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Wednesday Aug. 23, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
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From Russia with love Professor shares anecdotes of nomadic life
by Dick Lipsey Kansan staff writer
The prison camp was nothing more than a 5-foot-high fence marking a rectangle in an open field. One side of the fence was near a road where 10 or 15 elderly women stood clutching small baskets of food.
A single armed guard walked back and forth along that side of the fence. When the guard turned his back and marched the other way, the women rushed to the fence and passed the baskets to the unknown prisoners inside.
Tamerian Salaty was one of 15,000 captives of the German army in that makeshift camp in the Ukraine in 1942. He survived because of food provided by strangers, Russians who gave food to men they didn't know in hopes that others would do the same for their men, perhaps captive in other cames.
Salary, now a University of Kansas assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures, in the next 20 years led a nomadic existence that took him to Marilyn Monroe's dinner table, Rita Hayworth's hotel room and the Miss Universe contest.
But in 1942 Salaty was an 18-year-old partisan who had been captured after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in World War II.
Salaty soon escaped from the Germans, was wounded in a bombing attack by German planes and then was recaptured. He survived the war in captivity and ended up in a refugee camp in Ingolstadt, near Munich, Germany. There he learned a trade as an electrician and in 1949 emigrated to the United States.
After a couple of years in the United States, Salaty was able to get a loan to attend the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute to study engineering.
"I was sponsored by the World Church Organization," Salaty said. "The citrus growers in California needed 60 single men and they gave me a six-month contract to come and pick oranges."
After his contract ran out, Salaty held several jobs before moving to New York City. There his training as an electrician proved useful when he worked in the Hilton Plaza Hotel.
"I was called in to fix Rita Hayworth's hairdryer," he said. "I had the chance to talk to her and she daughter, Jasmine. My boss said she must have liked me. She asked them to send me back the next day when her iron broke."
"My friend Leo and I spoke poor English, and we didn't know how to register for classes," Salaty said. "We found two guys in engineering and just followed them to every window they went to. So we enrolled in 18 hours of courses.
That was one class he didn't sign up for.
"Then we followed them to another window where there was a man in an army uniform. He told me I should be a captain because of my age, but I could only be a second lieutenant when I graduated. I was in line for ROTC and I didn't even know what it was until much later."
Salaty was born in 1924 in the Soviet Union, but he is not a Russian. He is from a small village near the city of Civizhonikidze in the Caucasus and is a member of
The Osetians number less than a million people. They are descendants of the Alani, a tribal group conquered by the Huns in the fourth century. They have lived in the northern Caucasus for more than a thousand years. They settled there when the Russians were a small tribe living in distant forests.
the Ossetian nationality
satyty remembers growing up as a member of a small minority group.
"There were nationality conflicts all the time," he said. "We resented the Russians as big brothers. They were always telling us what to do. We had to compete with the Russians and always be better to get ahead."
Salaty decided to attend KU on the advice of a fellow Ossetian, Grigory Tokaty. Tokaty had worked on the Soviet Sputnik satellite program before defecting to Great Britain. He taught at KU as a visiting professor for a year.
Salaty became a teacher of Russian almost by accident. After running out of money, he left college to work and held several jobs. Eventually he was hired by the Sperry Gyroscope Company on Long Island, N.Y., and worked on the B-58 bomber program as an engineering aide. After three years he took a leave of absence in 1961 to complete his engineering degree.
"He said KU had impressed him as a strong school with a good future," Salaty said.
But Salaty also had another reason for choosing KU.
"I had lived only in California and New York, and people told me not to judge America just on them," he said. "So I asked where the real Americans lived, and people told me the Midwest. I took a map and measured from coast to coast, and sure enough, in the middle was Kansas. So that was another good reason to come here."
Before completing his degree in electrical engineering in 1963, Salaty began teaching part-time.
"In 1962 a Polish lady who taught Russian had to leave," Salaty said. "The department offered me $100 a month to teach her class. That doubled my income so I took it.
"Theen I thought that teaching Russian would allow me to help Americans break down walls," he said. "There were lots of engineers when I graduated, but no one to teach Russian, so I thought I'd do something for humanity."
"I if I could go to the Soviet Union, I could publish," he said. "But they would send me to Siberia if I returned."
Salaty is a short, slender, greying man who appears at peace with himself. He never completed his doctoral dissertation.
He began teaching full-time in 1965 and received tenure in 1971. He now teaches an advanced course in translation and basic courses in grammar and composition. His only professional regret is that he has been able to do little of the research and publishing required for academic advancement.
He said he enjoyed teaching and spoke favorably of his students.
"The students who enroll in Russian are usually at least 'B' average students," he said. "They used to take it to satisfy a requirement or to read Tolstoy. Now they take it because Russian is important to know. Students are more serious now than they were in the '40s."
Joseph Conrad is professor of Slavic languages and literatures and was department chairman for eight years. He has known Salaty for more than 20 years.
"He is one of the most dedicated teachers I've ever known," Conrad said. "He is a very giving man who is always available to his students. The student evaluations on him are always appreciative of the time and energy he puts into his classes.
"The addition of anecdotes keeps the courses from being dry grammar."
Salaty is well-known among his students for his anecdotes and his sense of humor. Most of his students have heard about the time he worked as a waiter and got a $5 tip after serving Marilyn Monroe and Joe Dmaggio.
Then there is the time he worked as a hotel bellboy doing odd jobs for 17 contestants in the 1956 Miss Universe contest. And the time he got a job as a busyb, thinking it involved cleaning buses between runs.
"His stories are great," said Ellen Strubert, St. Louis graduate student. "You are never quite sure where they are going, but there is always a tie-in to what you're studying. Many teachers just don't understand students, but he does."
"He has a wonderful way of presenting things and making grammar clear," Strubert said. "He only gets impatient when he sees you're not working up to your potential."
Lyne McElroy, Wichita graduate student, said, "He's very creative and resourceful. His attitude towards learning spreads to his students. The only criticism I've ever heard about him is that he's too nice, but that's because he cares more about you learning than he does about grades."
Salary lives in Lawrence with his wife, Caroline, and daughter, Tamara, who will be a senior at Lawrence High School. Another daughter, Madina, is a student at California State University at Fulllerton.
Salaty now has little contact with events in the Soviet Union. Salaty's father died when he was a child, and the uncle who raised him was killed during the war, as were many of Salaty's cousins. His other uncle died after being exiled to central Asia after his farm was confiscated by the government.
"One forgets one's mother tongue after many years of not speaking it." Salaty said. His native language of Ossetian is related to the Iranian family of languages and is rarely spoken outside of his homeland. He is fluent in Russian and English, and spoke German for several years before coming to the United States. He also has studied Polish and Serbo-Croatian.
"When I first came to this country, I wanted to study medicine or linguistics," he said. "The foreign student adviser at UCLA discouraged me from medicine because of the cost, and my American friends told me I would starve if I went into linguistics. They told me to study something practical, like engineering, so here I am."
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