by Guy Stern
In the morning my wife urged me to get ready. It was time to leave for our next interview. Suddenly my mind started to function. I responded by telling her that I would not leave the hotel until her ill-gotten gains were placed back on the credenza. She admitted defeat by simply telling Nancy to take out the silver tray setting. I was glad that everything had been returned, or so I thought.
When we arrived at another of our destinations in Denmark, she triumphantly showed me her stolen goods. “These two teaspoons provide me with some measure of revenge,” she said.
Having laid bare one of the numerous follies of my first wife, it is only fair that I also expose a bit of stupidity of my own, committed during that same time period. It’s the only time in my life when I got absolutely and totally drunk. During one of the summers of our troubled married years, we decided to spend a few weeks at a fabulous vacation spot at Saint Jean-de-Luz on the Basque coast. Mark was having a wonderful time discovering his prowess as a swimmer. But he discovered something else as well. He was told by a playmate that underground caves with prehistoric drawings had just been discovered in Limoges, France, and he urged us to visit these caves immediately. We looked at a map. Limoges was 275 miles away. We found out that in the city of Vare, quite close to our temporary residence, underground caves also existed. Even though they had no cave drawings, Mark was satisfied. We arrived in Vare around noontime, and, the eternal optimist, I stood ready to commandeer a cab to take us to the caves. But, alas, Vare didn’t boast of a taxi company. Rumors told us that a baker, as a further source of income, would take tourists around town. We hastened to the bakery and were greeted by the baker’s wife in a language we failed to understand. It was Basque. When we finally arrived at a lingua franca, Spanish, she told us that her husband was out taking another tourist to the environs of Vare. She suggested we have lunch at a five-star restaurant, which lived up to its reputation, and as a bonus, numbered two prominent French people among its guests. We were in the presence of Brigitte Bardot and her fiancé, Gunther Sachs, and we got our fill of gazing at them.
Back at the bakery, the baker was very willing to take us to the caves, provided he could bring his seven-year-old son along on the trip. The boy turned out to be the perfect playmate for Mark, even though a language wall stood between them, and they raced around the caves several times. We later learned from our driver that during WWII, these caves had served as assembly points for German refugees in flight, prior to their attempts to cross the Pyrennes and the French-Spanish border. I felt greatly obliged to our good baker and suggested that we stop at a bar for a drink.
“Well,” he said, “if we cross the border into Spain, my cousin, a farmer, also operates a makeshift bar where we would be served drinks at very reasonable prices.” He brushed aside my reservation that we didn’t have our passports along. “We’re driving across the fields to his farm. There is no check point.”
When we arrived at the farm, a whole clan was assembled, eating dessert on an improvised table. I looked at their fare and was appalled. There, at a countryside abounding in orchards, they were partaking of an imported delicacy, cans of Dole’s fruit salad. The male members of the clan and I gathered around the bar al fresco. I ordered a round for everyone, a glass of port for myself. And I thought this would be the end of a small-scale drinking bout. But that was not to be. An elder member of the Basque clan immediately called for a reorder just moments after we had drained our glasses. I told our kind driver that I had had my quota. “Oh, but you can’t do that. Once you have extended your hospitality to all, each one in this round will now take his turn at ordering.”
I have no idea how my wife and son got me back into the baker’s car, nor into the bus taking us back from Vare to Saint Jean-de-Luz, nor from the bus stop to the hotel. I awoke a few hours later, alone in our hotel room, and knew that the intake of some food had become imperative. I dragged myself to the dining room, long after lunch, but a merciful waitress brought me a large portion of paté. I survived and was nearly a model of sobriety again the next morning.
Margith had some positive points that allow me to retain some kind feelings toward her, including rescuing me during this episode of inebriation, though I scarcely remember it. She was the excellent manager of a print shop. Margith successfully continued my program that introduced foreign languages into the curriculum of an elementary school. She could exude at will the charm of an Austrian operetta star. Also, her exquisite baking betokened her Viennese origins. In fact, this skill catapulted her to local fame!
