by Deirdre Bair
No domestic animals dared to enter the impeccable Steinberg kitchen or the heavily furnished, ornately wallpapered dining and living rooms. “Everything had to appear nice,” and the house was layered with embroideries, curtains, drapes, and antimacassars. Rosa dressed Saul and Lica “like cabbages”; Lica wore fussy dresses with big collars and huge hair bows that held back her straight bobbed hair, while Saul was stuffed into stiff white shirts and fawn-colored suits with short pants. Even as a child he recognized that in comparison with Rosa and her immaculate household, her house-proud sisters “lived like pigs.” The Steinbergs were prosperous and could afford a servant, so Rosa engaged one of the many Romany girls who came down from the dirt-poor mountain villages. Rosa was a tough and frequently abusive taskmaster, but despite occasional shouting matches and hurled crockery, the girl stayed with her for all the years they lived on the Strada Palas.
When Lica was old enough for kindergarten, Saul tagged along with her, so they were in the same class and often the same classroom for most of their early education. Boys were not separated from girls until secondary education, and in keeping with the Romanian love of costume, they had to wear uniforms. Saul donned a lesser version of something military, a dark blue suit and cap, highly polished black boots, and a lighter blue scarf whose color signified his school. He also wore a sleeve patch with a number that denoted both him and his school: LMB, for the Liceul Matei Basarab, and 586, for his “identification and denunciation.”
The Liceul Matei Basarab, more commonly called by the French name, Lycée Basarab, was a highly competitive secondary state school for which students had to pass a rigorous entrance examination and where Saul learned a hard lesson: that in every single class, Jews were always outcasts, outsiders, or pariahs. He had not encountered this in his elementary school, in a neighborhood where the other students came from backgrounds similar to his. Those children were a hodgepodge of native and transplanted Jews from many nations, all of whom accepted each other and wanted only to meld into Romanian nationality.
As an adult, Saul Steinberg described himself as a “wunderkind … without knowing it,” for he did not realize until he was no longer there that it was the only way for a young Jewish boy to survive, let alone prosper, in Romania. Education offered the way up and out, and he was one of the students who did well in most subjects. He had not yet encountered overt anti-Semitism when he entered the Lycée Basarab—that only happened once he was there—and he began his studies as “a true native, proud of my country, seriously involved in loving it, thinking this was my life, my future and my pride.”
Just getting to school every day was quite an adventure, because it was on the opposite side of Bucharest from home, far from the secure homogeneity of his own district. He commuted on a decrepit American streetcar, where he had the experiences that led to his discovery of how deeply anti-Semitism permeated everything. It suffused him with shame at the time and imbued him with lifelong rage as an adult, when he became deeply embarrassed whenever he had to admit he had been born in Romania.
Nonetheless, being admitted to the Lycée Basarab and wearing its uniform put him into an elite class and offered his first opportunity to forge relationships with non-Jews even as such daily contact brought the horrific realization that “people literally showed hatred.” As an adult, Steinberg liked to use the word divorce to characterize ending everything from a friendship to a business agreement, and in this instance he said he “divorced” the entire country when he discovered the shame of not being wanted. He remembered the school as “an inferno of screams, slaps, toilets!” where only the French professor, who sometimes told bawdy stories, offered rare gestures of friendship and kindness that he remembered for the rest of his life.
Within the lycée, the enrollment was more than half Jewish, so he learned to avoid the classes and places where he encountered discrimination and tried to befriend Jewish boys who were like him. There was a clear division within the school that placed the students into three categories, and all the boys were aware of it. The first and highest comprised the “extremely sophisticated aristocratic Romanians,” who were in a social class all their own and who socialized only with each other. The lowest cluster was “for the peasants, the troglodytes, the simple ones who … were in contact with primitive culture,” whom he avoided. The remaining category was made up of the boys with whom he could interact, or, more accurately, those with whom he was socially comfortable and wanted to interact—other Jewish boys who were also cognizant of where they fit into the school’s scheme of things. Such an understanding meant that they accepted the role of wunderkind by studying hard in the hope that good grades would admit them into a desired way of life, which, depending on the student’s degree of intelligence, could range from a profession to the military, government service, or a satisfactory trade.
The problem for a young Romanian Jewish boy like Saul Steinberg in the 1920s was that he was “part of a civilization that had to be improvised.” The country was so new that there were few models to emulate: “We had no model in literature. We had no tradition of character.” Even more poignant was how difficult it was to find “an adult, a respectable adult” on whom to model himself: “Of course one has in the family an adult, a father, et cetera, but these are adults that one loves and one doesn’t quite respect them sufficiently to want to be like them.” In his case, this was especially true.
