- Creative Writing -
Eat Bread and Salt and Always Tell the Truth
By Donna Bryan
When you are a young student you don't know that the truth doesn't always come from books. You don't know that what you learn in a classroom is contoured in context, is sometimes delicately polite, aggressively dogmatic, or nakedly untrue. Your innocence translates as deference, you want to believe, you need to believe, you are an acolyte and your teachers demigods. You are the faithful supplicant awaiting an epiphany from the pedagogical deities.
But I think I missed my baptism.
Call me an educational pantheist. The best and most lasting of what I have learned has come from many sources and in varied settings. My mother was a quietly brilliant woman and taught me to read long before I went to kindergarten. We often took the long walk to the town library, past the park and the bus station holding hands, silently spellbound by the charms of a summer morning. Once inside the library my mother would greet the librarian, Mrs. Gerber, with a musical "Good morning, Louise" and walk directly to the corner where the latest issues of a half-dozen newspapers, and four times as many periodicals, were invitingly draped over a grid of wooden rods hung on the walls. The scent of the room excited me and the silence humbled me. I'd wait for mother to ceremoniously pull two chairs from beneath the table and I would anxiously sidle up in one, ready for adventure. Standing before the slack leaves of newsprint, something akin to rapture would light her eyes. I was poised expectantly although she was never consistent. Sometimes her choice was the local paper; sometimes it would be Harper's or Life Magazine, but she always spread the delicate over the table as though they were sacred parchments. Confident and settled, she began. "Oh, I see here that President Johnson is having a press conference at the United Nations." Or, " I didn't know Mrs.Schaefer had a son in the army." It was a ritual. She would read a line and take a long pause. I'd get ready. I'd fold my legs beneath myself and lean forward-it was my cue to ask questions and wait for the small but significant breath she took before answering.
We would spend the entire morning there and if my mother had been particularly interested in something we might end up rushing to the market the next block over to hurriedly grab the items she thought would make a fast dinner. The time would pass slowly as I followed close behind her wending her way through the stacks. She'd hand me Hemingway, Zola, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Swift, Socrates, and I'd fumble through the pages as she fired off questions and comments, " So what do you think about the French Revolution, Beans? Do you think Hemingway ever caught a fish like that? Did you know that Socrates was a poor man?" She taught me how to look for discrepancies, cross-reference historical details, how to appreciate the pattern of rhyme in a poem. And she always gave me an alternative view. In retrospect I know it was an informed view, but I was young and sometimes confused. I didn't realize at the time that her curiosity, her willingness to get behind and around things, and her urgent need to see the whole truth of something had been imprinted.
My father had a much more pragmatic approach to education. A half-breed Cherokee/ Pawnee, his philosophy was " Believe half of what you see, none of what you hear secondhand." Riding shotgun with him in his eighteen-wheeler schoolroom was a delight. With my elbow out the window and the breeze in my hair I knew everything. He taught me, in compliment to my mother's library legacies, that the only way to approach life was three-dimensionally. For my father that shape was human and the matrix was first- person verbal.
I was sixteen before I really learned anything. School was difficult for me. The teachers resented my curiosity and I was often bored and sullen as a result. Each morning brought eager anticipation routinely followed by disappointment. My academic life was outside of school, at home, in the library. I tried very hard to swim in the currents my teachers tried to stir but I was sinking, gasping for air. I really wanted to believe what they said, I wanted to see them as omnipotent. After a while, even my beloved books were beginning to pale. My naivete and scholarship didn't jive somehow and I couldn't draw a bead on why. Although my art classes provided some solace, I felt sheltered, provincial, and hopelessly dumb.
I knew some girls who were part of the work-study program, a popular concept during the Nixon administration when the economy was floundering and vocational programs were the latest educational panacea. Community businesses were eager to participate and the guidance office had weekly postings of available positions. One of the students I knew was working at a local art supply store and loved meeting local craftspeople and artists. Encouraged by her enthusiasm, I discussed my feelings with my parents and we all agreed that an after-school work experience might be a good tonic for my academic ennui.
A week after I applied, the moderator of the program burst into my French class trying to contain an urgency to "speak with me right away." He had found a position for me at a prestigious dress company that had a design studio downtown. The following week I was hired as a sample illustrator.
Thrilled, I learned my work quickly and easily. I loved to draw and the designer liked my drawings, told me I had an eye. I worked in a large room with dozens of people, all much older, and with the exception of the ladies seated at sewing machines, were busy with tasks I found mysterious. There were long, wide tables spread with sheets of stiff paper that had odd geometrical shapes scrawled upon them. Told these were the pattern making and grading tables, I eyed them and made a promise to myself to look up what "grading" meant in a dressmaker's lexicon. We all had a lot of work to do and there wasn't much time to talk-at the beginning. I felt comfortable though, and happy, and slowly began to introduce myself.
