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"Education is zero"
5 autograph letters signed.
4to. 10½ pp. In German.
Extensive letters by the Austrian Nobel laureate in medicine, all written to his sister Greti. The first, apparently composed soon after his relocation to the USA, describes the European's difficulties in assimilating to the so different culture and society of the New World: "As concerns America, you must not imagine it in terms of the 'Promised Land'. The mentality of the people here makes it almost impossible to make any acquaintances who take a real interest in you. Hence, you will hardly succeed in finding agreeable company. It's every man for himself, and life offers not much variety unless one is fully absorbed by one's work. I suppose there is hardly another country in which one so strongly feels a stranger. I observe the young girls who work here at our Institute or at an office; their entire purpose in life is fashion and possibly going on a date with a young man in the evening, which is socially quite acceptable here. Education is zero. They read nothing but cheap romance novelettes [...]" (transl.).
Similarly, Cori casts a skeptical eye on the Americans' relationship to their churches: so dominant is their role in society, he writes, "that there is no way for you to get in unless you are a member of a church. The Catholics, by the way, are quite powerful here, but are opposed by the Ku Klux Klan, this new secret organisation that grew out of the Civil War. But the oddest thing of all are the Revivals [...]" (March 1923, transl.).
The later letters (1925, 1931, 1933 [2], and 1937) reveal a well-assimilated scholar considering a festschrift for his father, the zoologist and physician Carl Isidor Cori (1865-1954): "Regarding the list you sent me, I agree with Keller, Joseph, Krumbach, Storch, Moroff, Stojanoff, Nowikoff, Kubo, Hans Przibram, Leder [...]; of the former students, I can think of Steuer, Innsbruck [...]" (transl.).
One letter with 4 and another with 12 autograph lines and signature by his wife Gerty Theresa Cori (née Radnitz, 1896-1957), with whom Cori won the Nobel Prize in 1947 for their research on glycogenolysis. The letter from May 23rd 1925 on stationery with letterhead of the "State Institute for the Study of Malignant Disease".
