my teacher's shadow

8/13/2019 My Teacher's Shadow

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AUGUST 22, 2013

MY TEACHERS SHADOW

POSTED BY CALEB CRAIN

In 1991, I arrived in New York after a year spent in Prague. Because I missed Czechoslovakia andwished that I could maintain contact with it somehow, I made the experiment of sitting in on an

advanced Czech-language class at Columbia University. It was there that I met Peter Kussi.

Kussi was a tall, slender man, then in his sixties, with an aquiline nose and a Chaplinesque

moustache, and he stooped as if apologetic about his height. He taught Czech the same way that my

classics professors had taught Greek at Harvard: each student was asked to read a few lines aloud and

then translate them extemporaneously. If anything, Kussi was even more old-fashioned than my

classics professors had been. I dont believe I ever saw him without a coat and tie, and he always

addressed a student by honorific and last name. I was Mr. Crain; my classmates were Mr. Smithor Miss Jones. This made for an initial bump of awkwardness in social interactions between

classmates outside of school, because none of us ever knew one anothers first names. We always

called him Professor Kussi. I must have suspected that he had a story, because anyone who taught

a Warsaw Pact language before 1989 was likely to have one, but it never occurred to me to try to

breach his formality of manner to find it out.

Prague, March, 1939. German troops march into the

Hradany Castle.


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In the first class I attended, I found him leading a discussion of Vclav Havels play Audience, in

which a dissident intellectual has a duel of wits with a foulmouthed brewer. I struggled to understand

the intellectual; the brewer, on the other hand, I had little trouble with. Now, whats the correct form

of this verb? Kussi asked, of a word the brewer used.

Is there something wrong with this one? I muttered to myself.

Thus did I learn that I was ignorant of the rudiments of proper Czech grammar. Kussi let me study

with him anyway. Im not sure his indulgence was good for me, as a matter of language pedagogy.

Fluency wasnt something that his methods were ever likely to give me, but what he offered, in its

place, was an opportunity to hear a master translator think aloud.

After two or three lines of improvised translation by a student, Kussi would nod and gently break in.

Sometimes he praised the student for having jumped over a syntactic mud puddle that the studentwas, generally speaking, unaware of. At other times, he amiably, coaxingly suggested that if the

student were to delay a limiting phrase until later in the sentence, or replace a literal rendering with

an analogous colloquialism in English, or transpose a prepositional phrase into an appositive noun

phrase, then English might be able to reproduce the meaning of the Czech original with a little more

elegance. His chief interest lay in questions of nuance and tone. Was mailman the best translation?

Might courier bear the metaphoric and semantic weight a little more easily? Tact is the best word I

can think of for what he was teaching. It was hard to know how to take notes, and it almost didnt

make sense to do so, because the modesty of his manner implied that any given comment was only

pertinent to the case of the particular sentence under discussion. He had a way of waggling a hand atthe wrist as he made a suggestion, the gesture seeming to signal that he himself dismissed any

prospective attachment of larger significance to his words.

Modesty was part of his personal style, too. Over the years he was tremendously generous to me, but

he was quite reserved. He once shyly admitted that he had recently been made an adjunct associate

professor, pronouncing his new title with invisible scare quotes, and I learned from a mailing address

he gave me that he lived in Queens. But that was the limit of what I knew about him personally, and I

responded in kind.

After a while, Kussi began to recommend me to editors in search of Czech-to-English translators,

explaining away his generosity by saying that he was offered more commissions than he had time to

accept. I translated a campaign biography of Vclav Havel, as well as a number of short stories, only

some of which made it into print. Kussi even invited me to collaborate with him and another


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translator on a collection of Josef kvorecks tales. The work required much labor and paid littlea

drawback that Kussi warned me about straightforwardlyand in my case effort had to compensate

for a lack of facility. Meanwhile, I wanted to write fiction of my own, and a sideline as a scholar of

American literature began to seem a more plausible way to support myself. That misapprehension is

a story for another time; all that needs to be said here is that I drifted away from Czech and awayfrom Kussi.

