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THE SIDIS STORY

Sarah Sidis, M.D.

Unpublished manuscript, 1950

CHAPTER IX

        None of us were anything but happy in our life at the Institute. Those New Hampshire woods and gardens, snows and summers, are the background for the memories that were for us unalloyed love, but they set their deepest print, I am sure, on our daughter Helen.

        Helen was born on [Wednesday,] February 12, 1908, just before the spring that we moved to Portsmouth. She is really Helena, and was always so called by Billy and by Boris, who named her for the heroine of a novel he had written before I knew him--a novel lost in a publisher's office and never re-written.

        Billy was always my boy in physique and in temperament. But my tiny titian-haired Helen from the moment she was born was a Sidis. She grew up with that artistry and elegance of thought that was her father's.

        The relationship between Billy and Boris in those years when Helen was a baby was one of dear companionship. By then, it was Billy who sat on the foot of the bed and talked his father to sleep.

        Some people who later wrote of Billy would have it that the relation between him and his father was somehow Svengali-like, that his father magicked him somehow into his easy learning of what seemed hard to poor children who have to go to school.

        But the conversations I remember had more of this sort 

 

[Sadly, this is the last of the pages of the unpublished "The Sidis Story" included in the Univ. Miami Archives collection.]

 

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