Swimming Across: A Memoir

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.

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.

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.

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.