Charlotte Serber

Charlotte Leof was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 26, 1911, the youngest of three children of Morris V. Leof, a physician, and his wife Jennie Chalfin. She had an older brother, the noted Pre-Columbian art collector and preeminent dentist Dr Milton Arnold Leof, and an older sister, Madeline Blitzstein (stepmother of the composer, lyricist, and librettist Marc Blitzstein). Her father was a member of the Socialist Party of America and was involved in left-wing activities. Visitors to their home included playwright Clifford Odets, journalist I. F. Stone, and physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Her father was the uncle of his stepmother, and they had known each other for many years. Initially, they lived in Madison, Wisconsin, where Robert was a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin. From 1933 to 1935, Charlotte worked as a freelance journalist, writing articles for newspapers like the Boston Globe. Her work included an interview with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. ==Manhattan Project==

In December 1941, Oppenheimer visited Urbana and asked Robert to join the Manhattan Project, the effort to develop an atomic bomb. Robert and Charlotte set out for Berkeley again in April 1942. Lacking experience in cataloging books, she taught herself how to use the Dewey Decimal Classification system. The whole library had to be created from scratch. Some 1,200 books and the complete runs of 50 scientific journals were ordered to establish the library. Many of these were out of print, and were ordered through inter-library loan agreements through the University of California. The library was divided into two parts: the main library and the technical report library. The former contained the books and journals. The first of the latter arrived by courier soon after the first books, in black suitcases carried by a courier, and were initially stored in a safe while a vault was being built. Some foreign journals came from the Office of Strategic Services Periodical Publications Program. Agents purchased journals in enemy, occupied and neutral countries, and these were copied and distributed. Enemy copyrights and patents were seized by the Office of Alien Property Custodian. One of the library's tasks was typing, copying and distributing these highly classified reports. The library staff grew to 12 people, mostly members of the Women's Army Corps and wives of scientists. Charlotte acknowledged that they might have looked unusual to outsiders: Serber was not permitted to view the Trinity Test, ostensibly because the test site had no facilities for women, but after the war, Oppenheimer acknowledged the importance of the job that she had done, writing to her on November 2, 1945: In 1946, Charlotte Serber and eight other women wrote accounts of their experiences at wartime Los Alamos. The manuscript was published in 1988 as Standing By and Making Do: Women of Wartime Los Alamos. ==Post war==

Oppenheimer attempted to secure Robert a position at the University of California, but was blocked by the head of the Physics Department, Raymond T. Birge, who still felt that "one Jew in the department is enough." Instead, he was given a position with the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, which had an independent status. However, he was given a professorial appointment in the department when Oppenheimer left for the Institute for Advanced Study. Charlotte Serber attempted to secure a position as a librarian at the Radiation Laboratory in 1946, but was rejected because she could not obtain a security clearance. The likely reason for her rejection was due to her political views. Between 1946 and 1948, the FBI wiretapped her phone and opened her mail. In 1950, the University of California instituted a system of loyalty oaths in accordance with the Levering Act. Robert was willing to sign an oath, but became increasingly disturbed by the atmosphere in Berkeley, and in 1951 accepted an offer of a professorship at the Columbia University from Rabi. Serber became a production assistant for the Broadway Theatre. In 1965, she took a job with Louis Harris as an interviewer. Serber suffered from depression after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, and took her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills on May 22, 1967. The Research Library at the Los Alamos National Laboratory remains as her legacy, and by 1999 it was one of the foremost scientific libraries in the United States. ==In popular culture==

Serber was portrayed in the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer (2023) by actress Jessica Erin Martin. ==Notes==