LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI, XXXIV (1994)

LIETUVIŲ KALBOS TARMĖS IR JŲ TYRINĖJIMAI

Rimgaila Salytė

REMEMBERING FATHER^*

First, I would like to thank the Institute of the Lithuanian Language for inviting me [to take part in the conference commemorating A. Salys. — Ed.]. I never thought that Mama and I would be in Lithuania on such an occasion. At various American conferences, I have listened to family members recall one prominent person or another. After hearing them, I concluded that one should speak briefly and stick to specific events. That is what I will try to do.

I must have been a crybaby, because my earliest childhood memories of Dad are these: for some reason, I keep bawling, and Dad comforts me. With me sitting on his lap, he sings in Samogitian, ”Pempel, pempel koudoutuoji, kam tav kamarele longoutuoji?” He also rocks me to the rhythm. I liked it very much, although I understood nothing then—and still understand nothing now.

I received my first lesson in language, as in behavior, from Dad. When I was about four years old, Mama fell seriously ill, and Vincas Krėvė and his wife moved into our house to look after me. Dad told me to call Krėvė professor. Mrs. Krėvė, who was not Lithuanian, called her husband Vincus. I found the word professor difficult to pronounce, so I started calling the professor Vincus. Dad explained that it was wrong and impolite, but I continued to address the professor as Vincus. Losing patience, Dad gave me a good spanking.

Dad, of course, paid close attention to my Lithuanian. If I started using words that were acceptable enough but not of Lithuanian origin, such as surprise, grandchild, or simply said in English hobby, cereals, shopping center, he would correct me at once. Only many years later did I realize that not all Lithuanian Americans use the words pleasant surprise, grandchildren, nickname, cereals, shopping mall. When my cousin Danutė and I started elementary school, English quickly pushed Lithuanian aside. We would play and talk to each other in English, while Dad kept running over to listen to what language we were speaking. If it was English, he would scold us using a particular expression:

— Well, there you two go, “blabbering” again!

Dad was a farmer’s son. While a professor in Lithuania, he looked after his farm and worked hard on it. He kept bees. In America, we lived in the Philadelphia sub-

^*These recollections by R. Salytė, with some cuts and light editing, were first published in ”Naujasis dienovidis” (December 18–31, 1992, No. 52–53; January 1–7, 1993, No. 1). — Ed.

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in the city, in a house with a small plot of land, less than a quarter of an acre^**. After returning from the university, Dad would hurry straight to the garden every day. Across from the house, on one side, there were raspberry bushes; in the middle were several apple trees, currant bushes, and gooseberry bushes. Five rose bushes grew beside the house; right next to it were flowers and two large, red climbing roses. There were many trees in front of the house. Dad particularly wanted unusual and special varieties. A mimosa and a paradise apple tree grew there (he hoped to make jam from the little apples). Both trees were constantly making a mess—one in summer, the other in autumn—and Dad would get scolded by Mom. Already burdened with work, she refused to make jam.

In summer, Japanese beetles (Japanese beetles) would swarm the roses, stripping his favorite flowers down to the last leaf. He hated those beetles so much that he would pick them up between his fingers and squeeze them until their green insides burst out from beneath their hard shells. Otherwise, he was a very calm man, not at all hot-tempered. But here, you could sense genuine vengeance. He would tell “more sensitive” people—that is, me—to pick the beetles off and throw them into a container of water and kerosene. He paid one cent for each beetle collected.

There were several apple trees that he especially loved. Although there wasn’t enough land for them to grow well, and the climate wasn’t suitable (it was too warm), Dad, being a northerner, planted them anyway. One apple tree was a dwarf variety, and the other was grafted in a rather complicated way: one tree had three trunks and three varieties of apples. He would fuss around them, spraying them constantly, but it always ended sadly: the apples were always worm-eaten. Only when I grew up did I understand why he needed that apple tree with its three varieties and that crowded little garden. Having grown up in the countryside, he had always felt there wasn’t enough space. He missed the land. After pottering around in the garden, he would feel refreshed and return to his desk.

Dad made raspberry liqueur from the raspberries. Keeping bees in the suburbs of Philadelphia, as in the city, was prohibited. When Dad spent the summers with the Sisters of the Crucified Jesus in Elmhurst, Pennsylvania, I remember how happily he would put on his beekeeper’s “hat” with its veil and go to inspect the hives with Sister Barbora, the beekeeper. He didn’t wear gloves; he used to say that bees never attacked him. In Philadelphia, making mead somewhat made up for not being able to keep bees. While studying at the University of Leipzig, Dad found various old recipes in the library, which he used to make his mead. The cellar housed the equipment and all the supplies: yeast and spices from Germany, a huge wooden barrel, with a curved tube sticking out of the top through which one could monitor the fermentation process. He liked treating guests to his homemade drink, and apparently everyone enjoyed it.

