Gregor von Rezzori - An Ermine in Czernopol

“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

rustling 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.”

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

The cypress and the olive tree,

piney woods and hill and meadow

sink into the heavenly deep

spotless fragrant blue

Around the waters and the lands,

high and low and far and wide,

Heaven wraps the outspread

arms of eternity

[8] From Die Fackel, Heft 781, 1928.

All that is heavy sinks

away from the things that expand

and the earth drinks

wonders of release

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:

Poftiţi cu toţi acuma la balamuc ,

unde boeri de rasă azi se mai duc:

comfort — guic-guic

fără bucluc …

poftiţi la balamuc …

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

Just follow me to the nuthouse, please,

where aristocrats come and go with ease;

it’s swank beyond dispute

and no one gets the boot,

so off to the nuthouse, please …

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:

… we are literally confronted with the mysterious revelations of a vibrant lyrical spirit that comes from another sphere and speaks through the medium of this broken mouth. What a font of words, what breath of the earth! Not since the days of Johann Christian Günther and the other noble Baroque poets has such a voice been heard. Am I exaggerating? Here is the proof

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”:

An apt old proverb states: For the jackal to admit his soul is black, think how black his soul must be … We are always happy to discover professions of ethnicity that serve to unmask a pose of national arrogance. Recently a particularly delightful example came to our attention. This particular voice comes from a nation that suffers more than any other from the flatulence of exaggerated self-opinion, and which misses no opportunity to rub the excesses of its discharges (which somehow never seem to bring relief) in the noses of other nations — to put it plainly, from the German nation, whose sons, down to the last stinky-foot, claim to be the descendents of Goethe and Beethoven — even in circumstances where intelligence (not to mention tact, which they don’t possess) would counsel against claiming a binding legacy, namely when living in scattered groups as guests of other nations, where the validity of such assertions is easily checked by comparison. However, the voice that now surprises us with its revelatory insights, with all the gravitas of a voice from the beyond, does not hail from our local ethnic Germans — the Volkdetusche , whom alas we must count among our minorities — but from their own homeland, although it is connected with an occurrence in our city. The great German journalist feels compelled to proclaim: “My inquiries led me to discover that the greatest German poet is an insane locksmith by the name of Karl Piehowicz, a resident of the Czernopol municipal asylum. He deserves every literary prize that Germany has to give