Page 34 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Cheder

economics, ethics, religion, manners, history, philosophy, medicine,
and a thousand other important subjects, the aggregation of the
studies of many learned rabbis of several periods in Jewish history,
really fit for grown-ups or students of higher education. Yet without
any system and without any educated teachers, the Jew was brighter,
more intelligent, and knew literature better than his neighbors. It was
only by long marches and hard ones that we got our little education.
To study from seven in the morning until ten at night in the long
cold winters was nothing unusual. No arithmetic lessons, yet we
knew how to use figures; no poetry books, yet we knew poetry from
the prayers, which have many wonderful songs by those Jews who
lived in Spain under the Moors. We lived on an island by ourselves
like Crusoe and had to learn everything by ourselves. It is very
strange to understand a difficult passage in the Talmud and not know
the grammar of the language in which it is written. I marvel today
when I look back to my cheder days, repeating so many prayers
without knowing the meaning of the words or the declension of the
verbs.
The fundamentals of teaching, comprised of logic, psychology,
and pedagogy, were unknown to the teacher and not required of him.
He was, in fact, not a teacher by choice or by profession. The melamed
was considered a man unfit for either business or manual labor, a sort
of shlemiel, as we call such persons. He often had a wife and many
children, so the community considered it a duty to help him, more or
less, by furnishing him half a dozen pupils to bring up as good Jews.
It usually happened that the teacher was middle-aged, with grown-up
daughters to be married off who did not have the looks or the dowry
to find husbands. The community did see to it that Jewish girls
should not remain spinsters, and provided the man with pupils and
money for the dowry.
Now, the word “school” to you people means a nice building with
steps in front, nice corridors, smooth floors, bright rooms with chairs
and desks, and a clean, nicely-dressed man or woman behind the
teacher’s desk. The schools I and all the other children attended were
much different in their amount of space, in their furnishings and
cleanliness, and in their teachers. Were I able to paint with brush or
draw with pen a picture of the classrooms in which I spent my days
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