External politics were tremendously influential in determining how the teenage Saul regarded his elders and how he and his father related to each other when he became an adult. It was grim to be a Jew in Romania in the 1920s and 1930s, and it was especially grim for the men of Moritz’s generation. The end of World War I did not bring peace, as Romania’s armies kept fighting Russia and Hungary in order to protect the four territories they had been awarded by treaty: Transylvania, Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Dobruja. Acquiring these lands doubled the country in size just when its resources had been so plundered and devastated that the original population could not survive without great infusions of foreign aid, which came only in sporadic dribbles. The future American president Herbert Hoover was shocked by “the minuteness of the German despoliation,” as the departing occupiers stole anything that could be carried or shipped home and destroyed everything that could not.
The American ambassador, Charles J. Vopicka, told his government that the country had been stripped and looted first by the Germans and then by the Russians, who followed them, and he “urged and begged in the name of humanity … that relief be sent as soon as possible.” Romanian famine was not a priority among Western leaders, noted the biographer of Queen Marie, who herself bemoaned that medals were being stamped in honor of Woodrow Wilson “whilst one cannot obtain a single engine that would help us to feed our starving population.” Steinberg’s memory of wartime hunger stemmed from the time when he was four or five and Rosa trained him and Lica to say “No thanks, we have that at home” whenever they visited neighbors and were offered cookies or cakes. They were allowed to take one only if the neighbor insisted.
By 1919 the situation of Romania, but most particularly of its Jews, was one of the most heated topics at the Paris Peace Conference. A fiery argument broke out between Queen Marie and Woodrow Wilson over which country’s minority population was treated worse, American Negroes or Romanian Jews. Wilson appeared to win when he provided evidence that Jews were removed from their usual battlefield stations and placed at the front of the front lines to be the first killed in the fighting with Hungary and Russia. Things worsened until July, when the Romanian prime minister walked out of the Paris negotiations, inspiring King Ferdinand to put the blame on “American Jews, bankers, and big businessmen” for trying to exploit Romania’s natural resources for their own corrupt ends. He further inflamed his citizens when he blamed the Romanian Jewish community for contributing to “the cause of the economical and financial crisis.” A year later, the usually tolerant Queen Marie echoed his sentiments when she said she tried �
�hard to feel towards [Romanian Jews] as I do to other nationalities, but ever again I am appalled by their extraordinary physical hideousness.”
Thus by the late 1920s, when Saul was making his daily trek to the lycée, the country was in disarray and the climate was ripe for the rise of an ultra-right political movement fervently dedicated to the tenets of the Romanian Orthodox religion and just as fervently obsessed with anti-communism and anti-Semitism. This was the Iron Guard, whose official name was the Legion of the Archangel Michael, organized in 1927 by the charismatic mystic Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, who found his most willing volunteers among peasants, young and idealistic intellectuals, and disaffected shopkeepers and civil servants. Not everyone who wanted to join the Iron Guard was accepted: the fanatical thugs who followed Codreanu were an elite group who had to prove themselves in a three-year apprenticeship, during which they were imbued with the ideologies of violent action in the name of religion, sacrificial death, and, if necessary, political suicide. By the time they finished training, they were ruthless terrorists, and they were the ones who patrolled and menaced the route to school that Saul took every day.
THIS WAS THE POLITICAL CLIMATE IN which Moritz Steinberg, his brothers, and his brothers-in-law tried to remain as unobtrusive as possible while they worked hard to make their businesses prosper and provide stable homes for their families. They kept their heads down and tried to avoid those who demanded bribes, and they learned how to placate them if they could not avoid having to pay. They learned not to engage with those who taunted them and to fade quietly away from those who made actual threats to their livelihood. Even though their sons were just as powerless, they rankled at such caution, which they perceived as a lack of backbone. It was hard for Saul in particular, who saw himself as participating in “a social class revolution…definitely going ahead and taking part in a cultural world that was remote and more advanced than the one of our parents.” For him, Moritz was “the weak part of my family. He has not courage or will.” Even worse, “he has always been absentminded,” a quality Saul detested.
The immersion at school in a culture different from the one his father lived in at home instilled a degree of bravado in Saul, but it also induced rage and frustration. Many years later he said that his childhood and adolescence in Romania were “a little like being a black in the state of Mississippi.” His exposure to the larger culture introduced another puzzle for a young Jewish boy in a segregated society to solve: how to use his education as a process of self-invention and how to search for role models within it. One of the ways he did this was through a literary circle that one of his friends, Eugen Campus, organized at his home. Steinberg, Campus, and the few others whom the rest of their classmates dismissed as the “serious boys” did not think of themselves as budding writers or artists but rather as idealists who wanted to examine moral values through their readings.
With his friends, but mostly on his own, Steinberg created a code of conduct and found reassurance in what he called “my real world, my real friends, in books.” At the age of ten, which he realized was “much too early,” he read Maxim Gorky, whose story “Alone in the World” became an important metaphor for his personal feelings. At twelve he was poring over Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, while Jules Verne provided “complete anaesthesia,” which he had to regulate with heavy doses of Emile Zola and Anatole France. Like many other precocious adolescents, he found the idea of “the artist as orphan” appealing, and like his fictional heroes, he had to invent his own scenarios through his readings; also like them, he “makes [his emphasis] himself by education, by survival, by constantly paying attention to himself, but also by creating an exterior world that had not existed before.”
