This department has from time to time offered portrait sketches of familiar types in the life of Jews in America. Shlomo Katz’s Miss O’Keefe will be recognized as belonging to a tribe of ardent women whose memory will live in the hearts of a perhaps not sufficiently grateful generation. Rare souls, the Miss O’Keefes, yet there are few public schools in immigrant neighborhoods that could not boast of at least one or two.
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I had almost forgotten Miss O’Keefe. But on one of my annual pilgrimages to St. Paul, I was greeted on the street by a man whose name I could not remember. I knew only that he had been with me in Miss O’Keefe’s class for special students in the McKinley School in the faraway winter of the early 1920’s.
The conversation stumbled along a few moments. Then he said: “Do you remember Miss O’Keefe? At the McKinley School? She died.”
He proceeded to talk about her, and at length I remembered his name. It was Irving—once Isidore, and originally Itzik.
Miss O’Keefe’s special class consisted of a number of immigrant children just arrived from Europe—in this case all came from Russia—whom she was to introduce into the mysteries of the English language, American institutions, and similar matters. In it were also such regular pupils of the school as required special attention. There were times when Miss O’Keefe was obviously bewildered by the vagaries of minds formed in a foreign climate or by the special talents of pupils who did not fit into the framework of a normal grade-school classroom; but she did her duty.
As for Itzik or Irving, he was now an insurance man, fairly successful, settled, solid. But during that winter of the early 1920’s, when Miss O’Keefe used to beam approvingly on the accomplishments of her new Americans, she had predicted that he would be a great violinist. He was talented in a way and perhaps he might have fulfilled her prophecies, at least in part, if things had gone right. But once his mother took him to be shown off and to provide the musical program for a meeting of a women’s group to which she belonged. He was getting along right well with Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” when the E-string broke, and he retired, convinced that his musical career was blasted forever. Nothing could ever induce him to play again in the presence of others.
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It was a bright, cold day when I was first ushered into the McKinley School and assigned to Miss O’Keefe’s class. I was twelve, and felt that a momentous occasion like coming to America entitled me to a longer vacation than the very few days that intervened between our arrival in St. Paul and my induction into the mysteries of an American public school. But it was the beginning of the semester and there was no waiting.
Five of us future Americans were introduced to Miss O’Keefe that morning. Later in the day, after prolonged processing in the principal’s office, some special students, already in their teens, were added to the group for special instruction in American history, arithmetic, and geography. We eyed our new teacher, our first American teacher, with curiosity. Miss O’Keefe was no longer young; she also had an infirmity: she was lame. We compared her with the teachers we had known abroad—severe male teachers in the government schools in Russia whom we dreaded as recruits dread the sergeant; and, since the five of us were Jewish, we also had memories of the bearded and tyrannical masters of the Orthodox cheder, and of the chaotic disorder of study in a classroom that was at the same time the teacher’s living room, and sometimes also his bedroom.
Looking back, it is always amazing to recall how Miss O’Keefe took us for granted, five small foreigners so alien to her in speech and, at the beginning, even in dress. Was it merely the professional calm of a good teacher inwardly indifferent to her pupils? It was much more than that, or else there would have been bursts of temper on occasion, and in the ensuing weeks she could hardly have taken so much maternal interest in our futures, which she invariably visualized in terms of success along professional lines.
That first morning was devoted to getting acquainted. Miss O’Keefe was baffled by our outlandish names. Itzik was first. She had trouble pronouncing it and still greater trouble writing it down. He too had been in the country only a few days and his vocabulary was negligible. He tried to explain his name, resorting to Yiddish and throwing in a few Russian words, working on the age-old principle that when you speak to someone who cannot understand you it helps if you speak an ungrammatical mixture of words, the more mutilated the better. She tried hard and she meant well. She made no attempt to “Americanize” the name, and finally succeeded in getting down some more or less recognizable version of it on the enrollment card.