Dad and I both loved animals. In Lithuania, he had wolfhounds and raised peacocks. Mom was afraid of those peacocks, and she was also allergic to animals. On the farm, when she returned from bathing in the stream, the peacocks would block her way and not let her pass. Anyone who tried to get by would have a peacock leap onto their head, grab their hair, and peck at them. Before the wedding, Dad’s housekeeper warned Mom: “Miss, he is a very good man. Just don’t let him keep those dogs.” Despite the warnings and Mom’s allergies, while I was growing up we always kept some kind of pet

^** An acre (English acre) is a unit of land area in the United States equal to 4,046.86 m². — Ed.

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pet. Of all of them, Dad loved the cat Micius most. The two of them got up early, around six. Micius slept upstairs with me. As soon as he heard someone stirring downstairs in the morning, he would dash to the kitchen, jump into Dad’s arms, put his paws on Dad’s chest, and nuzzle his little face first into one ear and then the other. That was how they greeted each other in the morning. Then Micius would jump down and ask for breakfast.

While teaching in Lithuania during the years of independence, Dad earned a good salary, dressed well, and ordered suits from the best tailors in Kaunas. Like many emigrants, he arrived in America with nothing; he started his life over at the age of 44. In those days, American professors earned very little, less than factory workers. That was the case until the Russians launched the first Sputnik and Americans, feeling they had fallen behind, began raising the standard of higher education and expanding Slavic studies departments at the same time. For many years Dad had to earn extra money teaching evening and summer courses. Needless to say, under such circumstances, all elegance was forgotten, and it stayed that way for the rest of his life. Dad had been used to buying his own clothes since long ago. He would often go to S. Klein’s discount store and pick out a suit for himself. He would come home very pleased with his bargain, while Mom wouldn’t know what to do. He couldn’t see himself from the side, and the trousers were a bit crooked. But he was happy with them and, to tell the truth, American professors looked much the same. Still, Mom would insist that Dad get some good suits.

As you know, Dad taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1947 to 1972. One could retire at 65, but he didn’t want to. He loved teaching and loved students, and the university valued him as a specialist. He stayed on to teach until almost 70. At first, when the department was small, he had to teach courses on a wide variety of subjects: Bulgarian, Polish, Old Church Slavonic, Old Prussian, and Baltic and Slavic phonology. When the department expanded in the 1960s, he was able to give more lectures in his own field. A typical course list for one year was: history of the Lithuanian language, Old Prussian, comparative Baltic linguistics, and history of the Russian language. The students liked Dad because he enlivened his lectures with anecdotes and jokes, was quite down-to-earth, and often invited students to his home. His former student, Prof. W. R. Schmalstieg, recalls: “My permanent impression of him is that of a man with a smile on his face” (“I constantly remember him with a smile on his face”).

Dad himself liked to tell two stories. At one point, probably in the late 1950s or early 1960s, knitting during lectures became very fashionable. At first Dad paid no attention to it, but later he noticed that there were a great many female students knitting, their hands so busy that they couldn’t take notes. Something had to be done. At the beginning of a lecture, as if nothing were out of the ordinary, Dad announced: “I would like to announce that only pregnant women are permitted to knit in the classroom” (“I would like to announce that only pregnant women are permitted to knit”). The knitting stopped at once.

Once, while teaching a course on the history of the Lithuanian language, Dad was explaining the old form “šit onais” to his students. Most of the students were Americans, so he repeated the word syllable by syllable, hoping they would write it down correctly. The more slowly and clearly he pronounced the word, the more the students looked at one another, rather confused. But he kept repeating it, louder and louder: “šit — on — ais. Write

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it down correctly, “šit — on — ais.” People had already begun stopping by the open doors when the students could no longer hold back, and everyone burst out laughing. A Lithuanian word turns into three little words in English, which mean “to relieve oneself on the ice.”

During the summer, Dad often traveled to give lectures at various Lithuanian-language courses for teachers and students, who taught children Lithuanian on Saturdays during the winter.

As the academic year began, he prepared very meticulously for his lectures, worked with his doctoral students, and this took up almost the whole day. I remember him sitting at the desk in his room. After a while he would start walking around the first floor, seeing nothing; I would listen—he was talking to himself (or so it seemed to me). Later I understood that, when preparing, for example, the “Dictionary of the Lithuanian Written Language”***, he liked to repeat a word aloud and in this way delve into its etymology, other forms, and so on.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Lithuanian Encyclopedia was published in Boston. Authors of various articles would often call and ask about specialized terms. Explaining them took a great deal of time. Another considerable annual task—editing the bibliography of Eastern European languages and literatures for the Modern Language Association—had to be done mostly during the Christmas holidays. Dad could begin his work only at about 10 p.m. and usually worked until 2 a.m. The long, strenuous work upset his stomach and digestion. Then he would blame Mom for cooking badly!

