Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

Madame Aritonovich decided that the school should put on a ballet performance for parents and guests; in later years the gratitude we always felt for her made us think that she came up with the idea just for us, and above all for Tanya, who danced with enthusiasm and talent. Nor can this supposition be entirely mistaken. Madame Aritonovich was too close to the prefect and Uncle Sergei not to know every detail of what went on in our house. She probably knew more than we did at the time, for instance about the heated arguments with Aunt Paulette, who stood accused, justifiably, of having opened the house up to Herr Adamowski. At the same time, no one had any idea of the content of Adamowski’s conversation with Frau Lyubanarov, which was the actual cause of the fight between her and Widow Morar. But Herr Adamowski was mixed up in it somehow, and that was bad enough, according to the entirely proper view that even an innocent bystander at such occurrences bears some responsibility. In other words: “That kind of thing just shouldn’t happen to you, regardless of whether you were involved or not.” Naturally Herr Adamowski never came to our house again; instead, Aunt Paulette began to visit him.

In any event, the prospect of the school ballet recital excited us, along with all of our classmates. We began rehearsing the snowflake scene from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. Tanya danced the part of the Snow Queen, while a handsome and talented boy from a higher grade played the Snow King; Blanche, to our delight — and this seems to confirm our suspicion that the plan was devised with us in mind — was given the part of Clara, while the rest of us, as part of the corps de ballet , were to be plain snowflakes, albeit exceedingly eager ones. Solly was cast as a comical snowball with his own special choreography. Turning to her inexhaustible supply of assorted odd, highly original, and skillful acquaintances, Madame Aritonovich assembled a small orchestra. Other instruction was reduced to the bare essentials. Costumes were sewn; Tanya was given a genuine tutu. We were in heaven.

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!”