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Melanie Getreuer
Melanie Getreuer was inspired by a fish story. Not the tale of a big fish or the one that got away but by a political science professor’s story, one he shared with Getreuer and her classmates during a class about post-Communist Europe. The professor, Paul Christensen, told his class about a fish store below an apartment in Moscow, where he lived in the early 1990s. Every morning elderly women lined up outside the fish store. One cold day, Christensen left home without his hat. Sure enough, one of the babushkas admonished him, and as the mob of matriarchs looked on in disapproval, Christensen slinked back upstairs to cover his head. That kind of story captivated Getreuer, an international studies major who, until then, had planned to study in France. “By the time that class was over, I was hooked,” she says. She stopped taking French and studied the Russian language instead. She declared a major in international studies and a dual minor in Russian and in Eastern European studies, and revived the Slavic Club on campus. Mark O’Connor, director of the College of Arts and Sciences honors program, encouraged Getreuer, whose father is Jewish, to explore her heritage in Poland and to apply for a National Security Education Program Scholarship, designed to nurture expertise and language skills in areas important to U.S. foreign policy. Getreuer won the scholarship and headed to Krakow, where she studied at the university and had lunch with her favorite author, Nobel laureate Günter Grass. This summer, she went to live in Russia to improve her language skills, and then will begin a Fulbright grant in Siberia, where she will study the impact of U.S. assistance on local labor organizations. As a Jew, Getreuer wasn’t sure what to expect when she first arrived at Boston College, though in a sense she was following in the footsteps of her father, who also attended a Catholic college. She found personal and intellectual support at the University’s Center for Christian-Jewish Learning and at the Hillel organization, volunteered at the Jewish Family and Children’s Services, and took a comparative course on Judaism and Catholicism. Building on what she calls a “really basic” religious upbringing, she explored her Jewish heritage in Poland and at Boston College, where she discovered that Jesuit education can touch people of all faiths. “I find it ironic,” she says, amused, “that I go to a Catholic school and become more involved in Jewish things.” Photo: Melanie Getreuer in Lyons Hall. |
