The Jewish passion for education struck out in many directions once the traditional cheder pattern found itself exposed to the free air of America. Ruth Field Iglehart here describes one of the many systems of education that flourished—and still flourish—among the Jews of Eastern Europe and their children in America.
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Although I grew up in New York and dutifully completed the prescribed stages of its public school system, much of my early education took place in other and less familiar surroundings. From nine to three I worked energetically at geography, spelling, penmanship, and whatever other enlightenment the school considered suitable to my years. At weekly assemblies I sang “The Harp That Hung in Tara’s Halls,” and several years of music appreciation classes taught me to recognize the strains of “To a Wild Rose.” I played tag in the schoolyard during recess and, safe among my friends, grumbled at the foibles of the reigning tyrants: the Miss Hughes or Miss Duff who, for the moment, held power over us.
By four o’clock, however, I had entered another world. The bright red brick of the newly built public school, with its many staircases and doorways all carefully identified by signs and arrows, its brown corridors speckled with large paintings of flowers and horses, its subterranean swimming pool and rooftop basketball court, all vanished. In their stead appeared an old two-story frame house whose upper reaches contained some battered side-arm chairs; a piano that could never, even in its best days, have produced more than tolerable sounds; a few ill-assorted bookcases and, in a back alcove, a clumsy Franklin stove that seemed to smoke even when it had no fuel.
But neither I nor the other children who spent their afternoons and evenings here thought the place shabby; its function was so different from that of the public school that it would never have occurred to us to compare them. It was, I suppose, a kind of academic underground, but it must have appealed to us as much for its divergence from what we considered customary in a school as for the actual knowledge it supplied. There were no tyrants here against whom to rebel: the one teacher was necessarily all things to all students. We called her “Comrade,” and if any grievances arose they were less like an outbreak against constituted authority than a quarrel among relatives. We learned to know her—to foresee and sometimes to stave off her occasional bursts of temper. We could, just as we did with our parents, evoke her delight or praise by some sudden witticism or insight. And one day, perhaps when we reached the august age of twelve, we passed a threshold more subtle and satisfactory than formal graduation: we were admitted into intimacy and could call her by her first name.
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More than physical differences or differences in attitude, however, set this world apart from the everyday one. Once you entered the frame house, you spoke another language and read books that could never have appeared on any ordinary school list. The songs you sang would have astonished your music appreciation class, and you discussed a remote but fascinating history and geography that had no place in nine-to-three life. Your penmanship exercises were of no use here because Yiddish—the language of this after-hours school—was written from right to left and used characters radically different from those of any Western language. Your very identity changed, the name to which you customarily answered being replaced by its Hebrew equivalent, so that for several hours you became a new and vaguely Biblical personage. And when, on special occasions, you stood at your seat and sang “The Children’s Anthem,” few of your public school associates would have recognized your fervent tones.
The anthem was sung to the tune of the old “Internationale” and began by announcing—in Yiddish, of course—that:
We chìldren all are equals
We are all young and free,
Among us there are no rich or poor. . . .
and went on to a rousing chorus which we always fairly shouted:
Then long live the children,
May they grow very great,
And to the work of building and creating
Advance, singing!
Between my ninth and thirteenth years, I must have spent every weekday afternoon as well as occasional Saturday mornings in that little second-story room, and my “graduation” class included at least a dozen equally industrious children. It is difficult now to recapture the sense of dedication—always somewhat ridiculous in retrospect—which we brought to our studies. Most of us believed, and all of us were constantly reminded, that our personal efforts could advance the culture of an entire people. We also knew the Jewish legend in which the world was said to rest on the shoulders of seven pious old men, so we did not think ourselves too few for our smaller task.
Fortunately, this Messianic ardor was tempered by more worldly concerns. The rent for our modest schoolhouse was often in arrears; the teacher’s salary had sometimes to wait until additional funds could be raised; and although the piano had been a gift, the dancing teacher—a huge, moon-faced, smiling woman called Comrade Wolff, who used it to accompany her instruction—required to be paid for her Saturday morning efforts. Except for the very youngest, most of the students were aware of these difficulties. Some of us were permitted to remain for the Friday night meetings with parents, and so could follow the fortunes of the school at first hand. And I was always a party to these troublesome discussions; my parents had been among the founders of the school, spent much of their time worrying about its future, and, as I learned later, often supplied its deficits out of their own household funds.
