Classy Frank

This is my post on Facebook:

My father was born in Luxemburg, Republic of Georgia (former USSR), Sept. 30, 1940 and passed away on Jan. 2, 2021 in Baden-W;rttemberg, Germany. He might not have changed the world but he surely influenced the world of hundreds of his students.

This is a tribute in memory of my father, by one of his former students.

"Classy Frank"
by Galina Vishnyakova-Zhurba
          

 Frank Emilievich Hoerz left for the "sky-high distance" on January 2, 2021.  He was 80 years old.
 In our southern Kazakhstan village named after Mikoyan, he belonged to the category of those rare people whom both children love and adults respect, and old people greet, taking off their old-fashioned caps.

 He was our class teacher from grades 5 to 10.  Together with us students, he picked cotton in the fields, organized sports days, concerts for parents, a bicycle race to Chardara, and also introduced us to art - he ordered a bus and took us on an excursion to the ancient city of Samarkand, to the Tashkent Opera and Ballet Theater and the Museum of Arts ...

 In this museum, I remember, the whole class, along with a guide came to the painting titled "Bather", but then only the girls continued the tour.  The boys were gone.  Frank Emilievich sent me in search of the missing:
 - Go to the "Bather", he said "That's where they are!"

 Indeed, I found the boys, mesmerized, near a picture of a naked young woman.  Her small feet touched the surface of the sea, wavy black hair streamed over her beautiful chest and thighs ...

 The boys had their mouths open, admiring the "masterpiece".

 I thought: "High art has penetrated our village boys!" But suddenly I heard:
 - Oh, what a pity that naked women don't swim in our creeks!

 Yes, it was not easy to instill in the children of collective farmers - cotton growers - a love of beauty!

 Frank Emilievich taught physical education, geometry, and mathematics, and was able to explain even the most difficult theorem in such a way that it seemed interesting and not at all complicated!
 For example, the Pythagorean theorem, in which "Пифагоровы штаны во все стороны равны" ("Pythagorean pants are equal in all directions,") we still remember.

 And what interesting after school class meetings we had!  He found, somewhere, completely scarce books and gave them to us to prepare reports on the work of classics such as Palenov, Vasnetsov, Serov ...

 He, in principle, was still a young man himself, never tiring of educating our loafers, always repeating his favorite phrase that "life is a huge sieve that will constantly test us for strength, and weed out weaklings and the lazy  . .."

 40 years after leaving school, a meeting of classmates took place in Mainz, Germany.  It was organized by Frida Dering, whose family was one of the first to leave for their historical homeland.

 Frank Emilievich outwardly looked good, still the same, stately and smiling, but a break had occurred in him ...
 He told me about how he had been caring for his hopelessly ill wife for 3 years, how hard it was for him to watch the life in his beloved wife fade away, as she fought with all her strength ...
 When it became completely unbearable, he would go into the forest and scream from all his throat like a wounded wild animal ... Probably, he tried to shout to heaven ...
 It was in vain, as heaven didn't hear...

 And he also talked about how, at the insistence of the children, leaving his beloved work and a well-established life, he moved to Germany and could not find a job.  The leaders of large and small companies, seeing in the resume that his last position was a school director, immediately refused with the motivation "Insufficient knowledge of the German language." (FYI: My father spoke his native Swabian, a dialect of German spoken in the southwest of Germany. He failed first grade twice because he entered school not knowing a single Russian word.)

 In Germany, a teacher is one of the highest paid and respected professions, and no former teacher is engaged in "blue-color" work there.

 Tired of searching, he came to another interview at a printing house, where a service worker was required.  When the boss asked him about his work experience, Frank, looking into his eyes, said: “I will not tell you what I worked as before, otherwise I’ll be turned away again, and I desperately need work!

 And so he began to perform some low-skilled operations, glad that he had at least some work...

 They say that a man should build a house, plant a tree and raise a son.
 Frank Emilievich was a "knight without fear and reproach."  He built many houses, planted many gardens and raised two wonderful sons, whom I remember in short pants.  And he also "put on the wing" a generation of students who now tell their children that life is a big and merciless sieve ...

 We called our class teacher simply - classy Frank.

 Thank you, our dear, our most "cool" in the world Frank Emilievich, for your life-long lessons, for your difficult human feat, for which they did not receive high awards, but people will always remember about him.