Annual Report 2000
Franck finds his voice at the U
Abe Franck, 82, isn't surprised when told he looks like a man in his sixties. "I get that a lot," says Franck, who plays the violin in two community orchestras, learned to swim only a few years ago, works out three times a week (swimming, lifting weights, or walking on a treadmill), and has varying degrees of fluency in Latin, Spanish, Hebrew, German, Italian, Russian, and Portuguese. And he won't be satisfied until he's tackled Greek and Japanese and has learned to compose music.
What attracts Franck to these endeavors is what drew him to his life's work--a love of structured systems and a need to understand the deeper meanings of things. A retired associate professor and director of engineering services at the University of Minnesota, Franck says he learns "by learning the structure of things. And language is structural in nature, like music. I look for relationships, harmony; it's a result of my mathematical training. I've never liked to learn by rote. I like to find the theoretical key behind a system."
Growing up in Brooklyn, Franck attended an all-boys' public high school, where, he laments, "They weren't teaching grammar in English." He wanted to know how a language was put together, so he signed up for, and excelled in, Latin. His love affair with words sparked, he began studying Spanish and, at his teacher's urging, took and passed a three-year competency exam after only two years of study.
After a brief stint at City College of New York, Franck--a self-described "independent thinker"--transferred to the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, where he studied mathematics and Spanish, played the violin in the university orchestra, and acted in school plays, earning accolades as Fagan in Oliver Twist.
With a bachelor of science (1939) and a master of science (1940) in mathematics from the University of New Mexico, he began a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Michigan then transferred to Brown University, which he left after a few years to work for a company doing underwater weapons testing. It was there that Franck first felt the sting of anti-Semitism. One of a few white employees who supported a peaceful protest by sitting on the "Negro" side of the segregated dining room, he was singled out for firing. "They told me they had too many mathematicians," he says dubiously, "but I realized much later that I was fired because I was Jewish."
Eventually, Franck found his way to the University of Minnesota, where he received his Ph.D. in 1949. After two years as an assistant professor of mathematics and applied mechanics at Kansas State University, he returned once again to Minnesota to work at Engineering Research Associates, a fledgling company that one day would become UNISYS. Finally, in 1971, he came full circle--back to the University of Minnesota, as director of engineering services.
At the time of the firing, says Franck, "I didn't think of myself as Jewish because I wasn't a religious man. Until I was 40, I didn't know what I was." The son of a Lithuanian Jewish father and Hungarian mother, Franck still puzzles over the "tremendous confusion" inherent in the language of identity, at times defined by geographical boundaries, at times by ethnic heritage, language, or religion.
Yet the Jewish identity that had been evolving quietly over the years eventually found its voice in the eighties, when Franck retired and began taking courses in Hebrew at the University. He recently gave $100,000 to fund the Abraham Franck Scholarship and Mentor Program in Hebrew Studies. The gift permanently endows a program that he has supported for years, allowing students with at least one year of Hebrew to study in Israel and receive a stipend for an Israeli tutor.
"I'm an average mathematician," explains Franck, smiling. "My creativity comes out in my patents (he holds 13 of them) and in my ideas for scholarship opportunities."
"Dr. Franck has been a friend of Hebrew at the University for many years," notes William Malandra, professor and chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies. "He never tires of embracing new knowledge, whether it's acquiring new languages or becoming an amateur performing musician."
To ensure that future students of Hebrew will have the same opportunity to embrace new knowledge, Franck has made a provision in his will for $1 million to endow the Dr. Abraham Franck Chair in Hebrew Language and Literature. "It's an extraordinary gift, one that will allow the department to appoint a Hebrew scholar of international stature," says Malandra. "The eventual chair holder will be someone with broad literary training who can command the wonderful historical and thematic breadth of Hebrew."
Franck, who, at a recent College of Liberal Arts (CLA) luncheon was chatting away in Hebrew with the Biblical archaeologist seated next to him, says his gifts to Hebrew Studies grow out of his love for the 6,000-year-old language, a love that was nurtured by his experiences as a student at the University and by an immersion program in Israel. The gifts secure a strong future for the program--in a sense, providing an enduring structure.
"Hopefully," says Franck, "it will help the language flourish and develop and remain rich."