I came back to him briefly, in 1999, as a journalist, which is what I became upon leaving graduate

school. The novelist Milan Kundera was then revisiting English-language translations of his works,

in pursuit of greater control and a radical linguistic fidelity. In some cases, Kundera went so far as to

ask a surrogate to retranslate a novel into English from a French version, which Kundera, who had

become fluent in French, now considered to have an authenticity value that matched the Czech

original. He had renounced two American translators whom he had previously extolled, Kussi and

Michael Henry Heim, each of whom had translated three of his novels, to much acclaim. Within the

small world of literary translation, thestory was fiercely controversial. Kussi agreed to be

interviewed. He was gentlemanly but firm, calling the attacks on Heim and himself questionable or

outright wrongheaded. I remember feeling impressed by his candor and a little frightened by it on

his behalf. Would it boomerang on him? But he was to retire a couple of years later, and he let me

know that he had, in any case, begun to turn his attention to writing fiction himself.

Last October, he died after a heart attack, and I drove to Kew Gardens, Queens, for his funeral. I

hadnt seen him in years. It was a mild, sunny day, and I joined a small group of his friends,

neighbors, colleagues, and former students. A longtime friend and neighbor of Kussis had found a

rabbi to administer the service. I hadnt been aware that Kussi was Jewish. The rabbi seemed rather

tradition-minded. When he remarked that few of us seemed to know Hebrew, his tone sounded

regretful. It sounded even more so when, toward the end of the ceremony, he informed us that there

was no obligation to say kaddish because none of Kussis immediate family had survived him. He

invited us to shovel dirt into the grave, and after we made a preliminary attempt he admonished us,

rather sternly, that we had to keep shovelling until the coffin was completely covered. The exercise

proved bracing.

* * *

From testimonials at the graveside and from conversations over dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant

afterward, I began, for the first time, to gather information about Kussis life. A couple of mourners

told me about a half-hour interview that Tereza Brdekov, of Czech Television, had conducted with


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Kussi in 2000, and Alex Zucker, a former student of Kussis who is now an acclaimed translator

himself, later shared with me his translation of a transcript. Zucker also told me that in 2011 Kussi

had donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum a letter that an uncle had sent from

Nazi-occupied Prague. I began to find out a little of my late teachers story.

Kussi was born in Prague, in 1925. We were a Jewish family who, apart from our religion, felt

completely Czech, he told Brdekov. It was a beautiful era, he said of his first thirteen years,

which fell in a liberal and progressive period of Czech history known as the First Republic. It was

sort of like a fairy tale, actually. Though the Kussi family felt that they had assimilated, they

recognized the threat posed by Hitlers Germany, and, in 1939, Kussis father, who had been born in

the United States, obtained American passports for himself, his wife, and their two sons.

They travelled by ship to New York. The American naval fleet and a great number of steamers were

anchored in the Hudson when they arrived, on account of the Worlds Fair, and to the young PeterKussi the ships seemed to be shining their floodlights in welcome. A few years later, at age

seventeen, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. In that short interval, he told Brdekov, he had learned

English so well that the Navy was willing to make him a radio operator.

It was in 1942, perhaps around the time of Kussis enlistment, that his uncle Ji Eisenstein wrote him

the six-page letter that is now in the Holocaust Museum, where its accession number is 2011.79. An

archivist sent me a scan of it. According to the museums records, Kussi didnt receive the letter until

1944, and in January of that year Ji Eisenstein was deported to Auschwitz, where he died. His wife,

Mimi Eisenstein, was killed in the same camp in March, 1944. I was able to find records in an onlineCzech database of the Holocaust that seem to correspond to Jis and Mimis cases.

The letter is written in English. A few word choices reveal it to be the English of a non-native

speaker, but it is sophisticated and elegant English nonetheless, the work of an avid reader who, in

the course of the letter, cant resist recommending a couple of books that hes read in the language.