If I look back on my first marriage, I try to remember the moments of pleasure that dispelled the gloom. I felt thoroughly at home on campus and less and less at home within my own four walls. Margith and I weren’t meant for each other. I should have realized my lack of judgment much earlier, but I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of a divorce after a short-lived marriage. The conservative customs of my childhood persisted. People didn’t get divorced often among my parents’ generation. We stayed together past the twenty-year mark. The photos of the last years still show me smiling. That was more of a mask than a reflection of my true feelings.
Beyond the satisfaction that my profession yielded during the difficult years of my marriage, Mark and I had fun together outside of the house. Hiking became both a past time and an escape—before the legal escape of divorce.
We received joint custody. I would have preferred being the sole custodial parent. During my time with Mark, I took him to science museums, here and abroad, on long nature walks that he looked forward to, and on summer trips in pursuit of natural beauty, in Washington State, in the forests of Ontario, and around the San Diego coastline. I also functioned as his swimming coach. At age twelve he became the leading backstroker on his team, the Tiger Sharks, who won the regional finals, one of the happiest moments of his life. After the victory ceremony, barrels of ice cream were wheeled in, and like champions, the Tiger Sharks won the battle at the dessert table as well. I rarely saw him so happy. He enjoyed the moment of victory during which his mother didn’t have the opportunity to belittle him. I shared his triumph and three of his ice cream cones.
He graduated from high school, but only through an equivalency procedure that involved passing the graduate requirement exam. He wisely didn’t try for college, but got himself a job in construction instead. Later he became a partner in a small company. He had acquired a girlfriend and a reasonably satisfactory lifestyle.
And then, at age forty-six, he died far too early. Neither we nor he realized that he suffered from cellular fibrosis, a disease easily controllable by an uncomplicated apparatus. My grief at his death, attenuated only by time, has turned into lasting regret.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Teaching
Even at the danger of inviting guffaws, I will maintain that my career as a teacher began while I was a senior in high school. It antedates by decades my official entry into the profession. As Shakespeare does not say, “some are born teachers, some achieve being teachers, and some have teaching thrust upon ’em.” I will say, somewhat immodestly, that all three conditions, to various degrees, apply to me. My uncertain beginnings as a tutor-teacher reflect the third scenario. I had been in this country only a year-and-a-half, when, at sixteen years old, I received an unusual message from the employment office of the high school where I had registered. The parents of a precocious piano prodigy, about five years younger than I, wanted their Mozart-in-the-making to have German lessons, so that he would know how to pronounce German song titles and to glean the sentiments pouring out of the lieder and arias he so nimbly performed on his grand piano. I presented myself at an opulent manor house, not far from the high school grounds, and for the next three months taught my pupil, quite successfully, the content of Schubert and Schumann lieder, but failed dismally in my attempt to get him to properly pronounce Wagnerian arias such as “Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond,” with its difficult pronunciation of Germanic Ws.
After that I went into temp
orary retirement until pressed into service by the US Army. In Bristol, England in 1943, while we were feverishly preparing for the invasion of the Normandy beaches, an inventive colonel decided that our frontline troops should come prepared with some basic German commands at their disposal such as “werft die Waffen weg” (throw away your weapons). I thus toured a good part of the British countryside going to different units for intense, sometimes hilarious teaching sessions in military German. I felt that we supplied our “students” not only with some useful phrases, but also with some comic relief. On one occasion, the corporal of a battle-ready infantry outfit challenged me: “Hell, Sarge, we won’t be that polite to those bastards!”
“You are right, corporal,” I said. “So here are some words you might want to add.” I taught them the German slang equivalents for “posterior” and “rectum.” Bursts of laughter and perfect repetition greeted the vulgarisms. For the moment anyway, humor had dispelled their (and my) anxiety about the impending invasion.
