6 minute read
Learning to travel by book
How Dr. Erik Nakjavani and Ernest Hemingway taught one alumna to commune with books
By Judy Hopkins ’71-’73
More than 50 years ago, I was a 17-yearold sitting in a windowless room that was once part of Emery Hardware Co. in downtown Bradford, repurposed as a college classroom. The class was 20th Century Narrative, and the instructor was Mr. Erik Nakjavani (later Dr. Nakjavani). He was handing back tests we had taken on a series of short stories we had read by Ernest Hemingway.
At first, I stared at the test without opening it for the grade. Erik made us fold our sheets of regular notebook paper lengthwise in half: We’d write our answers on the right side; he would make comments on the left.
The class consisted of only freshmen and sophomores. Pitt-Bradford was a two-year school at that point, requiring attendees to finish their Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science degrees at the Pittsburgh campus or else transfer to another university.
Then, as now, one student asked, “Did anyone get an A?”
Erik walked back to his podium at the front of the classroom. He waited before speaking. “Yes,” he said. It couldn’t be me. What did I know? I was just a naïve teenager, having graduated from Bradford High School a few months before. I had grown up in Bradford, now attending classes at the local campus of the University of Pittsburgh, one located in various buildings downtown and at Hamsher House near the hospital until the actual West Branch campus could be built.
Erik’s class had been my first introduction to Hemingway. I had learned that Hemingway’s short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” referred to a space—physical or metaphorical or both— that people seek out for solace when they feel fragile, or what Hemingway would call being “in despair.”
I learned from another short story that a shaky World War I veteran, shattered by the war, made progress toward recovery by doing something simple like cooking a breakfast for himself by a big, two-hearted river, far away from everyone. I learned from reading “In Another Country” that loving someone could still mean losing them. These things I learned by reading Hemingway as interpreted by Mr. Nakjavani.
I comforted myself that no matter what grade I received, I would know these things.
I turned over the test and opened the last sheet. On it was a red “A.”
Erik Nakjavani was and is the most influential professor I ever had. I took every class he taught at Pitt-Bradford during my two years there, including French, Aesthetics, Existentialism, and Comparative Literary Methods. I have never learned so much about life in my life.
It didn’t take me long to know that Erik was a true scholar. In his slightly accented speech, he spoke in a cadence that lifted then fell, as if he were carefully choosing words for one of his many journal articles. But he always grounded his insights in a way that we could carry them with us and think about them not only after class but, as it turned out, throughout our lives.
In a different class held downstairs at Emery Hardware, Erik spoke of Hemingway’s book “A Moveable Feast.” He looked at us and said, “I hope all of you can go to Paris as Hemingway did when he was young. Paris is for the young.”
I never physically made it there. But, in the words of Emily Dickinson who told us that “there is no frigate like a book to take us lands away,” I traveled far with the books I read for Erik’s classes. With Miguel de Unamuno’s novella, “San Manuel Bueno, Martyr,” I was transported to Spain to learn about a kindly priest whose pious demeanor belied his lack of faith.
From Erik, I became acquainted with international scholars and their philosophies: Edward Husserl’s phenomenology, Sartre’s existentialism, along with the teachings of Malraux, Leibnitz, Karl Jaspers, Henri Bergson, Goethe, Heidegger and others.
Never the icy scholar, Erik was a very personable professor. We students longed to get to know him better, along with his lovely wife, Jeanne, and his adorable daughter, Kirsten, just a child at that time. Some students in our classes invited him to one of our parties, an invitation he graciously accepted. We intended to shock him by showing him the album cover of “Two Virgins,” featuring a completely naked John Lennon and Yoko Ono. We watched carefully as Erik, chuckling, took a brief glance and handed back the album. We found out it would take more than that to unsettle the sophisticated man that was our professor.
In 1976, back from having graduated from Dickinson College, I took a summer seminar Erik was teaching at Pitt-Bradford on Hemingway and Faulkner. To this day, I remember what he told the class about Addie Bundren in “As I Lay Dying”— “Faulkner didn’t tell us everything about a character. Just as in real life, we can never completely know someone.”
I reconnected with Erik by way of the social platform X several years ago. I said in a post on X how inspirational a professor he had been after having read a chapter written by him in the then newly released book titled “One True Sentence: Writers & Readers on Hemingway’s Art” by Mark Cirino and Michael Von Cannon. My post was passed on to Erik by another former student. After that, I received a letter from him, and then we corresponded.
Erik inspired me to become a teacher and hold my students to high standards. He proved that young people can learn challenging concepts. Because of his teaching gifts and his brilliance, I understood the ideas he lectured about, ideas that have stayed with me for more than 50 years. He provided me with a foundation for subsequent learning and developed in me an unparalleled curiosity about — and love for — great writing. Looking back, I realize how fortunate I was to have had a worldrenowned scholar teaching me what the best minds — including his — had to offer.
Judy Hopkins ’71-’73 taught English at various universities in Arizona, California, New York state and 17 years at Pitt-Bradford. She is the author of “Babe in the Woods,” her debut novel, published in 2023.
