Politics, Logic, and Love : The Life of Jean van Heijenoort

SECRETIVE IN LIFE, enigmatic in death, Jean van Heijenoort was a man of many mysteries. To begin with, his name, pronounced van Hi' -en-ort, was Dutch, but he was born in France and was French to the core. His family called him Jean, most of his friends called him Van, and in the United States, for many years, he signed himself John. Futhermore, a French dictio- nary of biography lists thirteen aliases for Jean van Heijenoort: Alex Barban, Cestero, Garcia Cestero, Jarvis Gerland, Marcel Letourneur, Daniel Logan, Marc Loris, Marcel, Karl Meyer, Jean Rebel, Jean Vannier, Ann Vincent, and J. Walter Wind. When he was killed, in 1986, at the age of seventy-three, van Heijenoort was internationally known and respected as a logician and a historian of modern logic. His last academic base was Stanford University where he had been working as an editor on the Collected Works of Kurt Godel; before that he had been a professor at Brandeis and New York Univer- sity. Van Heijenoort also had a second, less widely-known career as a consultant and expert in special acquisitions for Harvard library's vast Trotsky Archive.