Our parents continued to insist that we never go to or from school unaccompanied. Until then, our coachman had always driven us in the morning, and Aunt Paulette had usually met us after school and walked back home with us through the Volksgarten. That had been very fun on occasion. But ever since she had hit our sister, Tanya, Aunt Elvira picked us up. Aunt Elvira was in her forties, and to us she seemed ancient and unbending. In addition, she had been “left on the shelf,” that is, she hadn’t found a husband, which also may have soured her. She was the oldest of four sisters—after her came, at significant intervals, our mother, our late Aunt Aida, and Aunt Paulette—and so she commanded a certain degree of authority in the family. We always considered her a terrible party-pooper. For like many unlucky women who have missed their natural vocation as mothers with families of their own, and who though not entirely without work lack much that is truly theirs, being forced to live with relatives, she clung to the illusion that our family was nothing more than an extension of her parent’s home, and kept a jealous eye out to make sure that everything was done in the same way and according to the same views as had been practiced there. This led to frequent conflicts with our father—so-called crises—that split the house into factions. At first glance, such divisions do much harm to family life, but frequently they are the only thing that makes us aware that there is such a thing as “family life” in the first place.
I have already mentioned that we didn’t concern ourselves with the religion of our new friends—nor in fact that of most of our classmates—though it’s hard to say whether this was intentional or an unconscious decision. But I would be straying far indeed from the truth if I were to claim we didn’t know what kind of instruction we were receiving every week from a certain Dr. Aaron Salzmann. We had never discussed or planned our participation; we simply took it for granted that we would take part in that course, just like the majority of our classmates, and above all like our close friends Blanche Schlesinger and Solly Brill. There were so few Catholics in the Institut d’Éducation that the school did not offer special instruction for them. We had been told at the outset that one afternoon in the week we were expected to visit the priest of the Herz-Jesu Church, Deacon Mieczysław Chmielewski, who had a hard time ridding us of the Anglican notions we had acquired thanks to Miss Rappaport. Similarly, the larger group of Lutherans, the occasional Eastern Orthodox or Greek Catholic, the Armenians, and Calvinist students went to their churches for instruction every Wednesday afternoon, and kept away from Dr. Salzmann’s class, which was the last one of the day at the institute. So it didn’t really attract any attention if we took part in that course; besides, no one at home paid much attention to our schedule.
Only Solly Brill expressed his surprise the first time he saw us in Dr. Salzmann’s class. “What’s this?” he said. “I thought you were little goyim. You’re not even circumcised. Well, so much the better. We’ll sit through cheyder all together.”
Blanche, however, appeared to see through our friendly deception. She said: “My father often talks to me about Christ and the holy symbolism of his crucifixion. I’d become a Christian myself if it weren’t for the fact that as soon as you do that you get attacked from all sides. My father also thinks that people can feel Jewish and Christian at the same time.”
Thanks to the short time we spent in Dr. Salzmann’s class, we never thought otherwise ourselves. Because what we heard there and learned was a beautiful reverence for God and an equally beautiful tolerance, wise and smiling—in any case far more ethical than the relentless zeal of Deacon “Mietek” Chmielewski, who tried to convince us that we, as Austrians—in other words almost Germans, by which he meant Protestants—had little or no chance of ever truly being good Catholics, and that a good Catholic had the duty of being an even better Pole.
From Dr. Salzmann we heard about the only people—apart from the Hellenes—whom we felt had a legitimate claim to national seniority, a nation made holy both by the greatness of its religion as well as by a thousand years of martyrdom, that had produced the men we had learned to revere as our own patriarchs, and whose cruel persecutions throughout generations were no less than those suffered by the martyrs of our Church, and continued to the most recent times. We were shaken to hear about the atrocities committed during the uprising led by Khmelnytsky, whose name sounded so much like that of our deacon.