The desk and floor in Dad’s study were covered with papers. Once, a priest sent the manuscript of a booklet he had written for Dad to correct its language. The manuscript got mixed up with the newspapers on the floor, and Mom, wanting to tidy the room a little, accidentally threw it out with the newspapers. The booklet was titled “He Who Looks and Does Not See.” After this incident, Dad forbade not only Mom but also the house cleaner to enter his room, and there was always a greater or lesser mess there, even if it was a very high-level one. On the other hand, when taking notes on scholarly works and preparing lectures and articles, he wrote everything down very neatly in thin notebooks so that individual pages would not get lost. All that material has survived.

In 1967, Dad began showing the first symptoms of cancer of the lymph glands. He was treated with radiation. The doctor decided not to tell him the details; Dad understood little about such things and lived peacefully for another five years. In 1972, he was preparing to retire and planned to begin writing a historical dictionary of the Lithuanian language. He was also getting ready to go to Lithuania again. Unfortunately, the cancer returned in May and forced him to be admitted to the hospital. He even took student examination papers there to correct. After a blood transfusion, he returned home, but not for long; he needed blood again. This time he stayed in the hospital.

*** While serving as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, A. Salys, together with A. Senn, completed publication of the five-volume “Dictionary of the Lithuanian Written Language” (“Wörterbuch der litauischen Schriftsprache, Litauisch-Deutsch”), begun in 1926 by M. Niedermann, F. Brenderio, and A. Senn. — Ed.

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Uncle Aleksas Vaškelis arranged for Dad to be filmed. We brought him home for one day. Dad kept saying that he felt well, and after filming was finished, I took him back to the hospital that evening. As he walked down the corridor, he stumbled; I asked whether he felt weak. He answered that he did not, only that Mom had made him put on new shoes, so it was uncomfortable to walk, but it was clear that his strength was failing. While he was in the hospital, he did not want anyone to visit him. He said, “Let them remember me as I was when I was healthy.”

He continued answering letters in the hospital. He dictated a letter to me for Prof. Juozas Girnius. When I brought him the typed text, he glanced over it, shook his head, and laughed: “When will you learn to write the abbreviation for year (“m.”) separately from the numerals?”

He spoke about himself only once. He said that somehow life had passed very quickly. He would have liked to do many more things. If it had not been for teaching and the Encyclopedia, he would have written more of his own works, but he did not regret it.

The illness progressed; it was clear that he was growing weaker and weaker. In his last days he suffered from a high fever, but was not in pain. Dad asked us to cook sorrel with blueberries. We took him that last meal. Toward evening we said goodbye; as we left, he smiled at us and waved with one hand. During the night, on July 31, they called to tell us that his heart had stopped.

While preparing this account, I took out Dad’s briefcase, which contained the things he had taken with him when he was last admitted to the hospital. He was a man who paid little attention to practical matters. The briefcase itself was black, worn, and made of artificial leather—not even real leather. Inside was a characteristic assortment: keys, the newspapers “Draugas” and “Gimtasis kraštas,” the magazines “U. S. News and World Report” and “Aidai,” a toothbrush, Prof. K. Korsakas’s letter about a bundle of cards sent from the dictionary card file and lists of surnames****, with this note: “Much of what you reproach us for depends on real conditions and circumstances, which should be at least approximately familiar to you from the press and other sources of information. And if we are to engage in polemics, then we, for our part, could also raise a number of objections, both concerning the lack of objectivity and the use of other criteria in evaluating our work in the press... But would that strengthen our scholarly cooperation? I hope you will understand me correctly.” There was also a letter from V. Šėstokas about a planned lecture at the World Lithuanian Youth Camp on the topic “The Lithuanian Language—A Value and a Duty,” Eltos news bulletins, paper and envelopes bearing the University of Pennsylvania letterhead, a fountain pen and pencil, a comb, a small mirror, a green leather wallet, worn until it had turned brown, battered glasses with faded frames, Archbishop J. Skvireckas’s “New Testament,” Eberhard Nestle’s “Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine,” Fr. S. Yla’s “Questions of Liturgical Terminology,” and a threadbare brown-and-black-striped “frog”—as he called bow ties. He did not like long ties.

**** Refers to the card file of the academic Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language and lists of Lithuanian surnames. — Ed.

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