August 26, 1976

Mre. Sylvia Averbach
151 Woodpecker Road
Jenkintown, Pa. 19046

Dear Sylvia,

I just tried to call you to reassure you that I had sent a letter
to Dr. Feeney at Montgomery County Community College. I was kind of hung up
on this, life here having been rather confusing on account of Viking and
other things. However, I also called his office and they assured me that
the position was still open and that they were indeed happy to get my
recommendation.

Also, going over my old files, I realized that I still had some of
the correspondence that we exchanged during that last incarnation. In fact,
I had not realized what good correspondents both of us must have been at
that time. We continued to write for quite a while after you married Lou
and then I guess life got rather busier for both of us.

Well, it's just in that connection that I also wanted to ask you whether
there was even some feeble hope that you had the counterpart of any of that
material. I have your letters to me, but I do not have copies of what I
had written, and it is a little tantalizing, to guess from your responses,
how much I may have been putting down about the way I was just getting
under way in my research career. As I am starting to write a biographical
memoir, any documentation of that kind would in fact be most helpful since
one can hardly put very much reliance on one's unaided memory over that
period of time. I realize this is a long shot, and that nostalgia is not
necessarily the most constructive move to try to inculcate for either of us.
On the other hand, I have been finding that these fragments of history are a
kind of bind to one's own real existence: a lesson I think you were more
able to teach me in those days than I knew how to receive. Anyhow, if you
have been keeping things in trunks in your attic and it is not too much trouble
to check, I wonder what you might be able to find along these lines.

Good luck on your position. I hope that it and everything else in your
life right now really does work out for the best.

Yours as ever,

Joshua Lederberg