The German Refugee

-         by Bernard Malamud

The Gist:

Oskar Gassner, a Jewish German Refugee, settles in America after being forced out of Germany by the Nazis. Oskar is a fifty something year old German critic and journalist who’s intellectual value is compromised because he does not have a firm foundation of the English language which happens to be the common language in America. However, Oskar is hired by the Institute for Public Studies in New York.

Oskar had at one time studied English but could only manage to put together a fairly decent, if rather comical, English sentence. Hence, to sharpen his linguistic deficiency, he hires Martin Goldberg, an English tutor who charges a dollar an hour to guide him. Martin has a meek knowledge of the German language. The two are able to communicate and converse mostly in English with an occasional assist by Martin in Pigdin-German or Yiddish.

Oskar is scheduled to give a lecture a week in the fall term, and during the next spring, a course, in English translation, on “The Literature of the Weimar Republic”.

The Dilemma

Oskar is a German Scholar but has a faint English foundation whereas Martin is an English Scholar who has a faint German foundation. Oskar could opt for a more professional tutor but if he went to the five dollar a day professor, it might help his tongue but not his stomach. He would have no money left to eat with.

Oskar feels like a child, or worse, often a moron. He is left with himself unexpressed and his tongue hangs useless. The increasingly warm temperature just added fuel to the fire.

Oskar had attempted to commit suicide the first week after he had reached America and also warned Martin that if he failed to prepare for the lecture in October, he would take his life. This notion enforced Martin to take great caution in his measures. There was a deeper problem tormenting the refugee’s displacement, alienation, financial insecurity, being in a strange land without friends or a speak-able tongue and that was the fact that his mother-in-law was always an anti-Semitic. He also feared that his wife was secretly a Jew hater.

Happily Never After

Martin taught Oskar three times a week at four-thirty for an hour and a half. The lessons were divided into three parts: diction exercises and reading aloud, then grammar, because Oskar felt the necessity of it, and composition correction.

Oskar progressed for a while, for instance, when “sink” became “think”, he stopped calling himself “hopelezz”. Martin practically explained phonetics and the consonants of the English language by demonstrating with the movements of his own tongue.

With October fast approaching and the news of the Nazi’s devastating ways grew louder, Oskar deteriorated with every feeble attempt at the English lecture.

Martin kept Oskar’s chin up by accompanying him to short walks on the Drive that seemed to cheer him up but he felt his will was paralyzed. The whole lecture seemed to be clear in Oskar’s mind but the minute he wrote down a single word in English or German, the whole idea would be smashed. He grew in fear that he would die before he completed the lecture or wrote it so disgracefully he would wish for death.

Martin read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and shared his notes with Oskar, hoping to understand Whitman’s influence on German literature but Oskar pointed out that it wasn’t the love of death they had got from Whitman but it was most of all his feelings for Brudermensch, for Humanity. However, in the process of doing so, Oskar miraculously wrote down half of his lecture and eventually got inspired to complete it.

In October, Oskar finally gave his lecture and read out poetry from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of

My own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers,

And the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson of creation is love …

Oskar read it as though he believed it. His enunciation wasn’t at all bad – a few s’s th’s and he once said “bag” for “back”, but otherwise he did alright.

Two days later, Oskar was found dead in his apartment. He had signed off all of his possessions to Martin Goldberg. The top of the drawer of Oskar’s desk laid a thin packet of letters from his wife and an airmail letter of recent date from his anti-Semitic mother-in-law. She wrote that Oskar’s wife had, against her mother’s fervent plea and anguish, converted to Judaism. One night the Nazis appeared and along with other Jews, dragged her to a small border town in conquered Poland where she was rumored to have been shot in the head.