Hugh Hewitt conducted an extraordinary two-hour interview of David Mamet on Friday. The transcript is worth reading in its entirety — not least for Mamet’s description of his high school experience.
Mamet recounted that public schools kept putting him in remedial classes for a “learning defect” (boredom induced by the teachers themselves). His life changed when he transferred to the Francis Parker School in Chicago and encountered “the greatest teachers I’d ever met” – survivors of the Holocaust:
And they were Jews who’d fled the Nazis, either got out in the 30s, or survived and came over in the 40s. And the board of the Francis Parker School found these people running elevators and scrubbing floors on their hands and knees, and people with multiple doctorates from the great universities of Europe, who couldn’t get accredited as a teacher in the Chicago public school system, and hired them. And so I was exposed to these genius teachers, these great, great teachers for two years.
Mamet’s description reminded me of Harvard Professor Ruth R. Wisse’s reminiscence in 2007 on receiving the National Humanities Medal for her “scholarship and teaching that have illuminated Jewish literary traditions.” In her award-profile, she traced her passion for teaching to the new Jewish immigrants who were her grade school teachers in Montreal:
I had brilliant teachers at my Jewish day school. These young men had no better opportunities. They were displaced intellectuals and went into primary education to our extraordinary benefit. They were engaged with life. At an early age I saw the calling of literature and teaching as inseparable from civic responsibility.
The teachers of the young David Mamet and Ruth Wisse were people who had escaped from or lived through the Holocaust, moved to new countries (often without family or property), reconstructed their lives — starting sometimes literally on their hands and knees — and transmitted to the next generation what was, in Mamet’s words, “the only thing they couldn’t take from [the Jews] at the border.”
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