On the day “Lottocracy, or, Casting Democracy in with the Lots” was published in a special War Math issue of Science in July 1970, six months after Sari inspired it Abs proposed to Sari. Theirs being an engagement very preoccupied with numbers—figures, equations—it bears notice that though they were married at Congregation Beyt Am, in Palo Alto, on January 1, 1971, their son and only child was born on June 8.

Witold Negrón, 8th Battalion, 4th Artillery, was mortally wounded in Operation Lam Son 719 between Khe Sanh forward supply base and Tchepone, Laos, March 1971.

[[[[OPENING VERSION 2 BIOGRAPHY: Sari’s parents, Imre and Ilona Le Vay, were Hungarians to the Americans, but Jews to the Hungarians. Above all, though, they were Budapesters, geographically and culturally marooned between Joseph’s [Abs’s father’s] ghetto origins and Eve’s [Abs’s mother’s] haughty ancestry in Cologne.

To them, Joseph was just a [coarse] peddler of frozen water who’d tried to socially elevate himself through his union with a [wealthy snobbish] yecca wife, Eve, who invariably played the same EZ piano arrangement of Mozart’s Variations KV.265 (“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”/“Baa Baa Black Sheep”/the ABCs), dabbled in depopulated watercolors (kitchen still-lives, insipid landscapes of the wildlife preserves around JFK), and in lieu of financially solving whatever problems their daughter was having with her monkeywrench son, preferred to waste her fortune on transcontinental flights, to offer her opinions in person.

The Le Vays would have sudden fevers and lymphatic surgeries whose recuperation periods would last the durations of Eve’s visits. They called her “the princess gourmand [Princesse de Guermantes] of the synagogue women’s league.” Or else “the doyenne of the mooing bourgeois [la doyenne de la moyenne bourgeoisie].” They mocked her Shalimar perfumes, her Scherrer suits worn always with the gloves, her inaccurate recitations of Heine that never aspired to more than the first two couplets of Die Lorelei, and were just the malapropic asyntactic expressions of the trait that most provoked them: Eve’s Deutschtum, or the conceit of her Germanness. Though it wasn’t just that she persisted in a vain attachment to that identity, it was that she hadn’t suffered for it—she hadn’t suffered like they had. The Le Vays had cultivated the full European education and with such unflagging intensity the continent had no choice but to plan their genocide so that they embodied its quintessence.

The Le Vays were the conjugation of generations of linguists, etymologists, philologists, and lexicostatisticians who’d been querulously crossreferencing one another ever since their forebears—who on both sides included Lévais and Lévajs—Magyarized their surnames in solidarity with the Kingdom of Hungary following its fraught unification with the Austrian Empire in 1867. [Their grandparents?] had learned how to speak, read, and write all the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, and how to speak, read, and at least write about all the Baltic languages too. [Their parents?] were capable of griping about the dissolution of the dual monarchy in its every single tongue, and in the Ural-Altaic, the Finno-Ugric-and-Permic, Samoyedic, and Oghuric—in everything but the Semitic. The stiff leatherskinned and authoritative edition that was their family would go to its death incomplete—the Le Vays the missing volumes.

Imre and Ilona had been doctoral candidates at the University of Budapest, where they’d maligned each other’s talents so publicly that when their professor paid a university janitor [how much?] to shelter them both in the janitor’s dacha [Hungarian equivalent?] outside Sárospatak, the beneficiaries, even with the Nazis at the door, interpreted the gesture as only partly altruistic. If the other part was a joke, though, the professor never laughed. Dr. Péter Simonyi died fighting with the Resistance. He never got to meet the couple’s daughter, born in spring—or witness its nuptials, civil in fall—both 1945.

But then neither did their parents and siblings [how many?]: Imre’s family had perished in Auschwitz/Auschwitz-Birkenau, while Ilona’s had been executed and left to the Danube [by the Arrow Cross?].

Following the war, the couple was unable to find employment—despite Imre’s formidable achievement as an Esperantist (his dissertation sought to officialize the artificial language’s first natural phonological evolution, the replacement of the phonemic ĥ with the k), and despite Ilona being one of the great hopes of Hungarian bibliography (her dissertation had proposed conversion mechanisms between the author/title taxonomies then prevalent in Hungary? and the various faceted? international standards). They labored, instead, in the dissident underground, as translators, interpreters: in Russian, vragi naroda—“enemies of the people.”

In 1956, with a popular revolt roiling the boulevards of Budapest, and columns of Soviet tanks about to roll in[, stretching like the lists for arrest they were on], Imre and Ilona took Sari on a train to Szombathely, and telling her they were just visiting her new Gymnasium, slipped across the border[—parted the Iron Curtain—]for Vienna.

In Vienna they renewed contacts with prewar colleagues, now adjunct émigrés abroad suffering from visa problems and pleionosis. Jobs were arranged, nonetheless [how?], and in 1958 they moved to Saint ?, Minnesota, initially to teach a discipline called Sovietistics at the Lutheran Bible Institute?, and then to Berkeley, to teach Magyar language under the auspices of the Center for Slavic Studies at the University of California [but Hungarian’s not a Slavonic language?].

Sari attended Berkeley for what she then called her bachelorette’s, mistress’s, and PhD degrees, initially studying applied linguistics, though under the guidance of Professor Debora Laklov she chose to do doctoral work in the specialized field of sociolinguistics, focusing particularly on the confluence of language and gender [on the genderlects of disclosure? second-language intimate differencing/contextual integrities?]. “Iceman,” to her, was more than an occupation, but not in the sense that it might’ve been to her future father inlaw, while “Icewoman,” which term Eve might’ve used to describe her daughter inlaw, would become similarly reprehensible. “Iceperson” was less deterministic, preferred. Sari’s dissertation, “Male without Prefix, Male without Suffix: Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, and the epicene misnomer in international(ist) language(s),” became a chapter in her seminal [no, no] book, Toward a New “Neuter”: what is ideal about the sexist, and what is sexist about the ideal, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979.

In September 1973, Sari traveled to a Reassessing Animacy summit at the University of Texas, Austin, leaving Abs with their two year old son, and prompting a visit from Eve. Abs insisted he was managing on his own, but Eve refused to accept this, and wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to spend time with her grandson who at the time was two years old.

Eve had strict ideas about the proper way to raise a child, but none approached the method by which Abs and Sari split their parenting duties: divvying up the caregiving by tallying, individually, at the end of each day, and together, at the end of each week, and then again monthly, their changings and feedings, playtimes, and sessions of counting and reading, to ensure an utterly equal distribution of responsibilities. Eve was not aware of this Had Eve been aware that her coming to take charge of her grandson would not redound toward Abs’s total time spent with the child, and that, quite to the contrary, he’d have to make up whatever time he’d been relieved of upon Sari’s return, she might never have made the trip.