Though addressed to My dear Peter, it is unsigned, no doubt as a precaution, and in its first few

pages it does not mention Czechoslovakia or Germany except by paraphrase, probably in an attempt

to make it more difficult to trace if it fell into the wrong hands. The subjectwell, its better to let

the letter speak for itself, as it so eloquently does:

My dear Peter,

Many a year will probably elapse, before this epistleif everwill get into your hands. You will be

a grown-up man then, and you will think back to the first years of your American life, and perhaps


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quite dimly remember your childhood, passed somewhere in the centre of Europe. And thus, quite

unawares, you may be reminded of the tragedy your people went through, and curiosity being inborn

to mankind, you might give them a few thoughtshow did they bear it, how did they live, what did

they suffer, which were their hopes, longings and comfort? If, by any chance you get a book, called

The Forty Days of Musa Dag[h] into your hands, I recommend reading it carefully. The setting is adifferent one, the procedure is more refined, as beho[o]ves people who live in the centre of Europe,

yet the spirit is the same, perhaps even more cruel behind the mask of orderliness and flawless

organization.

Franz Werfels novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is an account of the Turks genocide of the

Armenians during the First World War. Kussi seems to have taken his uncles advice about the book:

at a memorial for Kussi, held at Columba in April, 2013, Betty Belina, a longtime friend, said that

she had read it not long ago, at Kussis suggestion.

The heart of Eisensteins letter describes the gradual process by which, between 1939 and 1942, the

Nazis stripped Jews in Prague of civil rights, slowly but inexorably isolating them from the rest of

Czech society. It was, in the beginning, more a sort of chicane than a real danger, Eisenstein

writes. (When I first read this sentence, I had a vivid memory of Kussi using the word chicane in

conversation and of my having to ask what it meant.) At first, Eisenstein reports, there were just a

few restrictions on bank withdrawals. Everyone knew war was on its way, though, and everybody

was feeling then that a terrible thunderstorm was coming upthe air had become so sultry that all

decisions and attempts bore a note of casualness and uselessness.

Confiscations and arrests followed, but the early ones were intermittent and seemed to take place at

random. A turning point came in the summer of 1939, when new regulations were posted that

divided Jews from Gentiles in cafs and restaurants. Soon they were divided in movie theatres,

swimming pools, and parks. A little while later, the Nazis took away radios. Eisenstein lost his job.

The family lost its home in the country. Bit by bit, their freedoms were taken from them.

The power of the letter is in its specificity about the nature and timing of the losses. It is evident that

they were still fresh in Eisensteins mind when he wrote, as were the pleasures still possible at each

stage of loss. After the family car had to be sold, for example, the family members were still able to

ride their bicycles a bit, until, a short while later, the yellow star came and, along with it, the

confiscation of bicycles. In the end, there were


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the so-called transports. The first ones did not quite seize what this word meantwe know it already

[we know it now]. Crowded rooms without beds, foot equal to none [square footage equal to zero],

no heating in winter, no right to move aboutthe confiscation (sequestration) of our remaining

property except fifty kilos per person which we can take along towards?

How painful it is that Kussis uncle took so much pride in his hardheadedness, yet seems not to have

known what lay behind his dash and question mark.

The letter ends with a warning. In Eisensteins opinion, Americas continuing injustice to blacks

indicated that Kussi would ultimately be no safer in his adopted home than he would have been if he

had stayed in Nazi Prague. There were only two ways to escape, in the uncles opinion. The first was

complete amalgamation with the American nation, by converting to Christianity and perhaps

marrying a good, simple girl of pure irish origin. The second was through the creation of a separate

Jewish nation. Palestine could never be its site, Eisenstein thought; the region was too small and toohistorical. But wherever the new nation was located, the struggle to build it would be heroic. The

letter concludes almost angrily:

There is, of course, the possibility to live ones life and have no childrensort of racial suicidebut

leave that to the weaklings.

While writing this, I feel perhaps a bit sad and bitterI am not foolish.

* * *

Though Kussi never spoke of it to me, the Holocaust cast a long shadow over his life. Almost all of

my relativesaunts, uncles, cousins, and so onall of them died in the Holocaust, Kussi told

Brdekov, in his Czech Television interview.

That was an enormous shock for my parents. My mother had a breakdown because of it, and shenever fully recovered. My father also suffered a great deal. Eventually he had a heart attack, and my

brother was also affected by it.

According to friends and to Kussis own report to Brdekov, Kussis younger brother, Willy, also a

veteran of the American military, became emotionally and psychologically unstable. Brother and


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mother required so much attention that for twenty years or so, Kussi said, I had to take care of my

family, almost every day . I really missed out on those twenty years.