There was a small kitchen on the far side of the room and I'd pass by the pattern making tables when going for a drink or to forage for the paper bag of snacks I'd left in the refrigerator. The two men at work just outside the kitchen spoke alternately in Polish and German and seemed implacable and severe. One day, the shorter of the two had his sleeves rolled above his elbow and I spied a series of numbers tattooed on his forearm. I was puzzled and quickly looked away hoping to hide my expression. I turned back to the kitchen, pretended to be busy, and then turned again to leave. Startling me, he smiled and said, "With your hair like that you look like a ballerina." I must have looked surprised because he said, " Yes, you do." He asked me if I liked ballet and I said "Oh, yes, I love it." "Someday, I'll tell you about ballet," he said. His broad, charming smile instantly betrayed my impression of him. Still stunned, I replied that I'd like that very much. "Good," he said and turned to his work.
For several weeks there was little opportunity to speak again but the time clock was near my drawing table and he had to pass it in the evening to punch his card. "Good night, ballerina." " Good night, Max." I knew that Max was the kind of man who made friends on his own terms and I had a sense that when he was ready to speak to me further it would be his decision. I was intrigued and charmed by his dignity.
I would work a full day on school holidays and that afforded me the chance to eat lunch at work. One day in November, a teacher conference day, I arrived for work at eight a.m. Max was surprised to see me and when I explained why I was there at that hour, he wrinkled his brows and said, "Ah, good, good." Acquainted with Max's personality by then, I laughed and said, "Max, you make me wonder."
At noontime he came to my table and asked if I would like to have lunch with him and Jacob, the man who worked opposite him. "Ballet?" I asked. He laughed, "Yes, ballet."
The days turned to weeks, the weeks to months, and the months to years. I grew to love and respect Max. He was my friend, and my confidant, but above all he was my teacher. Dr. Max Mann had been a respected surgeon in Berlin. By way of Treblinka he became a pattern maker in New Jersey. He had lost his entire family, three sisters, mother, father, grandparents and a seventeen-year-old daughter who was poised to make her breakthrough as a ballerina.
Max had seen me notice his tattoo that afternoon and in the days and months that followed, he showed me how to unlock the puzzle he had seen in my expression. He would never tell me the circumstances that led to his internment and I never asked, but he detailed the horrors of the camp. He had seen his mother raped and her throat slashed by a drunken Einsatzgruppen officer. His father died in the grip of a malnutrition induced delirium, his uncle was beaten to death with the butt of a rifle, and his sister was shot point blank against a barbed-wire fence. He was stained by blood and gore when a neighbor shot herself after her infant daughter had been torn from her arms and bayoneted by a young SS captain. When his bunkmate broke the news of his own daughter to him he fell to the floor so hard he fractured his nose.
I listened intently to Max and it was seldom with a settled stomach. But, his intent was not to shock. What Max so desperately wanted me to know was how it happened, and why.
Soon, our conversations at work were no longer enough. Once a month, on a Saturday (Max no longer believed in God), I would take the long train ride to his apartment in Bronxville. It was a beautiful oasis, cozily cluttered with soft chairs, houseplants, and books-endless rows, stacks, and cases of books. Some in German, some in French, Russian, Italian; all well-worn and well-loved. His wife Eda had the grace and foresight of a sibyl and the culinary expertise of everybody's European grandmother. From Eda I learned which train was fastest and least crowded, who in the neighborhood sold the freshest whitefish, and how to put just the right amount of garlic in mashed potatoes. From Eda I learned that Max's pain was unfathomable. From Eda I learned that I looked very much like Max's daughter, Ruth.
On those season-spanning Saturdays, I learned how to think, what to look for, what to watch. We discussed Schopenauer, Goethe, Marx, and Wittgenstein. We discussed the nuances of poetry lost in translation. We discussed, of course, ballet. But, what Max wanted to impress upon me the most were things like why The Marshall Plan was a sinister piece of government and corporate collusion, details of the Vatican's involvement in the war, and what happened inside those little blue vans the Nazis parked outside the mental institutions. He enlightened me about the fascist complicity among the social scientists, the artists, the writers. Max wanted me to know that the historians had it wrong, tragically wrong and that it was my imperative as a human being being to always question, challenge, speak up and above all, be simple and direct, "Eat bread and salt" he'd say, " and always tell the truth."
I had never learned these things in school and I was wary of what I had learned
from books. My mother was right, he told me, and so was my father. He told me
they had been good to me and responsible. It was true, they had been. I had
learned so much from them, but little could have prepared me for the impact
Max had on me. My friendship with him is fundamental to who I am. Where my mother
gave me urgency, Max gave me insight. Where my father gave me a template for
authenticity, Max drew the truth free-hand. He
showed me, proved to me, that the only appropriate place for an acolyte to kneel
was before verity.
On the first-balmy-day-of-the-season one May, Eda found Max stilled in his favorite
chair near the window. The news was bittersweet because as much as I loved him
I knew that someone like Max could never pass away. He knew, as Karl Popper
did that social engineering involves only "searching for, and fighting
against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society." Max Mann was the
embodiment of Hegel's geist, the overarching collective Mind that is an active
force throughout history, and which all individual minds, that is human beings,
considered in their mental aspect are a part. I miss him still and think of
him often, but when I do, I always have the comforting taste of yeast and salt
in my mouth.