I was propelled into genuine teaching seven years later when I found myself standing before classes at Columbia that featured a healthy sprinkling of hard-boiled discharged veterans, most of them only slightly younger than I. Hence, my initiation into teaching, at first with only a few orientation sessions under my academic gown, was, because of my audience, perhaps more dramatic than the situation facing almost all graduate teaching assistants, past, present, and future. I quieted the volcanic veterans by coming to class one day bedecked in my Eisenhower jacket, complete with the stripes of a master sergeant and some sundry decorations, and shouting “At ease,” perhaps for the first time in the classroom history of Columbia College.
Until I had my master’s degree firmly in hand, I continued working as a waiter, a somewhat fail-safe activity that had sustained me during my days as an undergraduate. When I finally turned in my uniform at the Broadway Lobster Pond, the waiters’ union newspaper headlined the event alliteratively, “From Lobsters to Languages.” I came to one insight early on during that sink-or-swim emergence as an instructor: you become an effective teacher by modeling yourself on a personality that closely resembles your own temperament. In the course of my career, I have had the good fortune of encountering several such models. At Columbia I conjured up Father Steven J. Reeve, the Jesuit priest who had been one of my teachers when I was a lower-division undergraduate at Saint Louis University before the war. He was strict and demanding, but also showed kindness to his students when a softer approach was in order. Also he had a mordant sense of humor. He apparently surreptitiously supported the theory of evolution. When one student claimed that he believed literally and unalterably in the Genesis version of the creation of the world, Father Reeve answered, “Well, you can as easily believe that the world was created yesterday, that we all have the same memories, and that today most of us need a haircut.”
I also modeled myself on Professor Jack Stein, the department representative at the undergraduate Columbia College. He held high expectations of his students, but when a student failed to meet his standards, he studiously refrained from putting the student down. In his meetings with graduate teaching assistants, he repeatedly stressed the fact that a superior or supercilious attitude was out of place in the classroom: “Those students in front of you,” he would say, “don’t know as much yet as you do—or the roles would be reversed—but it figures by the law of averages that a good many of them have better brains than you. Respect that!”
Stein was untiring. He would remind us that if we came into the classroom with droopy eyes, our students would be all too happy to join us in a prolonged session of dozing. This advice stood me in good stead when I was asked to undertake a three-week teaching marathon during Columbia’s so-called Summer Interim Session. The work of a full semester was to be covered in less than a month. The five-day-a-week-rhythm meant three hours of teaching, interspersed with three hours of supervised studies and a communal lunch in the Kings Crown Cafeteria, where the patter of stereotypical German phrases was accompanied by the ingesting of equally humdrum meals. While this was the most strenuous teaching I endured at Columbia, the most challenging and stimulating experience came my way for three years straight in the form of a wonderful invitational conference called “Forum for Democracy.” Promising young instructors (a dizzyingly high rank, which I attained after receiving my master’s degree) were asked to participate. High school student leaders and editors of high school newspapers were invited (with free room and board) to this forum of lectures and discussions on a topical sociopolitical subject. It was always keynoted by some of the nation’s finest minds, including luminaries of our own faculty, such as Gilbert Highet, Lionel Trilling, and Mark von Doren. We young instructors, touted as Highets or Trillings in the making, led smaller breakout discussion groups.
I doubt I attained the Olympian heights of those vaunted older colleagues, but I have it on good authority that I did not entirely fail either my students or American democracy. Let me explain: Some thirty years ago, in 1985, I was present in Jefferson City, Missouri during the inauguration of the legislature and the new governor, John Ashcroft. A cousin of mine, Bobby Feigenbaum, was also sworn in as an incoming state legislator. At an informal, post–inaugural luncheon, my cousin introduced me to Missouri’s Republican Senator John Danforth. “I remember a high school student by your name,” I said. “That young fellow gave brilliant answers during one of Columbia’s Forums for Democracy. Might you be related to him?”
His face was all smiles; he looked as pleased as if he’d won a close vote on the Senate floor. “Yes,” he said, “that was me. And you were a damned good discussion leader!”
In recent years I received an accolade from Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan. As a speaker at Wayne State, he had talked to some of my students and heard favorable comments about the lectures in my German Cultural History classes. I therefore feel proud that my teaching has received bipartisan support.
