Afterwards Bacher returned to the University of Michigan on an Alfred H. Lloyd Fellowship. Jobs were hard to find at this time due to the Great Depression, and in 1934 he accepted a job at Columbia University, where he worked with Isidor Isaac Rabi, Jerrold Zacharias, Jerome Kellogg and Sid Millman. However it was difficult living in New York on his salary, and Jean gave birth to their first child, Martha, in December 1935. A second child, Andrew, was born in 1938. Bacher therefore accepted an offer from Hans Bethe to work with him at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Ithaca was a university town similar to Ann Arbor, where Bacher and Jean had been raised. At Cornell Bacher worked with Bethe on his book Nuclear Physics. A: Stationary States of Nuclei (1936), the first of three books that would become known as the "Bethe Bible".