Tag #130840 - Interview #78461 (Stefan Guth)

My mother was a housewife, but when I went off to college, in 1950, she took a job at the town’s second hand bookshop – back then the only one in town – which she ended up running for a long time. There was a funny incident involving my mother as a librarian, which later became a good anecdote in all the bookshops in the country. In those times, under communism, you entered whatever shop, asked for something, and the invariable answer was, ‘We don’t have any’. It was true. So an elderly gentleman entered my mother’s bookshop and asked her, ‘Do you keep any books in ancient Greek?’. The answer was, ‘We don’t have any.’. The man, probably aware that that was the standard answer, tried again, ‘You know, the ancient Greek, Hellene’ ‘I know, Sir, but we don’t have any’ ‘But ma’am, the ancient Greek language, in which the Iliad and he Odyssey were written… ’ ‘I know, Sir!’, answered my mother and started to recite the first verses from the Iliad, in ancient Greek. The man was stunned. He blushed, bowed, and said, ‘Please excuse me, dear madam!’ And he kept on bowing and walking with his back to the door until he went out like this.