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Swimming Across: A Memoir

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Andrew S. Grove is one of the few people whose contributions to his profession not only change the means by which societies function, his deeds have additionally earned him a place in history. The machine on which I type, and with which many of you will read these thoughts contain elements from Intel. The combination of brilliant science and management, while not perfect, has brought Intel to a position of leadership in international business. Mr. Grove stepped down from active management of Intel several years ago, however he maintains the position of Chairman. If you are interested in the story of a young man who arrives in America and rises to the heights of this country's business elite, and becomes Time Magazine's Man Of The Year, this is not the book you seek.

"Swimming Across", covers a remarkable though rather brief time of Mr. Grove's life. The memoir recounts memories from the age of 4, and ends when he completes college in New York City. After the close of the book he summarizes the 40 plus years the book does not mention, and while interesting to say the least, it is even more frustrating. Mr. Grove has always been a private man, and he states this book came about because of the arrival of his grandchildren. This may account for the time period covered, for even as a graduate of college, the papers of the city noted his remarkable academic accomplishments. As I read I hoped that a sequel would be readily perceived, however after reading why he wrote the book, and the summary of the balance of his life he offered, a definitive biography will be likely be written by another.

The book is still enjoyable albeit brief, and almost exclusively confined to his years in Hungary. Those years are filled with events that have appeared in other memoirs of those who managed to survive not only the Holocaust, but also The Soviet Occupation that arrived as the former ended. Born in 1934 his recollections are necessarily spare due to his young age, however what he does recount are the memories of a very precocious child driven to succeed well before he arrived in America.

Some of his earliest memories, and a few that he recalls from his early teen years, are remarkable in their candor for a man so normally private. His stories are candid, innocent, and at times remarkably funny. I have read many biographies of noted people that never seemed to have much of a childhood, much less decided to share the thoughts of their youthful hearts and minds.

His ability to survive the Nazi's and then thrive during the Soviet Union served him well when he chose to escape and make his life in America. The drive that was so channeled and restrained by the occupation and by his religion predictably launched a career in America from the moment he arrived.

I enjoy reading autobiographies like that of Mr. Grove, not because he eventually became a success by most measures personal and professional that are held in high regard in this country. I enjoy being reminded of just how remarkable this country was and continues to be to attract people from across the globe. Mr. Grove speaks of how he has never faced any resentment for his success because he was an immigrant. He explains why that for the over 4 decades that have passed since his escape from Hungary, he has never returned.

Most of us are fairly recent immigrants to this nation. Mr. Grove did not arrive until the 1950's. And while his success has been very public and unusually great, the millions who found their way here usually contributed with the enthusiasm he did. Our nation is not perfect nor are all its citizens or those who have emigrated here. However we are a nation of immigrants, and books like this continue to keep the history of this country fresh, and by doing so always make for important reading.

Andy Grove writes a poignant account of the first 20 years of his life from an endearing boyhood perspective. Different from Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (floridly written and unbearably sad), Swimming Across, in a beautifully spare way, recounts in matter of fact detail the story of a mother and son who escaped the Nazis and then later the Communists in Budapest, Hungary. There are several signature memories described by the young boy (abandoned or so he felt in a hospital room due to near fatal brush with scarlet fever or lost in the woods for a terrifying moment during the war)that fill out the picture of the adult man that we have only known until now as a corporate legend in the Silicon Valley. Andy's memoirs provide the rich internal and emotional story that was missing from his books on management and Intel. I am making holiday gifts of this book to family and friends because it is yet another powerful reminder of how lucky we are to live in America.