“And what is your name?” she beamed at the next child, partly to encourage the boy and partly out of relief at having finally solved the problem of Itzik.
“Berel,” came the self-assured answer.
“Barrel?”
“Berel,” he repeated cheerfully, seemingly content with himself, with his name, with the world. He was obviously serious.
In those far-off lands where she had never been, people apparently used “barrel” as a personal name. The frown of perplexity vanished and I think there was an expression of compassion on Miss O’Keefe’s face. The poor boy would have a rough time in life with such a name. As if to soften the impending hardships and misunderstandings of a harsh world she spelled the name with but one r—one small cushion against the knocks that were to come.
She had hardly any trouble with my name. I had already fought my battle. Not many hours had passed after we alighted from the train in St. Paul when the American branch of the family began shopping for a new name for me. Sidney? Stanley? Neither one sounded good to me. Older members of the family reacted with a healthy instinctive adjustment and proceeded to call me Sam, without asking my approval. I took the attitude that the days of old could not be improved upon in any case, and if I was called “Shloime” since birth, this I would stick to. I now revealed my name to Miss O’Keefe. The reaction was not too unfavorable, though for some reason she omitted the h.
Not long after that one of us discovered a book for the guidance of immigrants, and in the back of it there was a list of names transliterated into forms familiar to Americans. We promptly brought our find to Miss O’Keefe. Our linguistic accomplishments were still too rudimentary to tell her with ease what a treasure we had found, but partly in words and partly by pointing to the right place we made ourselves understood. She was delighted at our progress, at our brightness, at the fruit of little more than a week of her labors. Itzik thereupon became Isidore; Berel became Bernard; I became Solomon. There were two girls in the group, but their names, Ruth and Frieda, presented no problem. Ours were to undergo still further metamorphoses as we grew older.
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We studied our new environment carefully. The pupils assigned for special instruction represented American youth; Miss O’Keefe, the real American; and the books we used, American culture. These last were a painful letdown. Though we ranged in age from twelve to fourteen, we had experienced a revolution, pogroms, residence in foreign cities, an intensive training in Biblical lore; we had smuggled ourselves across borders and crossed the Atlantic. Now we were presented with one or two elementary books which dealt in the simplest terms with nature, the open countryside, farming. The speed with which we learned to read convinced Miss O’Keefe we were natural geniuses. But the monotony of our rendition was her despair. “Do you know what this is? This is a squirrel!”—she would read the sentence to us, rising to a crescendo at the question mark and accenting the first and last words of the second half of the information in a tone of cheerful finality. Then we had to repeat her performance. But how could one put any feeling into such a childish question and equally childish answer? It was embarrassing. What was there to get excited about in the picture of a squirrel? And yet, if squirrels were a basic element of American culture then we had to read about squirrels. Nor was it squirrels only. The pictures of children in the books were nearly always of farm children, and the boys invariably wore tattered, wide-brimmed Huck Finn straw hats.
This type of instruction would go on for the better part of an hour and then we would be left to study by ourselves while Miss O’Keefe devoted herself to her special students. But no sooner would she leave us than Isidore would fall back on his own cultural resources, which were numerous. “Have you ever read this?” he would whisper as he discreetly poked me in the ribs and slipped a folded piece of paper to me. It was usually a poem, in Russian or in Hebrew, elaborately written out in a fancy handwriting. The first time it was something by the Russian poet Nadson that went:
My friend! My brother!
Weary suffering brother,
Wherever you may be, do not despair,
Have faith, the time will come. . . .
This sort of thing was in the height of fashion in Russia at that time, and children imitated their elders. A love of soulful poetry was per se a sign of superiority and achievement, and these poems were memorized and sung with deep emotion. Since books were not always available, and in any case were cumbersome to carry around, an ambitious boy or girl would have many of the poems popular at the moment written out in his best calligraphy. To be able to say to a girl; “I have the words to Nadson’s . . .” and then to produce them, was as effective as Tom Sawyer’s broken doorknob or collection of colored pieces of glass. To show an interest in somebody else’s manuscript of a well-known poem, and to beg permission to copy it, placed one immediately in the category of the “cultured,” which also meant the worth-while, the accomplished, the real people with souls.