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My parents, who are intensely nationalistic but quite irreligious, have long been determined adherents of the movement to advance secular Jewish culture. When they came to the United States, however, they found that the only special schools provided for Jewish children were inflexibly Orthodox. And if this were not drawback enough, there was also a difficulty about language to increase their distaste for these schools. The language of the religious schools was the ancient Hebrew. My parents were convinced that Yiddish was the living speech of modern Jews and that the literature in Yiddish was well worth study. They could not, therefore, bring themselves to send me to a school where that language would be despised as a late and vulgar growth, useful mainly for conversation among women or illiterates. There was an additional difficulty, also: I was a girl and therefore a negligible quantity in the Orthodox religious view. Scholarship in the traditional sense has always been the prerogative of the men of the community.
To my parents, all this was a clear call to action. My father is still apt to remind us that when he left Austria for the United States, he was sixteen years old—and that he not only negotiated the trip successfully but also shepherded a younger sister to safety. And my mother claims to have been only fourteen when she set out from Russia. (She has always regarded her arrival here on the last ship permitted entry before the embargo caused by World War I as a special tribute to her courage in undertaking so dangerous a journey at so tender an age.) To such adventurous natures the founding of a school must have seemed a relatively simple enterprise.
Late in 1928, therefore, my father set out to ring doorbells and persuade his neighbors both to contribute funds toward the establishment of a school, and to send their children to it once it was under way. Ordinarily a shy and mild-mannered man who looked forward to his weekly walk in the park and his nap after lunch, my father now spent Sunday after Sunday arguing with strangers. His low but persistent voice filled living rooms he had entered uninvited, and his deceptively quiet manner nudged the doubtful toward consent. And on weekdays, my mother—usually somewhat distant in her dealings with neighbors and tradesmen—proselytized among them, bringing to her persuasions all the fervor and heat of a characteristically Russian temperament.
Every few weeks my father and two of his friends who were also engaged in this labor of love would meet in the local laundry shop (it belonged to one of the volunteer fund-raisers) to compare notes, count up the contributions, and discuss strategy. And despite the indifference of most of our neighbors to the fate of Jewish culture, within a few months enough money had been raised to rent a schoolhouse and pay a teacher, and enough students had been promised to make the venture feasible.
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The school that was inaugurated then as part of the system of Sholem Aleichem Schools scattered throughout the city is now about to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary. But although classes are conducted in the same place and by the same teacher, many of the school’s attitudes and ideas have been altered by time and the pressure of outer events. Indeed, I was somewhat surprised and dismayed to learn recently that this epoch in my life—which hardly seems remote or historical to me—has now been classified as a “phase,” has been labeled “classical secularism” and superseded by a newer and, presumably, more adequate ideology. The term for this more modern development is, I am told, “semi-secularism”—a phrase I am not certain I understand, but which seems to imply a greater amiability toward Orthodox religious views and rituals than I remember.
The first Sholem Aleichem School in New York was established forty years ago, and a central Institute organized in 1918. Their initial motive was to broaden the basis of Jewish education and, specifically, to provide a system of schools free of the domination of fraternal orders or political groups. They saw their primary concern as the advancement of a secular Jewish culture, and accordingly took their name from the writer whose ironic stories had given literary expression to the hopes and trials of thousands of European Jews. Other goals found their way into the declared principles of the schools: the validity of the scientific method, for instance, was affirmed in a general Declaration of Principles formulated in 1927, and the findings of modern child psychology and pedagogy endorsed.
All the schools were united in the pursuit of an ideal: the furtherance of Jewish culture. And though the particular emphasis might vary from school to school—ours, for instance, was strong on social justice, and the word “bourgeois” became an epithet we all learned to use with a proper show of opprobrium—the general pattern was much the same. We were all taught the rudiments of Yiddish, since even those who came from families where Yiddish was spoken could seldom either read or write the language. In my own case, Yiddish had, I am told, been my first language; but I had discarded it for English as soon as I began to play with other children, and so my first year at the new school was spent in learning what was, in effect, a foreign language.
