After the holiday, the orchard in our courtyard turned black and wet. Zaynvl the fruit-seller carted away the last wagonful of apples, wrapped in a crumpled red featherbed. Dusk fell in the middle of the day, dense and foggy. Yellow leaves stuck to the misty windowpanes.
In the evenings Father sat in his padded vest, making marks with the chalk on the table, as he did his Lenive accounts with his partner Motl Straw.
Leybke was no longer in the house. He was supposed to have gone to Warsaw to look for work, and was waiting only for a letter from Tsipe.
She had promised to write him and to pay back his crisp, Ekaterinoslav ruble. But Tsipe must have forgotten. Leybke then began to move about silently, lost in thought. He no longer told stories about the Russian army, and the grease smell slowly wore off from his body. One day he came home and informed us that he would no longer be living with us, that he had found work with Pinkhes the blacksmith, who would pay him six rubles a week, midday meals included. So he moved out.
He returned as a guest the first Sabbath after his departure, coming by just after we had eaten. He hummed under his nose and tapped his foot, and inquired after Tsipe. Had she written? Had she gotten married yet? He asked Mother to send his regards in her next letter.
Leybke must have noticed that we weren’t exactly swimming in money. In fact, he had once told Mother that if she needed to, she could borrow some from him.
Mother was certainly in need of money, not, God forbid, for herself or for some extravagance, but for me. In that post-holiday season, I had ceased being a kheyder-boy. Mother had enrolled me in a shkole called the New School, where the tuition was higher and where they taught Russian and grammar, in addition to the traditional Hebrew subjects.
Father had been opposed to the idea. In the shkole, he said, they turned students into Gentiles and the teachers there taught bareheaded. Here, Leybke took it upon himself to mix in and cited an example from Ekaterinoslav, the state-appointed “crown rabbi” of that city, who had also studied at a shkole.
“One never knows,” he said. “Mendl might one day become a ‘crown rabbi,’ too.”
Leybke was probably joking. But at the New School, the studies were different from the kheyder. When you left there, you knew how to read from the Torah with the proper cantillation. You were able to look into the Hebrew journal Hatsefirah. You could partake in Zionist activity.
Indeed, everything at the New School was different from the way it was at Sime-Yoysef’s. Here there was no single, dark room lined with sweat-soaked benches, but two spacious rooms with many scrubbed windows and an iron balcony facing the street. In the center of both rooms, arrayed like soldiers, one behind the other, stood rows of small, black desks, with compartments and little boxes for holding food and writing implements.
Hanging on one wall was an old, large map, blue and half-peeling, of cities and towns, rivers and oceans. On the other wall, looking down from charts, were pictures of wild animals and domestic beasts, fishes and lizards, plants and fruit.
High up, alongside the portrait of the Tsar, who was decked out in a blue silk sash across his chest, hung two other portraits.
One was of a stout man in an eight-cornered silk hat, with a trimmed, gray beard and a short neck, sporting a white cravat. We were told that this was Moses Montefiore and that he was a lord. I took an instant liking to him on account of that white cravat, not unlike Mother’s jabot.
The second portrait was of an altogether different sort, a clean-shaven man with the face of a Gentile, piercing eyes, and a black mustache with upturned ends. I was amazed. What was that angry-looking Gentile face doing at the New School? But the other boys told me that he wasn’t, God forbid, a Gentile. He was a Jew, an important magnate, right hand to the king. He was none other than Baron Hirsch, who sought to redeem Jews from their long Exile.
I couldn’t believe it and, disregarding the fact that he was the king’s right-hand man, I didn’t like that baron at all. His black mustache ends were too pointy. His eyes were constantly staring you in the face, and not just staring, but boring into you, as though he’d been hired to watch your every step, your every twist and turn. Not that we needed him to keep us in line. For that he could rely on our teacher, Reb Dovid.
This Reb Dovid was a Sime-Yoysef of a different order entirely. He was a vulgar Jew in a vulgar rayon smock, with a vulgar wispy beard, and one vulgar leg shorter than the other. In addition to his teaching, he owned a grocery store, had a grown daughter, and wielded a long, curved leather strap removed from a sewing machine.
This was the teacher who instructed us in the Pentateuch, with the Rashi commentary, as well as provided a review of the weekly Torah portion. Actually, it wasn’t he who taught us, but that curved strap of his, which he wrapped around his fingers, like a soft snake.
Reb Dovid had a wide, low-slung backside, which he would heave onto the top of a bench, resting his shorter leg on a stool. In that way he was able to look over the heads of all the pupils. He had small, squinty eyes and arched eyebrows. Nevertheless, he could see what everybody was up to. When he noticed something amiss, he would slide his backside off the bench, pretend to look in the other direction, and, limping sideways, sneak up on the culprit like a stealthy cat, snatch the cap off the culprit’s head, and let fly the leather snake across the full width of the unfortunate’s bare head.
