Saturday December 18, 1971.

I declare that there is always something weird about a girl who majors in
French. She has entered into her course of study, first of all, knowing full
well that it can only lead to her becoming a French teacher, a very grim
affair, the least of whose evils is poor pay, and the prospect of which
should have been sufficient to send her straight into business or public
relations.

—Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

I was seventeen years old, about to turn eighteen on December

23, and a first-year student at Penn State Abington, located in a
northern suburb of Philadelphia. My French final, my last
examination of the fall term, took place early that morning. My
instructor was Irma Jean Smith, a native of Kalamazoo, Michigan,
who was working on her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.
The subject of her doctoral thesis was Jean Cocteau, the French
poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist, and
critic. I worked hard at my French studies in college, perhaps to
atone for my lackadaisical performance in French class in high
school where I clumsily grappled with inverted adjectives and
nouns with grammatical genders.

After the exam I made an excursion to a phonograph store in

downtown Philadelphia. I purchased the complete recording of
the Paris Version of Wagner’s opera, Tannhäuser conducted by
Georg Solti. Tannhäuser is the story of a medieval troubadour who
is torn between gratification of his carnal desires and the need to
conform to his moralistic society. By publicly talking about a
forbidden sexual relationship from his past, Tannhäuser makes a
fatal mistake and is censured by the community. He returns home
from a pilgrimage to Rome in despair after the Pope proclaims
that the sinner could no more be forgiven for his transgressions
than the papal staff bear green leaves again. In the opera’s final
scene, Tannhäuser has just died and pilgrims arrive, telling of a
miracle: the Pope’s staff, which they bear with them, has
blossomed. The concluding tableau resonates with vital needs of
continuity: winter is unfailingly redeemed by budding spring,
death by the following cycle of life.

Tannhäuser was premiered in Dresden in 1845, but, for the Paris

premiere in 1861, Wagner had the German libretto translated
into French and he struggled to fit the new French text to the
existing music.

Many scholars and writers on opera have advanced theories to

explain Tannhäuser’s apparently self-destructive behavior. One
recent analysis suggests that his apparently inconsistent behavior,
when analyzed by game theory, is actually consistent with a
“redemption strategy.” Only by public disclosure can Tannhäuser
force a resolution of his inner conflict.

When I left the record store this December day, I happened to see
a classmate from high school, Fred Cohen, together with his
brother, Murray, walking down the street. Fred Cohen had been
in my French class at Central High School and was now a student
at the University of Pennsylvania. Today he is a practicing ob-gyn
physician as well as a licensed mohel, the person in the Jewish
religion who performs circumcisions. Fred Cohen and I were not
acquainted in high school, but he impressed me as a young man
of substance and character who had apparently grown up in a
conservative Jewish home. I once overheard him discussing a
point of Jewish law with a companion: “we are not allowed to
work on the Sabbath. So how is it that the rabbi can be paid for
their Sabbath duties? Is it not considered work?” I assume by his
name that Fred Cohen was a kohen, a descendant of Aaron,
patriarch of the Jewish priestly class. Did I associate my former
classmate with the idea of moral redemption?

That afternoon my sister telephoned and we talked about my

French final. She had started college with the aim of majoring in
French with the hope of teaching the language, but later changed
her major. She had commenced her French studies in the ninth
grade in September 1961. I was then a seven-year-old third grader
and, at the dinner table one evening, my then thirteen-year-old
sister taught me to say, Quelles couleurs sont les arbres? Les arbres sont
verts. “What color are trees? Trees are green.”