Page 35 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Cheder

of learning, it would be much easier to understand than my
descriptions. We often hear, in this prosperous land of ours, appeals
for underpaid teachers and demands for more schools and
playgrounds, as if there were starving teachers and terrible
overcrowding of classrooms. So no one today would believe an
accurate depiction of the living conditions of my teachers in that time
and place: they would seem like fiction.
The cheders seem much simpler to me today than when I was part
of them. But now I realize what an inconceivable yet glorious
sacrifice our parents made, under circumstances of poverty and
persecution, to gain an education for their children. Government
schools were closed to us, the local Polish schools were under the
Catholic church and dominated by priests, and to teach our own
religion we were required to have a teacher who knew Russian. We
therefore had small schools in private homes with unauthorized
teachers, which was a felony.
In some cases, one of the pupils’ fathers gave space in his rooms
for the price of his son’s tuition; otherwise, the classroom, so to
speak, was only a corner in the teacher’s dwelling—which was
composed, really, of one room for the whole family. The furnishings
were a long table near the window with a bench on each side and the
teacher’s chair at the head, with a kerosene lamp or a candle on it.
The teacher’s bed was in one corner and a brick stove in another. A
bucket of drinking water next to a big copper pitcher was near the
wash tub serving as a sink. The teacher’s wife and children huddled
together near the bed or at the stove where she cooked porridge.
The pupils bent over the books, reading in sing-song style the portion
of the Bible to be read in the synagogue that Saturday.
First the teacher would read—or rather, mumble—the biblical
story, Jacob’s ladder or Joseph’s kidnapping, for instance, with the
class following along until he finished. Then he made every pupil
read separately; if one failed to read well or forgot the name of a
prophet or king, a leather strap or a sprig of the willow tree would
land on his back, or his cheek would be pinched until it brought tears
and sobbing to the boy and giggles to the teacher’s or house-owner’s
children sitting in the other corner of the room. Sometimes they were
girls fifteen years of age or older who were knitting socks or
31