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 yarmulke.” 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.”