Isidore had quite a collection, and brought different manuscripts each day. The pieces of paper were frayed from much use and lying folded in odd pockets. He once suggested a project to copy them all anew, and we much admired him for his ambition and broad cultural vision.
For a while, at any rate, these manuscripts—usually accompanied with a description of how and when and under what circumstances they were acquired, even as an art connoisseur might recall how he discovered a Tintoretto in a secondhand furniture store—served to relieve the cultural monotony of the squirrels who ate nuts and lived in hollow trees, and similar information that was so pale when compared with the appeal to a suffering brother not to give up hope, for verily a day would dawn when the false idols would be cast down, etc., etc. We knew very little about squirrels and, at the time, cared less; but we were experts when it came to “suffering brothers” and the “rosy dawn.”
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Our readings did not escape the attention of Miss O’Keefe, but since she knew no Russian nor Hebrew she could merely nod approvingly at what appeared to be a form of study and leave it at that. In any event, these semi-clandestine literary gatherings in mid-morning did not last long. Once we had acquired the first rudiments of English and could communicate with our American neighbors, the poems lost their charm. Our cultural fare was still very often supplemented by outside reading in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish of such non-adolescent works as Byron’s “Cain,” Tolstoy’s Resurrection, and similar writings that spoke more to our vague but turbulent emotions than the textbook story of the boy who caught a rabbit, but the handwritten poems appeared less and less frequently until they vanished from the picture altogether. As for speaking English, it burst upon us with great suddenness. Two of us went to the post office one day about four weeks after the class had begun. We were well prepared with our little speech: “Meester, please geeve me a five-cent stamp.” The word “stamp” had us worried: the sound of a word must have some relation to its meaning, and “stamp” somehow did not seem to fit the object it described. We were sure there must be a mistake somewhere. But though the clerk laughed at our labored recitation, he handed over what we wanted. It was a revelation: after all, one really could make oneself understood in English. We recounted our triumph to the others and to Miss O’Keefe. A milestone had been passed.
We were very soon able to follow the talk of the students receiving special coaching. One of these, a boy named Jim, was rather weak in history; apparently he suffered from a mental block on the subject of Columbus and his three caravels. But this difficulty was more than compensated for by his intense interest in geography. In a way he had an unusual mind and always tried to reduce things to their ultimate, to get at the very essence of essence itself, to measure a point, to define the width of a line.
“Miss O’Keefe,” he would begin tentatively in the midst of a halting historical narrative which had Columbus sailing the Palos from Pinta in 1776, “I want to ask you something.”
She was infinitely patient with him.
“Would you say it is colder at the northern end of the room than over on the other side by the door?”
She assured him that it was not so and that any difference in temperature he might notice, or thought he noticed, was due to his sitting near a window.
“Well, why not? It does get colder as we go north. You said so yourself! It says so in the geography book.”
She explained to him that the heat from the radiators circulated throughout the room and made the temperature even.
“But the heat that comes from the radiators is the same, and since this is the north side of the room it should be at least a very little bit cooler.”
In time we learned that Jim had been a special student of Miss O’Keefe in previous semesters and she was therefore inured to the special probings of his mind. Otherwise she might have suspected a ruse to postpone facing Columbus and his navy.
Frustrated in his efforts to define a point where north ceases and south begins he next tried to capture the line of demarcation. “Well, is it colder on University Avenue than it is on Selby Avenue? That’s ten blocks away.”
Once more the answer was no. Furthermore, it appeared that it might actually be warmer by a fraction of a degree on the more northerly University Avenue because it was lower and therefore more protected than Selby Avenue. Now the world and the principles of geography were really tottering. What could one anchor to as a firm fact if even absolute statements in the geography book dissolved and lost meaning the moment one tried to apply them to reality?
