EIZERMAN LEFT THE Ore Miklet in an elevated mood, but at the same time he felt a vague sense of somberness and confusion that he couldn’t explain to himself. He tried to strike up a conversation with Tsiporin, who walked on ahead with his head bowed, but he didn’t reply or else answered abruptly and unwillingly. Eizerman fell silent; bouncing up and down clumsily, he followed fast behind Tsiporin. His mood soon became gloomy, and all his recollections were infused with dark colors. His new comrades at the Ore Miklet had greeted him with coolness and apathy; Mirkin, who’d treated him so warmly that morning, was now trying to get rid of him as quickly as possible. . . . Of course, he himself was to blame for everything: he’d bored them with his foolish chatter. . . . A strange sensation at his bare temples constantly reminded him that his side curls had been shorn; he regretted that he’d hastened that procedure and had elicited open mockery from his comrades, instead of their expected approval. . . . And finally, the real reason for his spiritual discomfiture occurred to him. Eizerman remembered his new friends’ remarks about learning and physical labor, remarks that contradicted his own ideas on this subject. Denying the necessity of systematic study, the freethinkers from the Ore Miklet almost seemed to be privileging physical labor over mental work, not only in theory, but also in practice. . . . Of course, there’s no reason to be ashamed of physical labor! On the contrary! A genuine advocate of Haskalah extols physical labor, mocks and reproaches fanatics for their contempt of such work. Eizerman knew all this very well. Nevertheless, in the depths of his soul, he couldn’t reconcile himself to this idea—and it seemed strange and bizarre to him that Tsiporin was a bookbinder; he considered this a profanation of the “sacred Haskalah.” . . . No matter how he tried to convince himself that Tsiporin was exactly the same kind of maskil as Mirkin and Uler, he still regarded him only as a skilled craftsman.
He followed Tsiporin in silence to the stone house where Kapluner lived. A young Russian woman, a servant, greeted them at the entrance and muttered in irritation, “At least you could wipe your feet, damn you, you devils! All you do is track dirt into the master’s room! There’s no end to cleaning up after them! Phooey!”
Tsiporin, who hadn’t intended to wipe his dirty boots, glanced sternly at the servant, moved sideways through the dining room, and toward Kapluner’s room.
“What does she want?” Eizerman asked in a half whisper, and with a tinge of fear.
“I can’t stand having to visit these rotten aristocrats!” Tsiporin growled instead of answering.
Having opened the door to Kapluner’s room and having convinced himself that he was at home, Tsiporin let Eizerman pass while he hastily withdrew.
Eizerman, embarrassed by the servant’s outburst and the unfamiliar surroundings that astonished him by their grandeur, hesitantly entered Kapluner’s cozy, tidy room and quickly removed his hat.
Kapluner, who was sitting there with a book, rose lazily to greet him and, smiling warmly, extended his hand in a protective and well-mannered way.
“Ah, you’ve come today! Mirkin said we’d begin tomorrow. . . . Well, never mind, we can start today. Sit down!”
Eizerman sat down on the edge of a chair.
First of all, I want to quiz you: I’ll see how much you know!” said Kapluner in a professorial tone. “Do you know how to read and write?”
“Ikh . . . ,” Eizerman began in Yiddish.
“Stop!” Kapluner interrupted him hastily. “Your first duty is this: not one word of Yiddish! Do you hear? Or else, you’ll never learn Russian. . . . You seem to understand what I’m saying to you.”
Eizerman nodded his head in agreement.
“Do you know how to read Russian?”
Eizerman thought for a moment and muttered hesitantly, “A droplet. . . .”
“A ‘droplet’?” cried Kapluner in surprise. “That word doesn’t exist in Russian. You must say, ‘A little bit.’ ”
“A little bit,” repeated Eizerman obediently after him.
Kapluner took the first book he happened to pick up, Ilovaisky’s History,1 opened it at random, and offered it to Eizerman to read, while he, placing his hands behind his back, began pacing the room.
Eizerman, focusing all his attention, delved into the book and, mouthing every word to himself first, began slowly, syllable-by-syllable, “Sofia was little . . . concerned about . . . her bro-ther’s . . . mil-i-tar-y ad-ven-tures and . . . riot . . . -ous . . . way of wife. . . .”
“Life,” Kapluner corrected him.