In portraying those events, or the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition, Dr. Salzmann’s intent was not to show how bestially the Christians had acted in their religious zeal. He mitigated their guilt as well as he could, with wisely resigned pronouncements about human nature, and by constantly demonstrating that stupidity or foolishness were more to blame than actual ill will—for instance when he told us that the reason Russian soldiers so much enjoyed enacting pogroms was because they had great fun slitting the feather beds with their bayonets. The fact that people who had been frightened out of their wits happened to have crawled under those same feather beds was, so to speak, a misunderstanding—“bad luck,” as Miss Rappaport might say, who also responded to such situations with cool objectivity.
In talking about the agonizing history of the Jews, Dr. Salzmann was not simply dishing out the murky broth of nationalistic feeling by citing the hardships of the fathers; his goal was to emphasize the steadfastness of belief that had been handed down through the generations. Untold hordes of old and young, men, mothers, children had been tortured to death upholding the precept of Kiddush Hashem—in the praise of the one whose name cannot be taken in vain, according to the commandment that for us also was the first—and would continue to be martyred for their belief. They died confessing their faith with words that we, who also believed in a single God—the God of the same tribe from which our Savior came—happily repeated with conviction the Shema Yisrael: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one!”
But most of all we loved this class on account of the teacher. Dr. Aaron Salzmann had a captivating way of treating each of us as creatures that were at once human and all-too-human, whose understanding of the world, from the least things to the greatest, was limited solely by our lack of practice in clear and logical thought—in other words, in merely thinking. He accepted neither ignorance nor stupidity, which he considered mere excuses. Whenever he encountered a lack of understanding, he never lost his patience, but closed his eyes, arched his eyebrows, and repeated the question or sentence that had not been immediately understood in his soft, rich tenor, adding a sigh of ponderous contentment—for as long as it took until he finally came out with the explanation or answer himself, because it was part of his internal vision. His standing expression was: “I’m thinking out loud.”
He was very fat—his stomach stuck out so far it seemed to push him backwards; his face had a glossy, reddish tinge with the olive undertone of his race, and he had sparkling black eyes and a thick, assertive mustache. His bearing was warlike. Embedded in the cushions of fat around his cheeks we could still make out the features of his youth: the face of a young David, bold, clear, and beautiful. His mouth was defiant, soft and sensuous, with finely molded scarlet lips. A profusion of oily ringlets formed a wreath around his neck inside his collar, which was always a little grimy.
He came into the classroom and said: “What am I doing? I am thinking out loud. I will speak about religious matters. So I step before God. Who am I to step before Him whom we do not name, out of respect for the first commandment—who am I to step before Him with my head bare, combed or not, just as I am? Am I subject to the order to cover my head? For the Orthodox it is imperative, and for the liberal, half-imperative—one doesn’t have to, but one should. I’m thinking out loud. Maybe the liberal isn’t wrong when he says that God sees his reverence even though he isn’t wearing a hat. Because He sees everything that is over a hat and everything that is underneath. But next to me is maybe an Orthodox man who finds my uncovered state offensive to his religious feelings. In order not to offend his religious feelings, I therefore put on a yarmu
lke.” He pulled out a round black silk yarmulke from his pocket and put it on. “There was once a man in Russia who saw an officer approaching with soldiers. The man thought to himself in fear: ‘Now they are going to beat me. Because if I let them pass with my head covered they will yell at me: Why didn’t you remove your hat to greet us?—and they will beat me. But if I take off my hat, they will yell at me: Who are you to be greeting us by removing your hat?—and they will beat me. Probably they will beat me to death. And if I die, I don’t wish to come before His countenance, whom we don’t name, with an uncovered head. So I keep my hat on my head.’ In this way the man died for Kiddush Hashem … The Orthodox wants to be certain at all times and ready for all things, and so he wears both, a yarmulke as well as a hat.”
