The crazy situation occurred when we had to go to the Hungarian school and teach a class of Hungarian natives a language that we couldn’t speak ourselves. Romania had and still has thousands and thousands of Hungarians and Germans living for centuries on its territory. Practically for ever. There are certain areas in the middle of Romania where practically everybody speaks only Hungarian or German. Anyway, here we were at this school for Hungarian born kids who spoke nothing but Hungarian. And we couldn’t speak Hungarian except a few limited phrases that we more or less memorized. And we were supposed to teach them. It was a very interesting situation. The way I handled it was to ask the questions which I was supposed to ask to test them if they had learned the previous lesson. I had no way of knowing though what they were answering to me, because they spoke rapidly, idiomatically and of course, free speech. When I asked a question and somebody gave me an answer, I waited to see the class reaction. If the class as a whole, was quiet, it meant that it was OK. If they protested, it meant it was wrong so I asked somebody else. Then I taught them the new lesson that I had down pat. Of course, I couldn’t answer any of their questions so I played deaf. All in all, I don’t think they caught on that I had no idea what they were saying. Luckily, they were in the primary grades not highschool kids.
In the last year (senior year) we had to pick a subject for our exit exam (dissertation thesis) which was solely in English. No Hungarian there, fortunately. A long list of subjects, pertaining to both language and literature were offered. Depending on what subject you picked, an advisor would be assigned to you. It had to be some original work, something that nobody had written about before. About 30-40 pages long. I picked the theory behind movie translations. In Romania, there was no dubbing, just subtitles. I had to discuss both, with pros and cons and anything related to that. As part of my work, I went and discussed with movie translators that worked either for the big screen or for TV. I was given access to their files and observed how they worked. My advisor was a very down-to-earth lady and she gave me some good suggestions.
Just before graduating, you had to submit a few copies of your typed thesis to the members of the examining committee and then talk freely about it for 10-15 minutes. I got the maximum grade (10) for this but then again, during the senior year, I had got 10 in all subjects. All in all, my grade average for the entire college was 9.83 out of 10. I was ranked about the 5th or 6th. The ranking with the respective grades was posted on the bulletin board. Because I ranked so high, they wrote on my diploma that in case they would ever have openings for teaching positions at the college, I would be given the chance to apply.
During that time, upon graduating from a college, you would be automatically given a job. Alongside the ranking with the grades, job listings would also be posted. Practically, all the positions were in teaching, and all of them were somewhere other than in Bucharest where most of us lived. Ideally, all of us should have gotten positions in Bucharest. That’s what everybody wanted.
The assigning of jobs was extremely stress-inducing. The procedure was that we would all assemble (about 200 of us) in a big hall and then the one with the highest rank would be asked to choose first. After that student chose, the next highest ranking one had his/her chance to pick a job. And so on, until the last position would be assigned to the lowest scoring student. All of us had studied the list of job openings for days. And made plans as to how better to get there. Practically nobody had cars so the commute was by train or bus. Some jobs would be close enough to Bucharest to allow for a daily commute. Most of the positions however were too far so people assigned there would have to live there for the week and only come home on the weekends.
I determined which jobs I might like to pick and found a couple that were fair. Not great, fair. There was one position that was slightly better than the others. When one colleague asked me what my pick was going to be, I told her because knowing that her grade was much lower than mine I knew that I would pick before her. But, that proved to be a bad mistake because at the last minute, a handful of people that had been ardent communist activists in college received additional points for their political activity and that girl in whom I had confided about my intended pick turned out with a slightly higher score than mine so she picked before me and she chose the one that I had told her about. So I had to pick my second favorite.
(to be continued)