“May the cholera strike you!” he would hiss, twisting his mouth to one side. “Do me a favor and stop playing that game with the buttons, bastard you!”
A welt would erupt on the “bastard’s” head. It would run down to a good part of his cheek, where it would come to a stop, like a swollen, bloody vein.
It was said that Reb Dovid was on his third wife, and that he would bury her, too. It was known in town that he detested her and called her despicable, but still wanted her to bear him children, even though he already had a grown daughter from his first wife.
Reb Dovid would turn up at the shkole later than his pupils. He limped about in a pair of old, worn slip-on shoes and in shriveled trousers that looked like pipes. All that notwithstanding, he regarded himself as a learned man. During the Days of Repentance, he propelled himself to the pulpit to lead the prayers, and on the Sabbath he read the Torah at the synagogue of the Zionists.
People also said that Reb Dovid was an ardent Misnaged, an opponent of the Hasidim, whose leaders, the rebbes, he held in contempt and despised. He was supposed once to have cursed a rebbe publicly, and from that time on started limping.
True, he was a vulgar man and a teacher who didn’t spare the lash, but he did possess one great virtue. For this we forgave him his hatred of the Hasidim, and even his accursed, curved strap. For there was no one who could teach Torah better than Reb Dovid. He had his own special chant, neither that of a Misnaged nor of a whip-cracking teacher. He dissected each word as though he were shelling a nut, and placed the kernels in our mouths so that we could taste their true flavor.
In Reb Dovid’s telling, the righteous Joseph became a tall, swarthy youth, so handsome that no one could look him in the face. He wasn’t just the son of Father Jacob, but a prince, a duke, who fed all of Egypt while remaining the most modest of men. And Moses didn’t have a white beard, like in the portrait that hung on Aunt Miriam’s wall. He was a young man with a full head of curls, like a sheep, and he was tall and strong, like a cedar. The proof? Pharaoh’s own daughter, the Egyptian princess, desired him for a husband.
Reb Dovid’s rendition of the chapter dealing with the Exodus from Egypt was a delight to hear. As he warmed to the account, he became a different person, no longer the man with the vulgar face, in a rayon smock. As he read on, he abandoned his usually niggardly, cracked voice, which now rang out hopefully, emerging not from his mouth but from his entire body. He recited and sang out the verses, not to us but to the wider world beyond.
Now, we ourselves were going forth from Egypt with Moses. We heard the pounding of the footsteps and the clatter of Pharaoh’s chariots. The sea split before our very eyes. We looked on as the Egyptians and their chariots and their horses drowned in the waters. We heard Moses singing in exultation with the Children of Israel, and Miriam the prophetess beating on her drum.
Had we studied only the Exodus chapter all year round, it would never have grown stale, especially since Reb Dovid, when he taught this portion, forgot about his curved, leather strap and the cholera curses he heaped on our heads. But Reb Dovid taught only Pentateuch with the Rashi commentary. There were other things we had to know, and for that there was another teacher, no vulgarian in a rayon smock, but—Reb Yankele.
On wintry evenings, in the bright light of the two lamps, that particular teacher taught us Prophets and Hebrew grammar. He couldn’t have taught these subjects in the light of day, for his voice, indeed his whole demeanor, was dark and shadowy, like the winter evenings.
A tall man with stooped shoulders and a pale face bordered by a small, pointy black beard, Reb Yankele came to our shkole from a distance, from the Skarszew barrier gate. He didn’t wear desiccated slipons like Reb Dovid, but a pair of polished boots with an aristocratic squeak, fit for the Sabbath and left over from his days as a timber merchant. His black ebony cane, with its ivory handle, was also a memento from that time. His slow, measured steps, his white, separate collar with the black tie—all these dated back as well to the days when his timber-laden rafts floated down the Vistula to Danzig.
Those days were long gone. In that far-off time, Reb Yankele spoke in a loud voice and rapped his ivory-handled cane on the floor whenever a poor man came to him for a contribution. His face wasn’t pale then, nor his eyes sunken and watery, as they were today.
Of those one-time forests and rafts, nothing remained except his noble name, Reb Yankele, and the even nobler prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel. People said that Reb Yankele became a teacher in his old age not to earn a living, nor on account of the sorrows and disappointments he had suffered at the hands of his children, but because of his great love for Scripture.
As soon as he began to teach us the first verse of Isaiah, one could tell that this former rich and powerful man had cast off the world completely. It wasn’t the prophet Isaiah who was castigating the sinful people of Israel, but our own teacher, Reb Yankele. As he read, his voice darkened, like his very being itself.
“I reared children and brought them up,” he intoned, throwing back his head. “And they have rebelled against me,” he continued, groaning quietly, as though complaining to someone about his bitter fate.