Dr. Salzmann had a watch that always stopped. Several times during the lesson he would pull it out of a small pocket on his waistband below his enormous stomach—he never wore a vest—listen to it, shake it, knock it on the table, and listen again, all the while patiently speaking. The watch seldom seemed to run, and hardly ever on time. Because there was no bell to mark the end of this last period on Wednesday mornings, it occasionally happened that Dr. Salzmann kept us past time in the classroom. That would prove to be our undoing.
For one day Aunt Elvira, who had come to pick us up, no longer had the patience to wait for us outside the institute. She knew from Herr Tarangolian or Uncle Sergei how free and easy things were at our school, for instance that one could visit Madame Aritonovich during ballet class. So she ventured into the corridor of the Institut d’Éducation and asked “some woman”—whom she took for a cleaning lady—how to find our classroom. She was completely taken aback when this same woman accompanied her into our room: it was our mathematics teacher, Dr. Biro, who was on her way to fetch Dr. Salzmann, in order to walk home together, as usual. And, as usual, Dr. Biro was chewing on something—this time a richly buttered poppy-seed bun that we called a “braid.”
Aunt Elvira entered the classroom with the put-on smile of grown-ups who view children as half-dangerous, half-idiotic creatures. She nodded and uttered a semi-sour, semi-friendly “Good morning,” which Dr. Salzmann answered with a sonorous-relaxed “Indeed it is!” Aunt Elvira’s smile froze at the sight of his black yarmulke, which she stared at as if transfixed.
“If the ladies will be so kind as to wait one more minute,” said Dr. Salzmann, shaking his watch and holding it to his ear. “I’m thinking out loud. The course—that is to say this class—in this Institute Dedication combines students from the cheyder as well as from the yeshiva. What is the cheyder? The cheyder is the basic religious study. So what is the yeshiva? The yeshiva is the place of advanced religious instruction. But what is this Institute Dedication? A private school with expensive tuition. The students of this institution are therefore children of rich people. Being rich doesn’t make one grateful. The children of rich people are seldom brought up in the faith. I am the teacher of this course. So what is my duty? My duty as teacher of this course is to make up for what has been missed. What tells me whether the pupils of the yeshiva master the basic instruction of the cheyder or not? My presumption as well as my knowledge. My presumption that the pupils of the yeshiva in this course have not mastered their basic instruction from the cheyder is based on the experience that children of rich people will have paid inadequate attention to religion. What confirms this supposition? My knowledge of the students of this class confirms that my supposition is correct. I repeat: my duty as teacher of this course is to make up for what has been missed. So the students of the yeshiva will repeat the greatest of the prayers in the faith, the Krias-Shema. What is this prayer? This prayer is the Shema Yisrael. The Shema Yisrael is the only prayer that must be prayed in Hebrew. Other prayers can be prayed in Hebrew as well—they should be, but they don’t have to be. This is half-imperative. That’s why one of our assignments is Taitsch. What is Taitsch? It is the Germanization, the translation of the prayers. We will translate the Shema Yisrael as well, but we will pray in Hebrew:
Shema Yisrael adoshem eloheynu adoshem echad!
Taitsch—I’m thinking out loud … Shema Yisrael—Hear, O Israel. Shema Yisrael adoshem. What is adoshem? Adoshem comes from joining adonai and shem. What is adonai? Adonai means God. So what is shem? Shem means the word for name. But what is the name? The name is God. Adoshem means the name of God, both literally as a compound drawn together and symbolically. The class will repeat:
“Shema Yisrael—”
We repeated it as a chorus.
“Hear, O Israel. Shema Yisrael adoshem—”
We repeated: “Shema Yisrael adoshem—” and so on, with the translation in Taitsch, until the end.
Dr. Salzmann had not yet put his yarmulke back in his pocket when Aunt Elvira walked right up to him. “Excuse me,” she said. “Am I standing before a teacher of this institute?”
“If you would prefer to sit down, ma’am, please,” said Dr. Salzmann politely, “you may have my chair.”
