Column — A lesson in what's fair

By Jim Rosenberg
Posted 9/12/18

During the summer of 1961, I was required to read four novels from an approved list and to write a book report on each of them, to be handed in on the first day of my senior year advance placement …

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Column — A lesson in what's fair

Posted

During the summer of 1961, I was required to read four novels from an approved list and to write a book report on each of them, to be handed in on the first day of my senior year advance placement English class.  

Because I had some free time before summer’s end, I decided to read and report on a fifth book from the list.  Little did I know when I chose W.H. Hudson’s “Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest,” originally published in England in 1904, that it had attracted an extremely loyal and enthusiastic readership in the 1920’s after it was republished in the United States.  Indeed, many critics consider “Green Mansions” to be Hudson’s masterpiece – that is to say, a book to be taken very seriously.

Unfortunately for me, I had no idea of the veneration the novel had inspired among people in the know.  Ignorant of the esteem in which the aficionados held “Green Mansions,” I thought it would be a perfect book to spoof; I took immense self-delight in mocking the heroine, Rima the “bird girl,” who reminded me of a female Tarzan swinging on vines through the jungle.  My sister Jean, who was entering her senior year of Wellesley at the time, commented on how enlightened my teacher must be to afford me the freedom to inject some humor into a book report.  

A couple of weeks after we handed in our reports, our teacher came to class with a tall stack of our papers. I was so proud that he had decided to read my spoof as an example to my fifteen or so classmates.  My fellow students – this was the last of twelve years that I was to spend at Pingry, an all boys private school – laughed appreciatively as my teacher slowly read my piece; they clearly enjoyed my sense of humor.

Clearly my teacher did not; he was about to make an example of me in a manner I had not anticipated.  Both he and the woman who was first reader of all those book reports took great umbrage that I would try to poke fun at a literary masterpiece, that I would be so insensitive to the richness and tenderness of the text, that I would presume to be funny when I really wasn’t.  Bottom line: He graded that paper a D; and even though I had handed in the four required “legitimate” reports, he insisted upon averaging the D into the decent grades of my other four reports.

“That’s not fair!” I complained. “I gave you the four required papers. My report on “Green Mansions” was a kind of bonus.”  My classmates unanimously agreed.

“If you had explained to me ahead of time that this was just for fun,” my teacher responded, “I would have said, ‘Fine. Let me see whether or not your attempt at humor works.’” 

The teacher who gave me that D was Dr. Herbert Hahn, my only Pingry teacher who held an earned doctorate.  Dr. Hahn turned out to be an outstanding teacher: patient, erudite, organized, inspiring, and demanding.  During my senior year, he shepherded us students through two 19th-century novels that have continued to nourish and guide me on my life’s journey: Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karmamzov,” both of which I have been reading and rereading to this very day.  

These two novels have kept me wrestling with profoundly religious questions: How is it possible to live in dialogue with God despite all the chaos, absurdity, darkness, and abject evil in which we are all immersed? How can we live meaningfully with the knowledge of our mortality, with the undeniable fact that all of us – at least in terms of our physical bodies – are doomed.  While both of these novels ask questions which penetrate to our very core, neither Melville nor Dostoyevsky offers answers; for both authors understand that true religion can never be dogma but rather must be life-long quest.  Religion is a path, not a destination.  

Somehow, Dr. Hahn possessed the wisdom and the pedagogic technique to sow within me my ever evolving understanding of these two colossal works of literature.  With the benefit of more than 55 years of hindsight, I now see that Dr. Hahn had far more to do with my decision to become a rabbi than I could have possibly realized when he was my teacher.  Though he died in 1981, in certain significant ways, he still stands at my side.  Nevertheless, I cannot figure out why he chose to give me a D for my spoof of “Green Mansions;” yet of one thing I am certain: Dr. Hahn had his reasons.

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