Novel Tells of Female Math Whiz Helping the U.S. to Win World War II

Trajectory by Cambria Gordon; New York: Scholastic Press (c) 2024; ISBN 9781338-853827; 285 pages plus notes; $19.99,

SAN DIEGO — In this novel written for high school students, a childhood trauma has molded Eleanor Schiff’s self-effacing personality through the end of high school.  When she was just 6, she interrupted her father, the mathematician, at his desk and demanded that he follow her up a flight of stairs to retrieve her toy oven from a high shelf.  Climbing the stairs, her father suffered a paralyzing stroke.  Eleanor blamed herself and retreated into a shell, determined never again to make demands on anyone or to draw unnecessary attention to herself.

Her misplaced feelings of guilt prompted her to hide a remarkable inheritance, the gift of being able to visualize the solutions to math problems in her head, similar to the way that television’s Dr. Shaun Murphy of the just concluded The Good Doctor series was able to mentally picture complex medical conditions and interactions.

Eleanor attends a math competition and correctly answers an extremely complex problem that is over the heads of other students, but doesn’t turn in her paper.  Although she can’t deny her love of math, she eschews recognition for a talent which she believes more rightfully should have remained with her father.  However, the instructor proctoring the exam witnessed Eleanor’s talent and mentioned it to federal officials who were attempting to recruit math geniuses to solve problems that would help the American cause during World War II.

Eleanor, who is Jewish and outraged by Hitler’s campaign against the Jews — which in particular endangers cousins in Poland — cannot resist the appeal to her patriotism and so joins a highly secret mathematics unit, telling her parents that her first job out of high school will be to work in and lodge with a secretarial pool.

From here, the novel goes on to discuss Eleanor’s gradual emergence from her protective shell, her encounters with anti-Jewish hatred, and her being chosen to work on projects at a top-secret installation in the Mojave Desert and later at Hickam Air Field at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

She befriends an African-American woman who faces down prejudice in the mathematics unit.  Eleanor, naive and never been kissed, also experiences the first stirrings of love with a serviceman who is Mormon.

Many themes are covered in this fast-moving novel, but Eleanor’s unusual proficiency in applied mathematics and overcoming her childhood trauma remain central to the well-conceived plot.

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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.