our first station. I worked as a programmer; my daughter was born; I earned a second Master’s degree, this time in Computer Science.
New York followed, then Bell Labs, then consulting, then doctoral studies at CUNY. I completed the requirements for a PhD in Computer Science but did not defend my dissertation on neural networks. Illness intervened, and life demanded adjustment. The dissertation remained a deferred desire—un désir ajourné, one might say—not extinguished but displaced.
In 2022, after the sale of a software company of which I was a principal, I retired from formal employment. Retirement, however, is merely a shift in cathexis. I study, I write, and I observe the unfolding drama of artificial intelligence with something between scientific curiosity and metaphysical suspicion.
If one must summarize: I was formed by war’s afterimage, disciplined by labor, educated by mathematics, and increasingly persuaded that beneath every system—political or computational—there persists a lacuna. And from that gap, meaning insists on being born.
Address: Hoboken, NJ, USA
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