An Ermine in Czernopol (40 page)

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:

[2]
 From the same edition of
Die Fackel
:

[3]
 From the same edition of
Die Fackel
:

[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.”

[7]
 The lines come from the poem “Tivoli” by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, The literal translation would be:

[8]
 From Die Fackel, Heft 781, 1928.

A
POPULAR
ditty started spreading among the so-called
patchkas
, or groups of young flaneurs who swarmed up and down during their daily morning and evening promenades. It was in Romanian, and people attributed the authorship to Herr Năstase on account of its wit, as well as because of the undisguised allusions to the goings-on in the house of Tildy, and to the Germans in general. The catchy refrain went like this:

Balamuc
is an idiomatic expression for asylum. In translation the song might sound like this:

In reality this creation was taken from an article in the newspaper
Vocea
that focused on the discovery of the insane “poet” Karl Piehowicz.

As I have mentioned, the junior house physician of the municipal asylum, Dr. Kipper, had forwarded a selection of the transcribed poems to a certain Herr Sperber, who published them in the
Tschernopoler Tageszeitung
, with some remarks:

This page found its way to the great critic Karl Kraus, who called it “by far the most respectable thing I have found in a journal in a long time, and certainly the most important I have ever discovered in a daily.” He published the poems ostensibly authored by Piehowicz, along with what he knew of their origin, in his highly influential polemical journal
Die Fackel
, juxtaposing them against some poetic creations recently published in German newspapers, in an essay entitled “From the Editorial Desk and the Asylum.” This was the focus of the article in the
Vocea
, which carried the headline “Voice from the Beyond”: