What is real? What is fiction?

Rebekah Mendelssohn is a fictional character in my will-it-ever-be-finished novel about economics —  Oikos Gnosis. She’s a made-up character with a real family past.

The Mendelssohn surname first appears in Germany in the 18th century, a land then still recovering from the previous century’s religious wars — Protestants against Catholics and everybody against the Jews.

It began with Moses, the son of a poor Jewish scribe. The family lived in Dessau, an impoverished Jewish shtetl a two day walk from Berlin. The father’s name was Mendel. Moses was the son of Mendel, thus, Mendelssohn.

Moses was a frail, hunchbacked child with a quick mind. In 1743, when he was 14 years old, he took off to find a better life in the big city.

He entered Berlin through the Rosenthaler Gate, the one reserved for cattle and Jews.

In the beginning, he slept on sacks of grain. But by the time he was done, he had changed the world by looking at it from a different angle. He corresponded with, and was read and discussed by contemporaries who would soon lead revolutions in France and America. Nearing the end of his life, he wrote that his “intellectual and spiritual guiding light” had always been Leibniz.

Moses was a crucial 18th century link between the mind of Leibniz and today’s understanding of thermonuclear reactions at the center of stars — fusion.

Moses tutored Gauss, who taught Dirichlet, who taught Riemann, who taught Einstein, who taught the 20th century that reality does not have to be just the way things look… to us.

Moses Mendelssohn is remembered today as “the father of the Haskalah,” or “The Jewish Enlightenment.” My fictional Rebekah first heard about him while researching her family’s history, which is also how she first heard about Riemann, whose teacher, Dirichlet, was married to the granddaughter of Moses Mendelssohn.

My fictional Rebekah was born a few years before I was born in 1948. She grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Queens, New York City.

As the story unfolds, she jumps the Fence around the Torah to find herself in a different reality, like Dorothy in Oz, a different person, a different identity. Which one was real?

Most everybody up and down the streets of her cloistered neighborhood had lost family members in the recent madness. There was a grayness. Even in the park where the children played, there was a grayness about the air. Which world was real, the child’s or the grayness?

From an early age, Rebekah is obsessed by the idea of reality. A gifted child, she’s drawn to music and mathematics. Alone in her room at night, cradling her treasured violin between her tiny shoulders and neck, she flows out of the grayness into the light of numerically logical progressions, resonating, creating something new, which calms and elevates her. Almost like a different reality she found hard to define with the language she knew.

She decides to pursue a career in mathematics. She writes her PhD dissertation on Bernard Riemann, the brilliant 19th century German mathematician she had first encountered while looking into her real family’s past.

Einstein famously once said that without the mathematical tools of Riemannian functions he could not have ever imagined such a different reality of time, itself, approaching the speed of light, curved space, intersecting parallel lines.

Riemann had also been interested in ontology, the philosophical inquiry that begins with the question: What is real? In the tradition of Leibniz, he discarded the idea of a single, universal and unchanging reality. He started with the idea that here had to be more.

Riemann was not saying that our somatic awakening in the morning is not real… the first taste of coffee, aches and pains and feelings of satisfaction, love, rejection… our doubts, our identity. He was not saying that this is not real. Only that this is not the only reality.

Riemann concluded (maybe drinking beer in a German pub, I don’t know) that reality is more like levels; like the steps of an ascending staircase; each level with its own unique set of universal laws, its own universe. The boundaries between realities can be crossed by shock waves, propagating new shock waves crashing and reforming in an ocean. His equations, the Riemannian functions, describe how to get from one level of reality to the next and what it’s like when you get there.

At first, Rebekah could only grasp what Riemann seemed to be getting at by bringing to mind familiar images… a layered cake, for instance, each layer possessing its own exclusive taste.

But then she learned how to read Riemann in his own language, expressed as the mathematical equations that filled the blackboards on her college classroom walls.

After receiving her doctorate, Rebekah is recruited by the Department of Defense to work on its hush hush inertial confinement fusion project at DOD’s high energy research center at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The operation had been dreamed up by and was under the thumb of control freaks with psychological problems and famous last names. They had been chosen at birth. Their religion was control. They had been chosen to exclusively possess the inexhaustible power of stars. When the rest of the world started running out, they alone could set the price. That would please them to no end.

After a frustrating day at the office, Rebekah plays her violin, alone, at night. She loses herself in the sound of Riemannian functions woven into and out of the grayness and into the light of a higher reality where energy, for all practical purposes, is essentially infinite.

She makes groundbreaking discoveries. She breaks the code. She wants to share with the world what’s possible, so all might experience the abundance just a couple more steps down the road. Time to go to work in the air-conditioned comfort of the energy machine, in another reality that could be real.

But her bureaucratic superiors stamp her papers TOP SECRET.

Once again, she Jumps the Fence.  She had glimpsed the possible! … unlimited energy for all mankind for all time. Vanquishing the cause of war. Her! A quiet Jewish girl from Queens. Leibniz said whatever is possible demands to exist. She decides to become a whistleblower. She calls a newspaper reporter she knows in Detroit.

The fictional reporter, named Benny, tries to share the good news with all the peoples of the world. There’s enough for everybody! It’s within our reach, just a few mathematically defined equations away. It’s complicated stuff in a little-known language, but Rebekah knows how to do it.

Benny thinks it’s the biggest story in the world, a Pulitzer Prize, a spot on the Johnny Carson Show, but he gets himself exiled, instead.

In the most recent “final chapter” of Oikos Gnosis, Benny has grown old and is sitting on his comfortable living room couch, watching the news. A Clash of Civilizations? Shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave? Who is really paying the price?