Harry Slochower in Cathedra

Students in the thirties did not have those informative and sometimes cruel evaluations of faculty, photocopied or even printed, that upperclassmen nowadays sell to entering freshmen. But it would be a mistake to imagine that students then had no sources of inside information. They knew, through the grapevine, that some professors were a disaster, others were to be sought out, and a few were musts.

I was pretty much in a fog when I first came to Brooklyn College in or around 1935, but even I quickly learned that Harry Slochower's courses were the musts. The problem for the freshman or sophomore was how to get into them. His course in Goethe's Faust might not be so crowded, since it was given in German. But year after year his course in the great European novel was filled during the first hour of the wild mob scene that was registration day. In that pre-computer era (or is it still the same?) the student sat hopefully scheduling, only to have classes fill their quota and close down before he reached the registration desk—so that he had to start all over again. It took strong nerves and a sanguine temperament to survive registration day.

Juniors and seniors had priority. An underclassman's only chance was to persuade the popular professor to open his class—an act of kindness which cost more in energy, time, and the jealousy of colleagues than we students ever suspected. Fortunately, Harry was soft-hearted; he genuinely liked students; and he let his classes fill to the physical capacity of the rooms, sometimes beyond. And so I managed to slip into the course on the novel. Then, like all the others, I discovered what I had let myself in for.

Harry's notion of a few weeks'reading would include such slim volumes as The Brothers Karamazov, Kristin Lavrans-datter, The Magic Mountain, and for coda the 2000-odd pages of Nexö's Pelle the Conqueror. We groaned, we complained that it was impossible to keep up with the reading. But