Jim made one last attempt to snare the truth and hold it. “But it is colder in North St. Paul than it is in South St. Paul, isn’t it?”
This was a challenge rather than a question, a last straw to which to cling in the treacherous tides of climate. Miss O’Keefe agreed that it was indeed so. She did not sound very convincing and there was a suggestion of weariness in her voice. I suspect that she merely wished to conclude the discussion. Jim outwardly accepted her answer as definite, but he remained doubtful. North St. Paul is miles and miles away from the southern appendage of the city, and if the climate does not get colder in ten blocks why should it in ten miles? Or two hundred miles? Yet it was a fact that palm trees grew in Florida—the geography book had pictures of them—but they did not grow in Minnesota.
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I don’t know what became of Jim. But whenever I read about the atom bomb I have a strange feeling that maybe Jim was involved in it somewhere along the line of its development. Who but he would persist in probing things to their very innermost secret until the atom itself stands stripped of its electrons and one finally reaches the point that divides, the point beyond which there is no going? In Miss O’Keefe’s room, though, her facts of life and his mystery of life could never find a common ground.
At one point Jim showed an articulate interest in us, the new immigrants. The two groups had been eyeing each other for quite a while in dumb curiosity. Finally there came a day when he felt that we were sufficiently advanced to understand him, and he began to ply us with questions. How was the climate where we came from? Was it like Siberia? And, the crowning question: had “we belonged to the upper class or the lower class?” Here again he tried to define the dividing line—this time the line between social classes—and again it was impossible.
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No sooner had we attained this much command over the English language than we were introduced to a regular curriculum including history and geography, and Miss O’Keefe began to assign us our careers in later life. History was fine. In Russia the first lesson in history contained the fateful definition of that country by the early Slavs when they invited Rurik to come and rule over them. “Our land is broad and bountiful, but there is no order in it . . .” America was different. One of the first acts of the handful of Pilgrims was to establish a well-defined social order. We read our assignments eagerly. The name “Quakers” at first caused some giggling in our midst, because in our mispronunciation it resembled a Yiddish word unmentionable in our strict homes. The giggling remained a mystery to Miss O’Keefe; try as she would to find out what was going on, we were too reticent to offer any realistic explanations. However, we soon passed that chapter and all was well again.
As for careers, Miss O’Keefe had us classified in short order. The drudgery of unskilled laboring people was not for us; her ambitions for her new Americans ran much higher. Isidore would be a great violinist. “You will give concerts, all over the country, in the biggest cities,” she informed him without a trace of doubt. I do not know whether she visualized herself escorting him onto the stage, but her pride in his brilliant future was unmistakable. Bernard, she decided, would be a doctor—a great doctor. I was relegated to law—the higher, more successful rungs of this profession. Why law? Perhaps she ascribed to me some of the wisdom of an ancient, more illustrious bearer of my first name. In any case she continually called our attention to the bright futures that awaited us.
What Bernard thought about the medical profession I don’t know. At the time he seemed pleased enough. A few years later I saw him addressing a poorly attended May Day rally in Central Park. Then he vanished from the scene. For a time there were rumors of radical activity. By recent reports he is the owner of a furniture store in a town near Cleveland.
I myself had mixed feelings about being destined for the law. I had Byron’s “Cain” on my mind and dreamed of writing a great drama in verse on a subject still undetermined at the time—but it was to be a powerful subject. By comparison, the law appeared a drab prospect. But I was not entirely opposed to it. I knew a lawyer at that time, and although he was not famous or otherwise glamorous, he was a very nice man. This was Mr. Lynch, who was the agent for the two-and-a-half-room flat my family occupied. On the first of the month it was my duty to bring the rent to his house. He would make quite a little ceremony of the occasion, inquiring after the entire family, my progress at school, how we liked America, and similar matters. And then he would take out his big book of receipts and make out a receipt with a mien of earnestness that perhaps should not have been wasted on such a trivial transaction. Mr. Lynch approved of me, of the family, of the career chosen for me by Miss O’Keefe, of our punctuality in paying rent. Like her, he welcomed us as a desirable addition to the population of St. Paul and the country. (Indeed, there seemed to exist at that time and in that place a remarkable readiness to accept the stranger.)