Recently, I have read memoirs/autobiographies of several prominent persons (e.g. Redstone, Jordan, Welch) and none touched my heart as much as did this one in which Grove generously, at times poignantly shares indelible memories of his childhood, youth, and undergraduate years. (He also summarizes more than 40 subsequent years which I hope he will discuss in much greater detail in a sequel to this volume.) Most of this book's focus is on his life in Budapest. Andras Grof somehow survived the Holocaust and then the Russian occupation before departing Hungary just as the Iron Curtain was descending. He lived in constant fear. Eventually, he and a young friend crossed the Austrian border (for me the most exciting portion of the book's narrative) and he finally arrived in America, becoming Andrew Grove. We know him today as the retired CEO of Intel. The book's title refers to a metaphor once invoked by a physics teacher who suggested that life is a lake across which students must attempt to swim. "Not all of them will [succeed]. But one of them, I'm sure, will. That one is Grof." For more than four centuries, millions of others have also completed a perilous journey to the USA, with a majority arriving in New York harbor nourished by the same high hopes and great expectations that young Grof cherished. Few then achieved what he did. (Grove claims "I am still swimming.") Tension and terror have even greater impact because of the matter-of-fact attitude which Grove sustains throughout his account. What I found especially remarkable is the almost total absence of any anger, bitterness, or recrimination as Grove recalls so many life-threatening situations, brutalities, and persecutions. In this instance, less is more. He lets the facts speak for themselves and they are eloquent.

This man's story is incredible. Grove's life events are both unimaginable (living through Nazi occupied Hungary as a Jew living under false Christian name) and ordinary (how to get the girls) and he writes in a way that lets the events speak for themselves. It is an astonishing story of triumph. An inspiration.

...Intel Chairman Andrew Grove Reminds Us of Our Roots

It is a rare book by a corporate CEO that isn't either a trumpet blasting his visionary insight and strategic brilliance or a dramatic and mawkish retelling of his climb to the top from unimaginably humble origins. Swimming Across: A Memoir - Andrew Grove's simple, elegant recounting of the first 20 years of his life - is that rare exception.

Grove, one of the founders of Intel and still its chairman, was born Andras Grof in Hungary in 1936, the only child of parents who were in the dairy business. We tend to forget that prior to 1945 there was no Iron Curtain, and countries we think of now as post-Communist had vital histories of their own before the Soviet Union stitched together its empire following World War II.

Grove recounts a happy childhood in Budapest, the country's largest and most cosmopolitan city. The specter of war loomed large in Europe in the late 1930s, but Grove was too young to be aware of its darker aspects. His family was Jewish and even as a young child he knew that many Jews were forced to live separately in ghettos. But to the young Grove and his playmates, this reality was simply material for another schoolyard game, much to the horror of their kindergarten teacher.

Grove's early years, before the full force of the war descended upon Europe, were comfortably middle class. Budapest was actually two distinct communities, the wealthier Buda on one side of the Danube River and the more commercial Pest on the other side. Grove's family moved to Pest in 1938 when his father expanded the dairy business.

In 1942, Grove's father was drafted into the Hungarian army. He and other Jewish conscripts were sent to the Russian front not as regular soldiers, but rather as part of a support team sent ahead to clear roadways and build camps, fortifications and other facilities. In 1943, Grove and his mother learned that his father "had disappeared at the front." The Hungarian army was unable to provide the family with any additional information regarding his father for the balance of the war. While his mother never gave up hope, Grove, who had been six at the time of the draft, had a more difficult time holding onto memories of his absent parent.

In one of the book's most moving moments, Grove tells us of the doorbell ringing in their apartment one day in the fall of 1945. His mother opened the door and found "an emaciated man, filthy and in a ragged soldier's uniform standing at the open door." As his mother embraced the man, Grove thought, "this must be my father."

Scenes like this, however poignant, are the book's chief disappointment. The writing is bland and devoid of emotion. Grove describes everyday life in the middle of a war zone and under the tightening noose of communism and even tells of his mother's rape by Russian soldiers, but all in prose that is more redolent of a corporate brief than an evocative memoir.

The meatiest part of the book can be found in Grove's recounting of life in Hungary in the middle 1950s. We see a country that was being slowly strangled by the politburo in Moscow. In 1956, Grove, who had found his passion for chemistry, was looking forward to starting his second year at the university. He was already part of a small class of individuals destined for leadership within Hungary. But in October 1956, Russian troops and tanks rolled into Budapest and clamped down on what had been an incipient, but weak, effort to throw off the Soviet chains.