During those years Columbia College attracted many Jewish students. They were not, for the most part, from the upper echelons of society. One student came to me after class, nearly in tears. He had torn his pants on a nail in his chair and had ruined his only presentable suit. The next day I slipped him a smallish parcel. I had correctly assessed that he was of about the same size and build as I. I had remembered that one of my suits came with two pairs of trousers.
Generally among the students there was little suspicion of postwar Germany. In an ahistorical age, a war that had ended ten years previously seemed already a conflict of long ago. With their parents, however, it was a different matter.
One of my Jewish students who was all fired up for German literature was particularly good at his studies, and I had secured a small outside scholarship for him for summer study in Germany. Both of his parents came to my office hour. “What have you done?” they reproached me. “We escaped from Germany; many members of our family died there, and you are sending our son back among the Nazis!” I told them a bit about my own tragedy, about my initial aversion to all things German, followed by the recognition that to make a mass judgment about a group of people was shortsighted, particularly for new generations. My counterargument in their son’s case—it was his decision after all and he would meet students of his own generation and not former members of the Hitler youth—only partially assuaged their dismay. Yet the story had a happy ending. The student, occasionally given to bouts of drinking, reformed under the lasting impact of his studies in Freiburg. After his return, his father, the owner of a jewelry store, came once again to my Hamilton Hall office and presented me with a tie pin.
Some Jewish students, like their parents, ambivalent toward Germany and courses in German, became inordinately conscientious after enrolling in them. Mrs. Rose, a Barnard student, had gotten special permission to enroll in my advanced conversation course at the all-male Columbia College. She came to me around midterm: “Could I take my final ahead of schedule? The regularly scheduled time is my due date.” But o
n the agreed-upon early spring morning before our class, Mrs. Rose, who had a perfect attendance record, did not show up. Half an hour later her husband called: “It’s a boy,” he said. She had attended classes right up to the last minute. My squeamish stomach was very relieved that I didn’t have to contemplate how to attend a delivery in my office.
A telling symbol of a department in transition was our Columbia College German Club. In retrospect, it was fusty, with the meetings a watered-down replica of Old Heidelberg and its beer-filled romanticism. The student president, Ernest Leo (later an instructor at the City College of New York), wielded a saber or sword instead of a gavel, and we sang boisterous songs, such as “Krambambuli,” printed in the ancient copies of a “Kommersbuch,” a collection of student songs. We drank weak beer in copious quantities, encouraged by toasts straight out of the repertoire of old German dueling fraternities. Midway through our meetings, there would be a series of modern presentations given by faculty and graduate assistants. Jack Stein talked about the beauty of words and music in German songs; Hugo Schmidt (later department head at the University of Colorado) compared the national characteristics of Germans and Austrians. I talked on Wilhelm Hauff as a precursor of the modern historical novel. My friend Gustave Mathieu spoke on Brecht; the exiled poet Walter Mehring gave a reading; and a guest speaker from the Music Department played Impressionist music on an out-of-tune upright piano, a performance that made me a lifelong enemy of Claude Debussy. In my last year at Columbia after I received my Ph.D., I became faculty advisor to the German Club.
The department’s classes in German literature, as well as the club—with all its outdated claptrap—formed bonds among our students. It was obvious there was no division along religious lines. It now puzzles me why our Jewish students flocked to those meetings. One of our officers, Yale Meltzer, was Jewish. Even more startling, a refugee economics professor at Brooklyn College, Dr. Garbuny, graced our bibulous meetings, impeccably dressed. Relationships were also cemented by various other departmental activities. Barnard College women recruited two of my students from my class “Introduction to German Literature” for a Goethe celebration. Both young men put on eighteenth-century court costumes, one of them—a recent arrival from Germany—playing Goethe, and the other—a diminutive student—playing Goethe’s secretary Eckermann. A large group of Columbia College men joined together with Barnard women to celebrate classical German literature.