Reading and writing, however, were only the beginnings of a blossoming of national consciousness. As soon as we were able to deal adequately with the printed page, we were started on a vast project: the history of the Jews in all ages, climates, and conditions. In practice, this meant beginning with Genesis and working your way toward your own schoolroom, proceeding in orderly fashion from Adam to yourself, as you bent over your textbook. (The history text was so bulky, and its pages so closely printed, that bending over it was a physical necessity rather than a ritual gesture.) Each school usually selected its own textbooks—ours, for instance, were often imported from Poland, where our teacher had many friends and colleagues with whom she corresponded. The history text, however, was standard for all the schools. Written by an eminent 19th-century Polish Jewish scholar, it had been translated into many languages and had become the authorized version of secular Jewish history. Originally, this work must have run to nine or ten volumes; for our “childish” understanding, however, it had been compressed into two huge, unwieldy books—cruel in length (Volume I ended, as I remember, with the Fall of the Second Temple) and unattractive in appearance. Its only adornments were occasional maps of cities and rivers now forgotten or called by other names, and some tiny cuts depicting dramatic moments in the lives of the Assyrians and Babylonians. Of these, my favorite was a scene showing the mad king, Nebuchadnezzar, contentedly nibbling the grass before his palace.
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But the gaiety of our storybooks more than compensated for the dull history text. With their foreign air, their lively illustrations (usually of boys and girls in the dress of Eastern European Jews, a dress just as exotic to us as it would have seemed to Irish or Italian children), and their amusing texts, they brought a touch of the strange and fanciful into a schoolroom that might otherwise have eventually lapsed into solemnity. We read Lithuanian folktales, Polish pastorals, Russian novels. I remember in particular a two-volume saga by the modern Russian novelist, Bergelson, which seemed to me a breathtakingly realistic picture of the delights and romance of rural life. I think of it still as mainly concerned with wide open spaces, wild horses, and a charming heroine—although there must surely have been much else to occupy two volumes—but I have never had the courage to reread the novel with a disenchanted, adult eye.
Even the jokes we told had their origins in Europe; we laughed at the simpletons of Chelm or the pranks of the two boys in Sholem Aleichem’s stories, without feeling their distance from us in either time or space. We spent almost as many hours in discussion of Jewish proverbs as we did on literary or historical material, and a seemingly simple phrase, like “Never show a fool a half-finished job,” could give rise to the sort of extensive exegesis that might once have been lavished on Talmudic studies. We examined the social origins of the bitter reproaches made by writers like Mendele or Peretz against the failings of their fellow Jews, and learned to sense the affronted pride and affection underlying these reproaches. And we were never surprised when a lesson dealing with a purely lyrical poem was immediately followed by one devoted to a play about sweatshops.
We accepted this huge and variegated literary diet, believing it offered a truthful picture of the Jewish life of which we were, or would become, a part. Nor did the fact that it was based almost entirely on European and, to us, foreign experience present any difficulties. Indeed, for most of us who knew only the Bronx apartment houses in which we lived and the city streets in which we played, these stories of farms and green fields and country towns were often more exhilarating than instructive. We read them with the same enjoyment that we read American stories of the Wild West and of cowboys, and sometimes, I am afraid, gave as little thought to any social message they might contain.
The details of many of these stories have, of course, long since been blurred and overlaid by later and more vivid impressions. What remains, however, is the sensation of warmth and intimacy in which they were read and discussed. The many afternoons and evenings narrow to one long winter twilight, and I see myself walking uphill past the familiar stores: the candy and newspaper stands, the bakery with fresh rolls heaped in its brightly lit windows, the “appetizing store” that sold nuts, salted fish, and pickled dainties of all sorts and could easily be identified by the barrels of herring displayed just outside its doors. The light of the street lamps is pleasantly misted by cold; the old man at the corner who sells baked sweet potatoes holds his hands—the fingers comfortably protruding from torn black gloves—over the chimney of his portable stove; the streets seem alive with a loud domestic hum out of which rise occasional fragments of complaint or conversation, or the lugubrious sounds of a violin or piano being “practiced.”
I turn the corner, enter an open door, and stamp noisily up an uncertain stairway. At once I am enveloped by even more familiar warmth and noise. The “babies” have not yet finished their lessons and so, smug in our greater age, we can pass the time in whispered jokes and subdued horseplay. I hang my coat and hat on one of the hooks that ring the little back room, slide my books across the linoleum-covered floor until they reach the heap of books set down by earlier arrivals, and settle to the solemn business of amusing myself and—if I can—the others. Occasionally we laugh too boisterously, or the boys, tiring of conversation, erupt into violent wrestling bouts. Then the face of the teacher appears in the doorway, hisses “Shahhh!” with professional ferocity, and disappears again. Finally, the babies go home to their suppers and, still joking and jostling one another, we take our places in the schoolroom.