We can imagine the agony Grove felt at watching his country being overrun by soldiers intent on enforcing a police state. He knew that many of his friends were in fact fleeing Hungary; Grove's parents urged him to get out before the borders were sealed. He and two friends made the difficult decision to leave, undertaking a journey to Austria and eventually to America that is the stuff of movies.

Grove found his way to this country through the combined efforts of numerous relief and charitable organizations. Relatives in New York City took him in and helped him adapt to his new life. Grove entered City College of New York and graduated in 1960 with an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering followed in 1963 by a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. The rest, as they say, is history. Grove ends this memoir with his move to California.

In an interview in Esquire magazine in 2000, Grove spoke about his life as an immigrant in this country. In an era when many would have the U.S. close its borders and eject every "foreigner," Grove's presence and success is a reminder that the U.S. has been the place for those seeking a better life for almost 400 years. "It is a very important truism that immigrants and immigration are what made America what it is," Grove writes. "We must be vigilant as a nation to have a tolerance for differences, a tolerance for new people."...

Regardless of what you think about this book, everyone will agree that Dr. Grove has accomplished a great deal in his life. He is clearly a five-star person!

Although I knew that Dr. Grove had been one of the most successful CEOs ever (having studied his work at Intel for many years) and that he was a Hungarian refugee, I knew little else. Apparently, that was a purposeful decision that Dr. Grove began to reverse in 1997 when he was interviewed for Time's Man of the Year award.

The book is not the sort of autobiography that most of us are used to reading. Swimming Across is mainly different in that it builds around a series of anecdotes and scenes, which provide an indelible flavor without showing the whole story. Many of the scenes are not particularly important, but all combine to provide a piece of the puzzle of who Dr. Grove was and how he became who he is today. The material is almost totally focused on the first 20 years of his life, from the time he was born in Hungary through the first few months of his arrival in the United States.

The book is above all very inspiring. This occurs at several levels as you consider the obstacles that he had to overcome. Dr. Grove had physical disabilities to overcome (the loss of 50 percent of his hearing at four and a weak heart from Scarlet Fever at the same age). In Hungarian society, his family's Jewish background led to severe challenges (his father being sent off with a labor battalion in World War II in which only 10 percent survived after maltreatment by both Hungarians and then by the Soviet military forces, many relatives being sent to Auschwitz and killed there, and anti-Semitism in day-to-day life and official actions) which had to be surmounted. Due to the disruptions of World War II, Soviet hegemony, and repression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, his education was often disrupted. He escaped Hungary with very little money, and not enough knowledge of technical English to do university-level work, at a time when tens of thousands were seeking a way into the United States.

I came away feeling very grateful that Dr. Grove chose to come to the United States, and that so many people helped him to get here and prosper.

The book's title is well developed in the book. Because of operations on his ears at four, Dr. Grove avoided the water as a youngster. He eventually decided to learn to swim, and got good ear plugs to help keep his ears clear of potential infections. In these days, it was very easy to develop polio from swimming, so there was a double danger. Self-taught as a swimmer, he came to enjoy it very much. To his surprise, while in the college preparatory program of the Gymnasium in Hungary, one of his teachers, Mr. Volenski, identified Dr. Grove as the student who was most likely to swim across the big lake of life. The book ends with the observation, "I still like swimming."

Prior to this book, Dr. Grove's most famous work was Only the Paranoid Survive. I can now see how his first twenty years of life in Hungary prepared him to develop and become effective in living that philosophy.

Many readers will also be impressed by the book's candor. With an active imagination and a lively sense of fun, Dr. Grove usually got into mischief and the book describes many escapades. Many well-known people would not have been willing to share these stories that make him seem very human, but far less than perfect.

Ultimately, I was impressed by the importance of persistence. Despite having no reason to expect that her husband was still alive, Dr. Grove's mother kept looking for him and prepared their home again after World War II. All the spare time she had was spent asking people if anyone knew where he was, and visiting the train station. After being on the brink of being rejected from the university in Budapest because of Communist social classifications, Dr. Grove's father kept looking for connections until he found someone who could get the classification changed. On the brink of being rejected from entry into the United States, Dr. Grove charged in and wouldn't take "no" for an answer from a group screening people to sponsor. The first two U.S. universities that would accept him wouldn't let him take as much chemistry as he wanted, so he kept going until he got into a more appropriate program at New York City College. I was not surprised to see that Dr. Grove had as a child been a fan of C.S. Forester's books about the fictional naval hero, Horatio Hornblower, who evidenced much the same strong character and persistence.