With the assistance of the G.I. Bill, he was able to earn a graduate degree in biochemistry at the

University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 1950. Though he had wanted to be a doctor, he returned to NewYork, probably to be near his troubled family, and he worked in the city as a medical writer for a

firm that promoted pharmaceutical products. Later, he worked in advertising. He was never

altogether happy with the unfolding of his life and was increasingly dissatisfied with its rewards,

Eric Lampard, a friend who met Kussi at school in Wisconsin, recalled in a testimonial. These seem

to be the years that Kussi later described having missed out on.

At some point during this odyssey, Kussi rediscovered an interest in his native tongue, his knowledge

of which had dwindled to what he dismissively called kitchen Czecha vestigial means of

communicating with his parents. He not only set about re-learning the language but also leftadvertising to earn a graduate degree in Czech literature. In 1970, at the age of forty-five, he received

a masters at Columbia, with a thesis on The Good Soldier vejk. He began to translate novels by

kvoreck and Kundera and to teach at Columbia, and in 1979 he received his doctorate. In addition

to his translations of Haek, Kundera, and kvoreck, his 1982 translation of Ji Gruas many-

voiced novel The Questionnaire has been widely hailed, and in the nineteen-nineties he went on to

serve as an adviser to Robert Wechsler, the editor of Catbird Press, editing an anthology of Karel

apeks writing and translating a novel by Karel Polek. It is a remarkably distinguished career on

any terms, especially when one considers that Kussi began it in his mid-forties.

In his last decade, Kussi seems to have revisited his uncles haunting letter in a short story, Blood

Brothers, which was published in Southwest Review, in 2003. Though Eisenstein carefully excluded

most identifying details, he did mention that Fathers factory was being sold at a nominal price,

and in the storywritten, as one might expect, in a lucid and understated styleKussi seems to have

drawn on his awareness, and perhaps his memory, of this factory. The hero, Bruno Fabrikant, is the

scion of a Jewish family that made its money by manufacturing caps and hats. The familys factory

dates from Brunos grandfathers day, and its smokestack is the second-highest structure in town.

Tennis and women seem more important to Bruno, however. The setting, unnamed, appears to beCzechoslovakia in the months before its takeover by Nazi Germany.

Bruno is troubled by a memory. As a child, he had been best friends with Beda Komar, the son of the

keeper of the familys tennis courts. Avid readers of tales of American Indians, the boys had sworn to

be blood brothers, and in a confusing encounter Bruno had provoked Beda into torturing him, in what


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they imagined to be an Indian style. Beda had gotten in trouble for the beating. As a grown man,

Bruno tries to apologize for the provocation and for Bedas punishment, but Beda responds with

disgust, not out of revulsion at the boyish excitement that had once linked them but simply because

Beda has become an anti-Semite and Bruno is a Jew. Instead of responding in a humane way to

Brunos confession, Beda expels Bruno from the local tennis club, and the men exchange blows.Though there is still time to flee the country, Bruno remains. He is held partly by a sense that he isnt

worth saving, and partly by a tender affair that he has begun with his Gentile housekeeper, a widow.

The Germans invade, as expected. Bruno is able to withdraw some funds from the bank but is forced

to sign over the family factory and then his house. As the story ends, he and the housekeeper are

enjoying their time together, but he has acknowledged to himself that it will be brief. He will soon

leave her in order to save her life.

The surrender of a factory, the transfer from a bank account, the loss of a house: the details echo

Eisensteins letter. Perhaps Brunos affair with his housekeeper is an echo of Eisensteins advice to

marry a Gentile girl. Or perhaps its a sort of answer to it: what Eisenstein recommended as a means

becomes, in Kussis story, an end in itself, and it doesnt save Brunos life.

Was the story Kussis way of imagining how he himself might have met the circumstances that his

uncle faced? In the story, Bruno tells his lover that he fears he resembles the grasshopper in the

fable, who sang all summer long. Did Kussi have to wrestle with a similar guilt when he chose to

give up a steady career in advertising for the uncertain art of translation? It must have been difficult

to reconcile the burden of his familys tragedy with a personal need for freedom. He nonetheless

found a way to both honor his heritage and express his creativity, thanks to his courage. When

Brdekov asked what the most important thing in life was, he answered, To live life like an

adventure.


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my teacher's shadow

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