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I have, since that time, spent almost too many years in all kinds of classrooms; yet this one still seems to me to have been admirably conducted. The discussions were, I suppose, rather too solemn and highminded for what would now be termed our “age level.” But they were discussions: vigorous, fairly well-reasoned, and, sometimes, even mildly speculative. Constant prodding on the teacher’s part, as well as the characteristically ironic tone of Yiddish literature, kept us from that literalism and concern for irrelevant detail with which children can destroy almost any work of art. Perhaps we felt free to talk, to hold opinions strongly, and to defend them energetically, because nobody seemed surprised at our doing so. Almost all the teachers and parents involved in the Sholem Aleichem schools had come from Europe where they had, while still very young, taken part in radical or Zionist activities. Some had risked their lives in these causes, and they considered it natural that their children should feel free to speak and act boldly.
I can, therefore, remember very little of that classroom shyness which often afflicts the young, and by which we ourselves were sometimes overtaken when reciting lessons in our public school classrooms. We each had our notebooks—usually a heft specially ruled and arranged for Yiddish script—in which we recorded our opinions, comments, and literary efforts. It was by no means uncommon for us to receive as home assignments for the following day the writing of a critical article on some author we had been reading, as well as a discussion of some phase of, say, 19th-century history. And simple summaries of the text were never considered sufficient; to be acceptable it was necessary that our exercises show some indication of thought, however juvenile or undeveloped. So it came about that you might often find a class of twelve-year-olds listening solemnly to a paper on the philosophic, historical, and political implications of the appearance of the “false Messiahs” among 17th-century Jewry. Our faces intent, a hand occasionally raised to indicate disagreement or the desire for discussion, we followed the arguments carefully, each of us awaiting the moment when we might stand up, open our notebooks, and in a loud, clear voice expound our own views on false Messiahs.
No moral, social, or political discussion was considered off limits to us, and in this sense our classes here supplied, both in atmosphere and factual information, far more than we could acquire through the more sedate and selective program of the public school. It seems to me now that if there were any drawback to these wide-ranging studies, it lay in the fact that they served to emphasize the gulf between Jewish and English education. For though you might hear little about the American Civil War in the Sholem Aleichem school, in your public school you would never learn about the Assyrians and Babylonians or, closer in time, about the life of Eastern European Jews or the rise of the labor movement. The effect, therefore, was to make it seem as though two separate but parallel streams of history were under discussion, neither of which was ever likely to impinge on the other. And for me, at least, the impressive scope of the Jewish history, as well as the intensity with which it was presented, have caused it to remain much the more vivid of the two.
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Occasionally, of course, our total immersion in adult issues had ludicrous results. I can still remember the Saturday morning I spent listening to a handsome Estonian lady, newly arrived in the United States and ostensibly engaged to teach us the elements of Hebrew, dramatically arguing against the double standard. “If my husband were to be unfaithful,” she cried fiercely, “I would leave him tomorrow.” And while none of us quite understood what she meant, we thought her very pretty and felt that her husband had somehow mistreated her. But the next week he came to class (apparently the single standard meant alternating the teaching chores), and he also was handsome and seemed incapable of cruelty to a woman; and so we abandoned the attempt to understand what either the single or double standard might be and concentrated on linguistic problems.
Study, however, was not the only province of the school. There were many holidays to be celebrated, chief among these being Chanukah. There were presents and parties and dreidlach. (The last are small silver tops whose segmented sides are each engraved with a different Hebrew character. You spin the dreidl and, I regret to say, bet a certain number of hazelnuts on the letter you hope will turn up when the spinning stops.) And at Passover there were intramural festivities. All the pupils of the various Sholem Aleichem schools were gathered up and then set down in a giggling, chattering mass at Maurice Schwartz’s Theater on Second Avenue. But our boisterousness lasted only until the impressive figure of the actor appeared from between the curtains to tell us, in his deep, slightly European-sounding Yiddish, which play he had chosen this time. Each year, he and his company gave a program prepared especially for us—always from Sholem Aleichem’s works, of course, and usually very funny. I would guess that the performances were almost as good as we thought them and no actors, whatever their language, could have asked for a more enthusiastic audience.