Where in your life can persistence make an important difference? What contributions can you make to the world and to those you love as a result of being more persistent?

Consider this book your antidote for all the recent tales of CEO excess and duplicity. Andy Grove's story of his first 20 years in Hungary and New York City tells us how the events of World War II and the Hungarian Revolution shaped the integrity and inner drive of one man.

The story is compelling in its own right. But to read the story of Andras Grof and realize that this boy and his distant childhood turned into Andrew S. Grove...well, it's a journey of unfathomable proportions.

To his credit, Grove never oversells the story. He is quite forthright about his role in the Revolution - he was simply a bystander. Fellow Hungarians have read his story and lauded him for his accuracy and honesty.

Grove's writing style is sparse and direct. He recalls events with clarity and without extensive interpretation. He gives credit to a couple of editors who helped shape the story, most notably Norman Pearlstine of Time. But this is no ghost-written CEO treatise. These are obviously his words.

Some will read "Swimming Across" and conclude that it is a statement about the triumph of the American system. Grove notes near the end of the book "I've continued to be amazed by the fact that as I progressed through school and my career, no one has ever resented my success on account of my being an immigrant."

While there's an element of that, I think you'll see it more as a simple but brilliant testament to the Power of One Man.

Long live Andy Grove.

My sons gave me this book for Christmas, thinking that it would interest me. It certainly did - and hit me in the heart.

Andy Grove opens up the secret chambers of his heart, which he has long ago sealed up. As a Hungarian-American, to me his story rings true, even down to some of the same details of his escape and journey to America (his first encounter with bananas, the troop carrier ship across the Atlantic, the Hungarian National Anthem played like a military march by the Navy band... These were my personal experiences, also.)

He is also brutally honest about his personal memories. In a rare glimpse of a boy "playing with himself" or peeing down the stairwell, he shows his vulnerable side, without overplaying it. Any one of us, who grew up in Budapest can immediatley identify with him as he discovers the wonders of old fashioned apartment buildings, the Danube promenade, the City Park. He loved that city and loved the people in it. They were a comfortable nest for him. Soon, however, that nest was turned upside down, and the brutality of the extreme Arrow Cross party henchmen, and Eichman's Gestapo turning the place into living hell. His mother and he are hidden by relatives and strangers, and survive. Most of his father's family is killed in Aushwitz. After the "liberation" by Russian soldiers - with not so velied reference to the sexual abuse of his mother - the Grof family rebuilds its existence, only to be knocked down repeatedly by the Communists. During the Revolution of 1956 Andy Grove does nothing heroic - and admits honestly - and ends up escaping to the West.

What is very sad for me in this account is his turning his back completely on his homeland. I understand the conflict in him, I understand the desire to banish the memories. But Andy's story, the Hungarian portion at least, is not unique. Thousands of others with identical stories maintained their contacts, kept their roots and today's Hungary is the better for it. Perhaps eventually Andy can resolve his hidden barriers and break through this final wall. He'd be most welcome by all who are inspired by his story.... and he'd feel relieved.

The reason we should read biographies, to my mind, is clear - to find out what drives other people towards success, towards failure, towards redemption, towards evil, even to find out how the Mansons, Stalins, Hitlers and Husseins grew up. The pursuit of a clue towards a person's later decisions is a delicious game, to find the key events in childhood that makes that person later go down in the history books.

However, there is one problem in an autobiography: the person is himself writing it, therefore editting out consciously and unconsciously factors that may well have been much more critical, omitted due to personal embarassment or because the family members and friend are still alive.

Reading the life of Andrew Grove, according to Andrew Grove (born Andras Grof), is to have a feeling that his whole childhood was drawn through a cheesecloth with small holes. If he did write it all himself, without outside editting, it reads in a very simplistic way, for a very complex man. It seems as if the "big words" were taken out, the more complex self-examination of his soul was either never set to paper, or deleted.