When we studied Lamentations, his body shrank and became bent, like the prophet Jeremiah’s. He didn’t scream out the Destruction of the Temple, but murmured the sorrowful phrases to himself, like the cooing of pigeons early morning behind closed windows.
Reb Yankele lived in a separate, little side room in the home of his youngest daughter, Dvoyre, who married after her father had become impoverished and she had been obliged to take a husband with no distinguished lineage. Every day Dvoyre would polish her father’s squeaking boots and wipe the dust off his black ebony cane, and, even though she already had two sons studying for their final exams at the gymnasium, she would still address her father in the most filial of tones.
“Father dear,” she would say, “maybe you’d like something to take with you. A cookie? An apple?”
My sister Beyle, who was a neighbor of Reb Yankele’s, told us that he would sit up whole nights writing by the light of a candle. People said that he was composing a commentary. All the neighbors knew about it, and everyone told a different story, though he himself said nothing.
Reb Yankele walked about the shkole quietly, leaning on his ebony cane, his sagging shoulders thrust forward, listening to us read the scriptural verses, absorbed in his own thoughts. Although it seemed as if he wasn’t aware of what was going on around him, he nevertheless knew very well who was paying attention and who was playing with buttons.
If it were the latter, he would then approach the culprit quietly, not with a leather strap like Reb Dovid, nor a “Cholera!” spewing from a twisted mouth, but merely lean one hand on his cane and the other on the culprit’s desk.
“Whose boy are you?” he would ask.
“Itshe the tailor’s.”
“What’s your mother’s name?
“Freydl.”
“Tell your mother, and let your father hear this as well, that all the trouble they went to, to send you here, was for naught. Your father, no doubt, toils to earn his piece of bread. Your mother, I am certain, saves what she can, groshen by groshen, to pay your tuition. Then you come along, bringing ruin and destruction on their hard labors. Do you think that the prophets were merely talking into the air? They were poor people, just like your father. Their words didn’t earn them a living. All they wanted was for people to listen to them. And then you go and play with buttons? Tell me, can’t you see for yourself that you are sinning by not paying attention?”
Reb Yankele was absolutely right. How could anyone play with buttons while he was teaching us Scripture? And wasn’t it far better to attend to his special chant than to win a few more silly buttons from a fellow pupil? But Itshe the tailor’s son, and boys like him, remained fools until the day they died. They simply failed to grasp that it was also possible to learn something, unaccompanied by blows and curses. For them, Reb Dovid was good enough, as was another teacher, Mattias.
It may very well have been because of such boys that the school hired Mattias as a teacher. It was hard to understand how both Reb Yankele and a person like Mattias could be found teaching under the same roof.
Neither a Jew nor a Gentile, but a Muscovite, Mattias was an uncouth Russian, pure and simple. He taught Russian, penmanship, and arithmetic, all in a hoarse, drunken voice, with drunken hands, and a drunken head.
Mattias smoked constantly while he taught, cigarette after cigarette, coughing and spitting into corners. He had the habit of sticking out his jaw, making his wrinkled, sleepy face look like an unmade bed. He didn’t hold his cigarettes between his lips but between his yellow, stained teeth, which were big and pointy, like a wolf’s. He did indeed prowl around the classroom like a wolf, waiting for the opportune moment to pounce on his prey. It was hard to conceive how a shriveled-up body like his could contain such murderous rage.
Rumor had it that Teacher Mattias hadn’t been sleeping with his wife for many, many years. In fact, he didn’t sleep at all. He played cards all night. His wife wasn’t from around here. She wore a long yellow fur coat dating back to the days of Poniatowski, and went about with her hair uncovered. Everyone in town knew that she bought her meat in the Gentile butcher shops and never salted it to make it kosher, that on Christmas Eve she set up a crèche inside her house and crossed herself. Teacher Mattias, so people said, when he returned home at dawn, after a night of gambling at cards, beat up his wife, spat on her long yellow fur coat, and smashed everything in sight.
All this was common knowledge in town. Everybody held a grudge against him and stayed clear of Teacher Mattias’s house.
Nevertheless, all the mothers wanted their children to attend the New School in particular, where Teacher Mattias was one of the instructors. Mother’s reasoning was, first, that when you were graduated from the New School, you know how to read a holy book. Second, she especially wanted me to learn grammar and penmanship. She herself had once studied penmanship, which was why she was now able to write letters for girls engaged to young men serving in the Russian army, and for women whose children were in America.
Mother said that a whipping would do me no harm. King Solomon himself had advised giving a child an occasional smack. Sometimes, she added, if you are hit on the backside, it travels up to your head.
Well, first of all, I was no longer a child who needed to be smacked. Secondly, Teacher Mattias didn’t hit you on your backside, but precisely on your head. And thirdly, no amount of beating would have done me any good, since my own handwriting would never be as accomplished as Mother’s.
