At Salahaddin University in Arbil, Klaus has his work cut out for him as he teaches Pasternak, Hemingway, and other writers, all to students with somewhat limited English skills, and those skills taught by teachers of English, rather than American English (which makes for an amusing few pages in the book). But the author’s real challenge comes in teaching American history, with all its complexities to a country within a country, a people — the Kurds — with their own complex and rich history, who have been subverted first by conquerors and then by a cruel dictator and now find themselves in the midst of a war that they do not fully understand. America’s history lesson proves even more confounding.
As Klaus so eloquently puts it: “There is a particular conundrum about teaching one’s national history abroad - finding the fine line where intellectual honesty and nationalist interests overlap without compromising one or subverting the other. The effort is limited and made more difficult by a lack of national consensus. Our often strident disagreement over issues at home, our sometimes vocal criticism of the government or of individual parties, nevertheless takes place within a set of shared principles, a general philosophy upon which most Americans agree... we all continue to believe axiomatically in the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [But] we assume at our peril that our notions of the individual in society resonate intuitively with other cultures.”
The title of Klaus’s book comes from two cultural references to which the students are universally familiar: the rock star and the Oscar-winning film, which one student puts, logically or not, together. Ian Klaus, in this his first book, a lovely memoir of a year plus in a war-torn country, has painted his readers a portrait none of us who view it will soon forget. For so young a writer, he is full of knowledge and insight and we would do well to take the gift he gives us and remember that our actions provide historical documents for generations to come.
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