“And with whom do I have the pleasure?”
“Dr. Aaron Salzmann is my name. The lady here teaches mathematics at this institute, Dr. Margit Biro, née Wurfbaum.”
Dr. Biro, who was in the process of biting into her poppy-seed bun, bowed to Aunt Elvira.
“I only desire to learn the nature of the course being taught here,” said Aunt Elvira.
“You speak like a diplomat, ma’am. We are simple Jews. The course you have just attended was the Mosaic religious instruction.”
“And is Madame Aritonovich cognizant of the fact that this instruction is being imparted to Christian children?” asked Aunt Elvira, indignant in the true sense of the word, that is to say, removed from her dignity.
“For that information you have to ask Lustig, ma’am.”
“I have to ask how? said Aunt Elvira, sharply.
Dr. Salzmann closed his eyes and arched his eyebrows. “I use the word lustig not as an adjective, meaning jolly, but as a given name. Dr. Lustig is the professor in charge of this class, who takes care of the enrollment relating to religious instruction.”
“In that case, one will have to turn to Madame Aritonovich personally,” said Aunt Elvira, her non sequitur sounding painfully illogical to Dr. Salzmann.
“By all means, please do,” he said, bowing to her, as much as his enormous stomach would permit. Dr. Biro followed him out, still chewing.
The revelation that the Institut d’Éducation was a “pure Jewish school” where classes were taught in Hebrew, was first met with disbelief at home. But when asked, we had to confess that we had been taking part in Jewish religious instruction. This set off one of the usual “crises.” Our mother sought out Madame Aritonovich, who listened to her carefully and then said: “Didn’t you know that I’m Jewish myself?”
Not a syllable of that was true—both Herr Tarangolian and Uncle Sergei took pains to rebut this claim as tactfully as possible, but even as they did, our parents remained resolute in their decision to remove us immediately from the school. We cried for days. It was only thanks to some strenuous intervention on the part of Herr Tarangolian, who openly declared that he hadn’t expected his personal friends would disrupt his efforts to prevent the national, religious, and racist antipathies in this city from boiling over, that we were permitted at least to stay through the end of the term—naturally without further participation in the Jewish religious instruction.
As it turned out, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the term. Meanwhile, our family’s friendship with the prefect, which had lasted for decades, from that moment on began to chill.
[1] Karl Kraus first published the poem in Heft 781 of Die Fackel (1928), and later returned to it with an extensive analysis of the language. A literal translation follows:
A large bell-flower
wafted off the springtime tree
to the glory of the bright spring day
and danced into a gentle dream
A cloud of white silk
r
ustling by reflects each step:
mystic change takes place inside her garment
of blood and skin and breat
On her body’s flower-stalk
she swings the bell of her skirt;
the double clapper of her legs
gives a quiet melody
A large bell-flower
wafted off the springtime tree
to the glory of the bright spring day
and danced into a gentle dream
[2] From the same edition of Die Fackel:
Let us in the silver glow
that cloaks the birches green
fill the vessels of our hearts
with the deep silence!
Let us with our dying breath
and the last wave of blood
flow into the shrub
as into the roots of the source.
All that is earthly must fall from us
without substance, without sadness;
a child once more, in the forest’s womb,
with only nightingales around us.
[3] From the same edition of Die Fackel:
… nightingales around us
that gently rock us past time and space
beyond ourselves, to God’s fields
and eternity,
where the angels with their gentle
motherly hands beatify our bond of love
and rejoice to choruses of harps
from mouth to mouth
jubilant that we again belong to God
[4] Longfellow translated this as “Knowst thou the land where the lemon-trees bloom?”
[5] “On a far-off, foreign meadow” [Johann Gabriel Seidl]
[6] A 1902 translation by Forster and Pinkerton renders this as: “More dignified than in our northern lands.”
An Ermine in Czernopol Page 31
