TRIBUTES TO "DOC" MITTELMAN

This section will be expanded as selected tributes become available.

"In Memoriam

A TEACHER CALLED "DOC"

Who was your all-time best teacher? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of former Lincoln students would unhesitatingly answer "Doc." His full name was Dr. Naum Mittelman, but for them the full name is no more necessary than is the full name of Mozart or Maradona. He is just "Doc," the teacher who for four decades in his classroom and laboratory on the third floor of the Lincoln Mansion seduced students with the delicious uncertainties of modern science and other passions of the intellect. "Don't flirt with knowledge," he liked to say. "Fall in love with it."

Doc turned his intense attention from research to teaching after completing a post-doctoral stint at Harvard and working with Argentina's Nobel-Prize winning chemist Luis Leloir for two years. For the next half century Doc professed passionately, first in the University of Buenos Aires, then in Lincoln High School, and for the last two years of his career, in Lincoln University College.

Doc's primordial proposition became, in effect, "I teach therefore I am." Like Kurowawa's teacher in "Madadayo," he was abetted in his stubborn resistance to retirement by admiring and fiercely loyal students. Before finally retiring from Lincoln High in 1995 at the age of 82, he taught chemistry for a time from his hospital bed. One student would go to the hospital and receive the lesson and then transmit it to his classmates. In 1997, when continuing heart problems were forcing his retirement from part-time teaching at Lincoln University College, Doc gave impromptu lessons in chemistry to the doctors who attended him in the hospital. Struggling to recover sufficiently to convince his family to let him teach one last course at LUC, he made his case to continue clearly and simply "If I am not teaching, I am not myself."

He was not able to teach that last course, but he continued to teach those who called him, wrote him, or visited him. One of the last visits was from a young man who had studied chemistry both in the High School and at LUC with Doc and who went to get a final lesson before following the path of the young Naum Mittelman to advanced studies at Harvard.

Teacher and chemist to the end, Doc never allowed his ideas to become inert. They never will be. Doc passed away on Good Friday here in Buenos Aires, but his ideas will live on and flourish in his students and their progeny throughout the world.

Raymond McKay

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