Madame Claudine Kurtz – A jamais dans nos coeurs (Forever in our hearts) By Carrie Brown Wick ‘76
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Life is no pique-nique!” Madame Kurtz would frequently tease in her charming French accent as she announced a surprise test to her class. In her cozy third-floor classroom, Mme Claudine Kurtz taught French at SEM from 1969 through 1994. The quintessential SEM teacher, Mme Kurtz combined the love of her subject matter with generous devotion to her students. Claudine challenged her students with sophisticated French novels, plays and poetry. Class discussions of reading assignments were wideranging, with spirited digressions into French history, politics, philosophy, art, and cuisine, peppered with personal stories and a great deal of laughter. Yet she also set high standards and expected excellence. Pop quizzes and dictées were routine. (“Prenez une feuillle et ecrivez après moi …”) A student who shirked the homework and offered a lame excuse would hear “Next case!” Tyrannically tough but infinitely caring, Claudine brought out the best in her students. Many warm and detailed recollections of alumnae from Mme Kurtz’s 25 years at SEM attest to her lasting influence. “Our 1992-93 French 5 class (which I now realize was well beyond the French AP) ploughed through Sartre’s Les Jeux Sont Faits, Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux and we were pretty spent with about a quarter to spare,” recalls Allison Mitchell ’93. “Claudine went to Paris over spring break and combed the bookshops to bring us back ‘trash’ to read. The last book we read was L’Impure — a ridiculous romance novel by Guy des Cars about forbidden love set on Molokai when it was still a leper colony! We had the greatest time reading this schlocky French novel all together. Of course, it had an existential crisis — because it was Claudine — but it was as far from a canonical text as you could get.” Assignments in Claudine’s classes spanned French literary classics to racy contemporary paperbacks, and her teaching style combined no-nonsense tutelage with a mischievous sense of humor. She entertained us with stories about her family (“Never marry a philosopher!”), especially the antics of her son Jonny, and her faux pas as a non-native English speaker navigating daily life in Buffalo. “My fondest memory is Madame telling us the story of going to a
The 1975 Seminaria dedication to Claudine Kurtz.
department store to shop for bed linens,” recounts Marie Schmukal ’91. “She asked the sales person for help finding sheets, but with her accent, it didn’t sound like sheets, no matter how many times or how emphatically she said it.” This anecdote also was enjoyed by ’70s alumnae who recalled that after this experience, when shopping for sheets Claudine said she would just ask for pillowcases, instead of uttering what came across as a four-letter word in English. Says Mona Fetouh ’90, “When I think of Madame Kurtz I think of one phrase: `Don’t get overexcited!’ I can hear her saying it now with her voice and tone. Other memories are about reading books like Thérèse Raquin — and being impressed at what she was able to draw out of us with understanding higher-level literature. I also remember her little attic