Nevertheless, you will find this book a good read, like a suspense story, as young Andris, only child of a Jewish comfortable family in pre-WWII Budapest, grows up with a strong sense of separation from others.

He has several marks against him from the start - he is Jewish, and all around him know it, and for the most part, in Europe, that was no plus. He rejects his own religion and remains fiercely secular, so he has no religious morality on which he hangs his decisions. He is a pudgy boy, whom others tease, whom girls reject. He turns to books, to study, to the English language, and finally to science, in his loneliness. His own father is taken away during the war, hence his mother loses her social life and is isolated along with her son. The situation is restored to prosperity and popularity after the war, when the father miraculously survives a dreadful work camp, returning home a filthy skeleton.

When the father is in clover, getting top level positions in the post-war economy, by means unclear to readers, all seems well, and people come in a steady flow to the house. Later, the father is accused of illegal activity, and loses his position and 75% of his salary, along with the pretty secretary and the car. The sensitive son, Andris, notices how popularity depends on the income and position of the father. NO doubt that this is driven deep into his consciousness more than anything else.

When a chance to leave Hungary arises in 1956 with the 17 days of fighting the Russian Communists, his parents do not hesitate to encourage him, for at least he has a fighting chance with relatives in New York City, and years of English lessons under his belt. These two factors hasten his journey by ship to America, where his relatives adopt him and support his way through college, until he has a degree in chemical engineering. His attachment to Hungary is weak to this day, and he has not returned since his mudcaked trudge over the border to Vienna. He never voices a strong hatred of Communists, perhaps because his own father must have been one to have been appointed an inspector in an area in which he was not qualified. Yet it is the Communist mentality which has hung over his country and threatened the Western world for decades. It is a strange omission in a man who celebrates America's open doors and willlingness to give immigrants a chance at great capitalistic success, something that could never have happened in a Russian-dominated nation.

I am impressed with this older man's willingness to write about his painful and persecuted youth, but any experienced reader can feel that there is a stiffness in the writing, especially in dealing with any of the women who did not mother him (i.e. his own mother and the aunt in NYC), as if the human elements in his life were not so critical for him. He seems to be a very tough nut, although he may have underneath some sentimentality, i.e. when the grandchildren were born, he wrote this book. He admits in the closing chapter that he himself is not sure why he does not return to the country of his youth, but I have my own suspicion - that he felt himself an outsider and a social failure throughout all those years, both as a Jew and a "nerd", and that his father's ups and downs with the economy and with the Communist affiliation made a much bigger impact than he will dare delve into. He perhaps underestimated the English-speaking world's understanding of this kind of dictatorship and decided not to go deeply into that part of everyday life.

Most refugees from Communism and Nazism are willing to go on for chapters about the restrictions and mind control of their homeland's dictatorships, but you will find that these are only briefly touched upon. I see the young Andris a boy of self-conscious, sensitive and rationally intelligence, who refuses to let external factors push him down, what the Finns call SISU. Whether it is outside takeovers like the fall of Hungary to COmmunism, the rape of his mother by the Russians, the imprisonment of his father, and other extremely horrid life situations, he shut his emotions down and plowed ahead. Yes, he is very much like the Finns, especially their men.

We can all admire Andrew Grove as a great leader of Intel, as a driven and highly intelligent man, but the person underneath, as revealed in this story, is a damaged and isolated person from his youth. No wonder that he did not want to write it down until so much later in life, when material success and a family of his own could prove that he was great.

Never would I have expected a man behind Intel could have such a childhood.I picked this book because it was written by Andrew Grove and mostly because it sets in the the times of World War II. Although I could not get much from a Jews perspective during the war time, however the book has captured some of the essence of tension during the period.

I was intrigued by his childhood story and found it hard to put the book down one I started reading it (Yes, it is cliche to say that..) The title of the book "Swimming Across" could not have been more appropriate with his escape from Hungary to the United States - that made such an outstanding person in man's history!