Mother had learned her craft with another teacher, who must have been a very calm person, one whose hands didn’t shake like a drunkard’s. Otherwise, how could he have taught penmanship, where each letter requires the utmost concentration, where one line is thick, another thin, sometimes round and sometimes pointed?
How could I have done all that when fear of Teacher Mattias’s footsteps hung over my head like a sword, making me tremble, body and soul? He would throw one cigarette away and light another. We all sat there, our heads bowed to one side, and, with beating hearts, traced the letters along the blue lines of the page.
Teacher Mattias’s shoes shuffled fearfully across the floor of the quietly breathing classroom. Even his shoes seemed drunk. I broke out in a cold sweat, though there was nothing he could fault me for. I looped and curved all the letters, as I should, and they couldn’t have been more beautiful unless Mother herself had traced them.
In the midst of all this, I began to detect the acrid smell of a cigarette. There was a rasping sound above me, issuing from a stopped-up throat. Before I could even manage to look up, I felt a ringing in my head and the unexpected smack of a fist on my chin.
“Hooligan!” Teacher Mattias screamed at me, and broke into a coughing fit. “What’s wrong with you? Is that how you write a shtcha? Go to the blackboard and write the letter again, you dog!”
He pulled me up by an ear. My whole face was in pain, my temples were throbbing, and I saw sparks before my eyes. The heads of all my classmates shrank into their shoulders, becoming round circles of black, as uniform as rows of cabbages sliced in half.
The blackboard, standing on an easel supported by three wooden legs, was no longer a blackboard but an ablution board for the cleansing of dead bodies before burial.
All of us pupils feared the blackboard more than we did Teacher Mattias. It was like a brother to him, and stood on its wobbly legs, looking drunk, too. There was nowhere to hide. Teacher Mattias stood there, taut, legs apart, like a wolf about to pounce on a lamb. It was useless. Even if I were to trace the shtcha to perfection, I still couldn’t avoid the smack on the jaw that would make my teeth rattle.
Not long ago, a classmate, little Yosele, had had one of his teeth knocked loose, and he pushed it out with his tongue, all bloodied. In my case, after I had filled half the blackboard with shtchas, adorned with all manner of curly pigs’ tails, I still felt a sharp pain in my ear, as well as a trickle of warm blood running down my neck. Teacher Mattias’s lips were white. The trickle of blood didn’t bother him in the least. To add to my injury, he kicked me in the backside, accompanied by another scratch across my ear, and snarled, “Idiot! Get out of here!”
That’s how it went, day after day. Sometimes I was the victim, other times someone else. Only Moyshele, the tavern owner’s son, didn’t get a taste of Teacher Mattias’s drunken hands.
Moyshele, even though he had a girlish face and was always smacking his lips, was Teacher Mattias’s favorite pupil. He was a glutton, that Moyshele, with a big belly brought on by his overeating, and white, pudgy hands. This, however, didn’t keep him from excelling in penmanship, from knowing how much nine times nine was, and from getting all the Russian spellings correct. Everybody in the shkole hated Moyshele. First, because he knew everything, second, because he wouldn’t let anybody copy from him, and third, because he was an informer.
Moyshele had but one friend in the shkole, a poor, thin boy called Yukele. This Yukele had no father. His mother, a young, redheaded woman, went from house to house, begging alms for her fatherless child. Yukele paid no tuition. The school took him in out of pity.
This was the Yukele whom Moyshele, son of the tavern owner, befriended. Moyshele treated him as a personal servant. He liked to pinch Yukele’s cheeks and tickle him. From all that pinching, Yukele’s greenish face swelled up in white puffs. In return, however, he received rewards from Moyshele, a cold gizzard, a turkey liver, a hard-boiled egg. Occasionally, Moyshele took him along to his father’s tavern and let him taste the froth of the beer that young wagon-drivers had left in their glasses.
Because of Moyshele, we also hated Yukele, even if he was so skinny and had no father. No one talked with them. They were always together, and if anyone ever felt like picking an argument with them, they never took up the challenge, always running away. But the next day, in Teacher Mattias’s class, Moyshele stood up and squealed on us.
“Teacher, sir,” he said, “they threw stones at us yesterday.”
“Who did?” Teacher Mattias stuck out his yellow, stained mustache.
“Itzik did and so did Mendl. Everybody threw stones.”
Teacher Mattias delivered smacks to jaws with his fist, squeezed ears, and rasped drunkenly, “Scum! Hooligans! I’ll get you for this!”
It was a bitter life. We all prayed that Teacher Mattias, Moyshele the tavern owner’s son, and the blackboard should all meet with an unnatural end.
But of what use were our prayers, if Teacher Mattias went on drinking in Moyshele’s father’s tavern, if the blackboard continued to wobble on its unsteady, drunken legs, and Moyshele kept squealing on us, even more than before?