My father, Amnon Katz, died seventeen years ago today. It was October 3, 2000. His helicopter crashed and he was killed instantly. There were no other people on board. It was an experimental helicopter he had built with his students at the the Universiy of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He was sixty-five years old at the time, and a Cudworth Endowed Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Alabama.
My father, Amnon Katz, on his tricycle
To the right is a picture of my father mounted on a pony in 1938 in Krakow before the war broke out. To the left is photo of him, probably taken for some identification document, when he was a refugee in Vilnius,Lithuania, on the way to Israel.
Amnon Katz was born in 1935 in Krakow, Poland. Here is a picture of him riding his tricycle in a park in Krakow when he was three years old. When he was four, he and his parents left the country by stealth, and took a long and arduous journey that led to Palestine, where they settled down. I know that none of his relatives who remained in Poland survived. But looking at this picture, I suddenly wonder what happened to the tricycle.
My father’s parents were Zionists, and so he spoke Hebrew at home even before the move. He had a nanny who spoke Polish with him, but his parents only ever addressed him in Hebrew. It was a grand linguistic experiment he was involved in: reviving a dead language.
My father and his Polish nanny
Neither of his parents was a native speaker of Hebrew. There were no native speakers until the language was revived in the late nineteenth century by Zionists. Yet my father became a native speaker, because that is what his parents spoke to him from birth.
When people ask me how dare I run a linguistic experiment on my own children, I smile and reply that there is an ongoing family tradition to experiment linguistically on our children. As far as I know, it has never done anyone any harm to be exposed to dead languages that have been revived.
My father in Texas with our dog Aza and the twin engine he called Gearcheck
My father’s love of flight developed en route to Palestine, when he boarded his first plane. But his first career was as a physicist, at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth, Israel. It was there that he met my mother. It was also there that he wrote and published the following books: Classical Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics, Field Theory, Academic Press 1965 and Principles of Statistical Mechanics (The Information Theory Approach), (Freeman 1967).
My father was a member of the Canaanite movement. He believed in separation of church and state and equal rights for all Israelis, of whatever ethnicity or religion. He also thought Israel should not accept aid from the United States, and he believed it should keep all territories conquered in war.
In 1970, disillusioned with politics in Israel and the uselessness of the academic calling, my father decided to immigrate to the United States and become an aerospace engineer. But he had much to learn about industry, and especially the way the defense industry has been corrupted by government contracts.
My father also ran his own company, Inverted-A, and he designed one of the first electronic flight simulators for general aviation: the Minisimulator IIC. He is the founding member of Inverted-A Press, which I inherited from him. His book one political book, Israel: The Two Halves of the Nation was published by Inverted-A.
Eventually, my father went back to academia. While a professor at the University of Alabama, he published the following two books: Subsonic Airplane Performance, (Society of Automotive Engineers 1994) and Computational Rigid Vehicle Dynamics, (Krieger 1997).
My father has always been my role model. He was an independent thinker and a pioneer in more than one discipline. I owe everything I am today – even the weird stuff – to him.
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Your dad was very handsome when he was younger. Was he the first Israeli Libertarian, perhaps?
Thanks, Julia. I think he was. But as for being libertarian, here’s what I think about that. I think all Israelis before Israel became a “State” in 1948 were libertarian. They had to be, because they were a self-governing community, but their armies, which competed with each other, were all sub-rosa. So all the rules of the community, to the extent that they differed from the laws of the British Mandate were agreed to voluntarily. There was no draft. There was no taxation, and yet things got done. There were schools, but people paid their own children’s tuition, and some people got a scholarship that others funded. There were doctors, but you paid for your own care. There were people who guarded your settlements, but they were volunteers. Yet the moment Israel became a state, suddenly most Israelis became Statists.
Where did Amnon KATZ get his formal education? What was his doctorate in? Do you have any brothers? Are there other teachers in your family?
He got his education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His doctorate was in physics. He was a professor at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. Later he studied engineering at the University of Michigan. At his death he had an endowed chair in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Alabama. I have one brother who is a mathematician, teaching at Cal Tech.