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There was one embarrassing moment between me and Mr. Lynch. In Miss O’Keefe’s classroom, we had heard the pupils who were receiving special tutoring answer the teacher’s questions with “Yes, ma’am.” We had a lengthy discussion among ourselves as to the possible meaning of “ma’am” and finally concluded that it must be a form of confirmation, like saying “yes, certainly.” We thereupon began to use the expression when speaking to her. She was delighted at our politeness, and we took this as proof that our judgment had been correct. During one of the rent-paying trips to Mr. Lynch I answered one of his questions with a “Yes, ma’am.” He laughed. I sensed a faux pas but did not know what it consisted in and turned red. He explained my error. I became obstinate, not wishing to admit the mistake, and began to mumble that I knew all about it and what I was really saying was not “Yes, ma’am” but “Yes, man.” This interview ended in great confusion and self-consciousness for me.
Bernard had a similar experience which almost led him into a fight. As soon as we had finished with the squirrels, there were some stories about other animals in our first book. One story had to do with goats and their offspring. Kids, we learned, were young goats. And about that time Bernard was hailed in the street as “Hey kid,” by some youngsters who wanted to make friends. But we had been brought up in an environment where youngsters in the street didn’t readily make friends with a strange boy, especially one who looked obviously Jewish. And as for “kid,” he knew what it meant and it was hardly complimentary. The misunderstanding was eventually straightened out without resort to arms.
It was getting to be spring, and we had made great strides. Miss O’Keefe was proud of us. She began to tell us the elements of American government and urged us to visit the State Capitol. Why she should have thought that a casual visit to the sprawling marble mass at the head of Wabasha Street would make us better Americans I do not know. But she was proud of the Capitol. All St. Paul—nay, all Minnesota—was and still is proud of the Capitol. At Miss O’Keefe’s bidding, we circled the building a couple of times. We climbed the broad flight of stairs. But we dared not venture beyond the marble portals. It was all too imposing. A Capitol meant—well, it is hard to describe just what the word meant to us at that time. It meant the center of government, a sort of American Minnesota Kremlin. There must be Cossacks guarding it inside. Miss O’Keefe, we felt, had sent us on a fool’s errand. Children wouldn’t be admitted into the sanctum of the Capitol just like that—foreign children, too. Besides, hadn’t we memorized and sung songs about “weary suffering brothers” who were looking forward to “a new time”? Once inside the Capitol, we would surely be spotted right away for the subversive potential destroyers of government that we were.
This was during the first winter. Three years later Bernard had a newspaper route which included the Capitol. “Yeah,” he then boasted, “so I went in and there was the Governor and I gave him the paper, put it right in his own hand. A Governor ain’t nothing.”
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But the mysteries of the English language did prove to be my nemesis shortly before school closed that spring, and Jim, the same Jim who had a personality conflict with Columbus, was my undoing. Jim had explained to me the game of baseball, and went into enthusiastic details about pitching and pitchers. Before the semester ended Miss O’Keefe informed me in a congratulatory tone of voice that I had been chosen to take an intelligence test together with some pupils from other schools. Success in this test would have meant skipping the seventh grade. The legal profession, and other forms of glory, seemed imminent. I went to take the test in the frame of mind of one dedicated and destined to greater things. I emerged from it with doubts in my mind. A few days later Miss O’Keefe sadly informed me that I had missed passing by one point. The test was of the true and false type and consisted of vocabulary and language comprehension. The fateful word that spelled disaster for me was “pitcher.” From Jim I had learned what a pitcher was. But the authors of the test had another definition in mind.
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