“Wife,” Eizerman repeated after him.
“Not ‘wife,’ but ‘life’!”
Eizerman looked at Kapluner with astonishment, without understanding what he wanted.
“Say: ‘L-L-L-L!’ ”
“ ‘W-W-W-W’! Eizerman uttered, trying to position his lips the same as his teacher’s.
“Awful!”
Kapluner took an elementary textbook for reading and found the ‘The Goldfinch and the Nightingale.’ ”2
“Read this word, the first one!”
“Pinsh . . . ,” Eizerman read and hastened to correct himself immediately: “P-pinsh-sh!”
Kapluner spread his arms as a sign of despair.
“Nothing can be done with you!” he decided. “You can’t read at all! We’ll have to begin with the simplest stories. . . . Read this one, ‘Grateful Vanya.’3 . . . Wait a moment, what does the word ‘grateful’ mean? Do you know?”
Eizerman shrugged his shoulders in silence.
“Don’t shrug your shoulders, but say, ‘I don’t know.’ . . . So, do you know what the word ‘grateful’ means?”
“I don’t know,” Eizerman replied boldly.
“That’s the way to reply,” Kapluner said, quite satisfied and began to explain the meaning of the word “grateful.” Eizerman understood, at last.
“Now, listen to the way I read this story!” Kapluner said, emphasizing the word “I.”
He began reading slowly and clearly, noticeably exaggerating his pronunciation.
“Did you understand?”
“Uh-huh!” replied Eizerman, who had the feeling that he was standing for the recitation of the Shimenesre.
“Not ‘Uh-huh,’ but ‘Yes’!” his teacher corrected him.
“Un vos heyst,” Eizerman began swiftly in Yiddish, hoping to finish his sentence before Kapluner could manage to break in.
But Kapluner interrupted him just as swiftly: “Stop! No ‘Un vos heyst’! I don’t understand Yiddish and don’t know any ‘Un vos heyst’! You must say, “What does this word mean?’ ”
“What does this word mean—‘Vanya’?”
Kapluner wasn’t expecting such a question and was even somewhat taken aback.
“ ‘Vanya’? You really don’t know what ‘Vanya’ means? It’s the diminutive of the name ‘Ivan.’ Have you never heard the name ‘Ivan’?”
“Ah! Ivan,” Eizerman said joyfully. “Hey, Ivan!”4 he added, even waving his hand in a gesture of disdain, as if wishing to say, “No need to ask! What Jew doesn’t know that name?”
They moved on to arithmetic.
Eizerman grew more animated. He knew all four arithmetical operations; in Miloslavka he’d been considered a fine mathematician. He hoped to mollify his teacher by that fact, or even actually astonish him. But the poor fellow was mistaken in this as well.
Kapluner began to dictate two- and three-digit numbers to him. Eizerman wrote them down accurately and was attempting to explain to his teacher that he knew all this very well and they could move on to more complicated material.
“Give me a ‘pwoblem’!” he repeated, looking at Kapluner with timid entreaty. “I can handle it! I know! I can do it!” he corrected himself hurriedly.
“Don’t hurry!” his teacher said, stopping him coldly. “First of all, explain why you put a zero here and the number three over there. You wrote it correctly, but why?”
“I can’t . . . ,” Eizerman replied, shrugging his shoulders.
Kapluner began to expound on the rules of arithmetic. Following this explanation with great attention, Eizerman grasped the main point immediately and interrupted him merrily, “I can do this!”
“Listen! You must wait until I’m finished!”
Eizerman distractedly, impatiently listened to the rest of the explanation and then asked boldly, “Well! Give me a ‘pwoblem’!”
Kapluner pretended that he hadn’t heard the request and once again began dictating numbers.
“Well, here’s what,” he said finally in summary. “You must begin again from the very beginning. You have to forget everything you studied at home. You butcher the Russian language. Do you understand? For the next lesson read the story ‘Grateful Vanya’ ten times and copy it out twice. You’ll be asked to retell the story in your own words in Russian. Then write out the numerals from 301 to 1,000 in succession. . . .”
1. Dmitry Ilovaisky (1832–1920) was the author of several standard textbooks of Russian history published during the 1870s.
2. One of Ivan Krylov’s animal fables.
3. Origin unknown.
4. One of the most common men’s names in Russian, used here as symbol of any Russian male.