These pleasures, however, were all “occasional”; they depended on holidays or special events. Much more to our taste were the regular Friday night parties, nominally reserved to parents, but which we—an elite of age rather than peculiar merit—were also privileged to attend. I suppose what we found most attractive about these weekly gatherings was the transformation they seemed to work upon our parents. Once seated along the narrow trestle-tables put up for these occasions and covered with overlapping lengths of borrowed white tablecloths, the most familiar adult was likely to change before your eyes. Morose and (to us) ancient men miraculously shed their years as they joked with their neighbors. Seemingly solemn heads of families sang loudly and accompanied themselves by tapping the thick sides of their tea glasses with their spoons. Fretful women bloomed into contentment as they hurried back and forth setting the table with platters of cake and bowls of fruit; or, their serving chores over, cracked pumpkin seeds between their teeth and laughed with unaccustomed abandon. Often there was wine to augment the good humor of the meeting—a sweet, homemade wine, far too mild to account for the gaiety of the assemblage. And toward the end of the evening, when the jokes grew broader and the singing louder, you might almost believe that our parents had unwittingly been captured by the spirit of the songs they sang, songs for the most part deriving from the life of Hasidic Jews almost a century ago.
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Paradoxically, the unfamiliar joy which took possession of our parents during these Friday night festivities seemed to bring them closer to us than more customary moods could. We had difficulty in recognizing them, but we took an intimate pleasure in their transformation—as though we had somehow helped to engineer it. It seems to me now that at such moments we were closer to genuine affection for them than children usually permit themselves to feel. In general, the line we drew between ourselves and the child’s hereditary enemy, the grown-up, was less rigidly observed here than outside the walls of the school. And this mingling of worlds was characteristic not only of personal relationships but also of intellectual ones. When in the final semesters we came to study modern Jewish literature, for instance, we found that many of the writers were men we knew in person.
Nor was acquaintance with a literary figure always an unmixed pleasure to us. I can remember a terrible day when I was about eleven years old, and was riding in the subway with a friend who in local circles was considered somewhat of a musical prodigy. As we talked we suddenly realized that across the aisle from us sat a well-known Jewish writer, a friend of both our families. He noticed us at the same moment, and nodded amiably. Then motivated, I suppose, by a desire to be kind and take an interest in our childish affairs, he beamed at my friend and shouted across the car in his characteristically Polish-accented Yiddish: “Nu, shreibst eyes an opera, shreibste?” Both of us shrank from the stares of the other passengers, all of whom were startled and most of whom had understood these words and were curious to see what sort of child it was that wrote operas in his spare time. At that moment I know that I, for one, wished that my parents had chosen less literary friends. In any case, however, it was difficult to learn to view as a public character a man with whom you often shared your dinner, or who patted your head abstractedly as he asked after your latest exploits. So difficult, in fact, that often the transition was never quite accomplished; for my own part, I frequently felt that there must be some mistake—that Mr. X, despite his noble head and expansive gestures, simply could not be the same man who wrote the books I read.
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Perhaps this overlapping of public and private worlds, of adult and childhood interests, was a final effort to prop a weakening structure. For the children have vanished, the grown-ups are rarely so gay any more, and the writers have almost stopped writing books for which there would, in any case, be only a handful of readers. The world I have been describing was always a small one; now it has been painfully diminished by time and history, and soon it may exist only as a recollection of departed warmth and a speech once again become alien. The ideal which my parents and their friends held before themselves has been partially realized, but in a form so different from their imaginings that it seems barely recognizable. The State of Israel is, after all, a remote and foreign one. They approve of its existence and support its efforts, but feel few real ties with it. Moreover, the new state has repudiated Yiddish even more violently than the religious schools ever did. There seems hardly a corner left in the world, therefore, where Yiddish can hope to flourish as a living language.
Listening to my two-year-old son attempt to talk, I have been reminded of all this—of the words I once knew, forgot, and then learned again. I can see that he may not be likely either to need or to want to learn those words; indeed, there may be little reason for him to do so. It is a curious sensation to think of yourself as belonging to a generation with which a particular form of culture, however limited, will end. My principal regret, however, is not for this inevitable change, but for the fact that my son will have missed an irreplaceable intimacy and gaiety, and that he must find new words with which to advance, singing.
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