To those who loved him, Sammy Fisher seemed at times to be everywhere at once, as if he were not one person, but two — briskly moving between cultures, countries, and disparate pursuits.
He recognized the dual nature of his life and embraced the contrasts as complementary, not contradictory. The branches of his family tree reach back to the Holocaust and to China. He studied Mandarin while growing up in Newton and immersed himself in Judaism at a Jerusalem yeshiva. He was a classical cellist and a jazz bassist, and performed at Symphony Hall and the Regattabar. As an aspiring Wall Street analyst, he read David Foster Wallace’s daunting 1,000-page novel “Infinite Jest’’ his senior year at Harvard University, choosing the elective because he wanted to, rather than had to.
“These dualities have enriched my life beyond just introducing variety,’’ he wrote in a series of columns for The Jewish Star during his time in Jerusalem after high school. “Through my experiences at home, at school, and in orchestra and jazz band, I have come to recognize that contrasting, even seemingly opposite, viewpoints bring merit and value in their own rights. I strive to respect rather than reject differences.’’
On June 12, he took part in a charity triathlon in Stamford, Conn., with colleagues from Goldman Sachs in New York City, where he had moved to work as an analyst for the global financial firm. Just after receiving a medal for participating, Mr. Fisher collapsed and died. He was 24.
“We may never know what took him,’’ his father, Dr. David Fisher of Newton, noted in a eulogy at the memorial service, though tests are pending as the family searches for the cause.
With uncommon reach for someone so young, Mr. Fisher influenced and was influenced by the lives of family and friends from Newton to Hong Kong, from Harvard to Israel. He was a mentor to his youngest brother — 10 years his junior — and the time he spent with their grandparents was just as memorable.
His grandmother in Hong Kong introduced Mr. Fisher to a Chinese phrase that translated into “living in the moment’’ — a demanding concept for a 15-year-old. On another teenage trip, he traveled with his paternal grandparents, both Holocaust survivors, to the former Auschwitz concentration camp and stood by a wall where Jews faced firing squads decades earlier.
“It is my responsibility to feel the Holocaust vividly, to be shaken into intolerable awareness,’’ Mr. Fisher later wrote in a column. “To keep the memory alive takes a lot more than words.’’
His words resonated, though, whether in columns or conversations. “He was an amazing person to talk to — he could talk about anything,’’ said his friend, David Sackstein, who preceded Mr. Fisher as president of Harvard’s Hillel chapter. “He was incredibly worldly.’’
Their late-night walks sometimes brought them past midnight to Harvard Square’s IHOP, where they welcomed strangers into their conversations. “Once there, we saw that there were people without food and seeking shelter from the cold,’’ Sackstein recalled in his eulogy. “It soon became a fairly usual occurrence for us to invite familiar faces to join us for a bite to eat or a coffee.’’
In his new life at Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, Mr. Fisher “was not just good at numbers, he was deeply intellectually curious and he would question assumptions and help us to be creative with new ideas,’’ said Greg Lee, a partner in the firm’s industrials group in investment banking. “This was a really remarkable, special young man.’’
“To say that Sam’s young life was promising was a huge understatement,’’ said Rabbi Jonah Steinberg, director of Harvard Hillel. “His life and leadership touched so many people and continues to touch and shape so many people in our Jewish community at Harvard and beyond.’’
The second of four brothers, Samuel Ming-Sum Fisher grew up in Newton. His father, David, is the Edward Wigglesworth professor and chairman of the Department of Dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital. His mother, Dr. Claire Fung Fisher, is on the faculty in radiation oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and is part of a Newburyport practice.
Mr. Fisher began piano lessons at age 5, the cello at 7, and later added jazz bass to his instrumental repertoire. With his father and brothers he also fished, a pastime that would illuminate lessons from the Torah, and teach him “to appreciate the underlying gifts I have come to take for granted,’’ he wrote in a column. Even when no fish are caught, Judaism promises “a life in which a bad day of fishing doesn’t exist because the freedom to go fishing is itself satisfying. What more could I want than for fishing failure to be my greatest grief?’’
Though Mr. Fisher was the second-born, he “had become in the end kind of an older brother to me,’’ said his brother Jonathan of Cambridge, the oldest sibling. “Things came naturally to him. It’s not that he didn’t work hard, it’s that hard work came naturally,’’ Jonathan added. His brother, he said, “was somewhat of a child wonder.’’
After graduating from the Maimonides School in Brookline in 2010, Mr. Fisher engaged in advanced study of Jewish texts at Orayta Yeshiva in Jerusalem, and then received a bachelor’s in statistics from Harvard in 2015. He had been an intern at Ernst & Young and a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with being a leader of Harvard Hillel, he was principal cellist in the Harvard Bach Society Orchestra, and he competed in a marathon in Jerusalem.
“Especially in college he always seemed to be extraordinarily content,’’ said Stevie Fine of Cambridge, a friend since childhood. “He had a lot to be thankful for, and he knew that, and he was appreciative. He knew what he had and there was something really beautiful about it. A lot of people live their life without appreciating it.’’
Mr. Fisher “lived a full life,’’ his father said, “and that has given us some comfort.’’
A service has been held for Mr. Fisher, who in addition to his parents and older brother leaves his two younger brothers, Jeremy of St. Louis and Benjamin of Newton; his grandparents, Shiu-Lam and Sydney (Chan) Fung of Hong Kong, and Hans and Ruth (Hirschberg) Fisher of Newton; and his girlfriend, Dani Keahi of Hawaii.
Mr. Fisher went to Jerusalem “with lots of questions and doubts about religion — what is God, what is prayer,’’ recalled his father, who visited his son at one point and asked if he had found any answers. “He said, ‘I think I’ve figured out that it’s OK not to have all the answers, that the process itself is valuable.’ ’’
In a final Jewish Star column, Mr. Fisher mused about the fraught relationship between accumulation and appreciation, which raised questions that perhaps can only be answered by asking more questions.
When it comes to material possessions, for example, “we are so far from fully appreciating that it makes no difference how much more we accumulate,’’ he wrote. “When was the last time you fully appreciated your life? How can you truly appreciate a new car when you cannot even appreciate the infinitely dwarfing value of life?’’
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.