At the Lycée Basarab, Saul was subjected to an entirely different kind of education. The rigorous curriculum consisted of courses in philosophy, foreign literature (with emphasis on highly sanitized Russian and French authors), history (primarily of Romania), Romanian language and literature, and foreign languages. He took two years of classical Greek, four of Latin, French, and German, and one year of Italian. Also required were courses in geography, mathematics, and sciences, including chemistry, the natural sciences, and hygiene. Students were required to take religion in each of the four years, but for some reason Steinberg was exempted in his first and last years. When he graduated, his diploma officially classified him as a Romanian citizen of Jewish nationality and the “Mosaic” religion, “Mosaic” most likely being an administrative term dating from the Ottoman Empire, which may have been why he was excused from religion classes for two years.
Music was one of his two best subjects (at home, Saul took violin lessons and Lica played the piano); not surprisingly, drawing was his best (grade 9 out of 10). Despite his high grades in music and drawing, his was otherwise a decidedly mediocre record that placed him exactly in the middle of his class, with grades ranging from 5 (almost failing) to 7 (good), with only German higher at 8 (very good). In conduct (general deportment), his attitude and behavior were good, but overall his record was not good enough for him to be listed among the elevi celebri of today’s Matei Basarab Institute.
He graduated in June 1932, and although he did not focus on preparing for any specific career during his lycée years, his favorite courses were in literature. He read avidly in Romanian translations all those Russian novelists who were approved by his teachers because the school required them: Babel, Zoscenko, Avercenko, and Korolenko. On his own, in both Romanian and French translations, he read Chekhov, Gogol, and Dostoevsky, and they became his lifelong favorites. After reading the Russians, he turned to French novels in their original language, but later, when he became proficient in Italian, he read some of them again in translation and liked them best in that language. He read voraciously during his lycée years, when constantly having to translate foreign literatures into Romanian was irritating and disturbing for reasons he could not quite pin down until he became fluent in Italian and then in English, when he understood how poor the Romanian translations were. From then on, he concluded that his native Romanian was “a language of beggars and policemen” which he had to ignore.
His embarrassment at the recognition of having been born into “a primitive civilization” may have begun shortly before, when he was ten and his uncle Harry visited from New York with his wife and two teenage daughters, Henrietta and Gertrude. Saul was “electrified by the beauty of my cousins and also by the smell of America, chewing gum, shampoo.” Everything about America was grist for his imagination, especially the postmarks on the letters his family received from his uncle Martin in Denver and uncle Harry in the Bronx. The word Bronx itself was “especially magic, an explosive place, a fantastic name. Imagine—to live in Bronx!” America was “the constant hope of the oppressed,” from which a steady stream of things came to the Steinberg family via the Hoover Relief: coats, woolen underwear, knickerbockers, and toys such as a double-decker bus and a sailboat. He called them “things to revere, not for play.” Although he was fascinated by all things American, he made no mention of trying to emigrate there, but he did make a solemn pledge to escape from the claustrophobia of Romania at the first opportunity.
By the time he was a teenager, he had decided that everyone around him, from his parents and relatives to most of his classmates, were living a life that disgusted him and espousing principles that he disdained. “I was different,” he recalled, but at the time he could not find the courage to behave in ways unlike theirs. The literary circle showed him that it was possible to have intellectual preoccupations and high values, but it also showed him that he needed to be careful about how he expressed them.
Steinberg’s jaded view of his native country influenced his work in courses that focused on Romanian history and literature. One essay he wrote during his junior year is notable for a light touch that falls somewhere between simple observation and outright sarcasm. He was seventeen when he was assigned to compare and contrast two Romanian writers, Miron Costin and Dimitr
ie Cantemir. His teacher’s few corrections shed interesting light on Steinberg’s attitude when he wrote the essay. He had just become fully disillusioned by the realization that his entire secondary education had consisted of “a fictitious history made by, adopted by, politicians … where a great number of kings and kinglets and royal bores and princes succeeded one another, absurd people who most of the time were front men of the Turkish Empire, princes elected for the political convenience of the monarch, decapitated six months later and substituted by somebody else.” This jaded attitude permeates the essay, in which he called Cantemir and Costin the “two aces of old historical literature,” which his teacher (no doubt horrified by such flippancy) changed to “two leaders.” Steinberg sided with Cantemir, whose education and outlook were international. He praised Cantemir for his study of foreign languages and cultures, for the books he published in other languages, his contact with “distinguished [international] personages,” and his membership in the Berlin Academy. He was careful not to denigrate Costin, but neither did he praise him, writing of how Costin studied “briefly” in Poland (which even in Romania was considered a cultural backwater) before returning to Moldova (then a primitive country), where he spent the rest of his dull life as a court functionary. The essay was not what a student who wanted to go places within his insular native land should have written; it was not politically expedient in the Romania of the late 1920s to prefer a writer who went out into the great world and made an impact on it to one who stayed at home and followed the party line.