Page 55 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Three teachers

As I mentioned earlier, it would take a master to describe the
teachers I had and make it believable. So I will only write of a few
who were nice, clean men, serious in their task of teaching a Jewish
boy Jewish knowledge—as they understood it. At the age of eight, at
a time when children in other countries are just beginning to learn
how to read sentences, the Jewish boy is having whole pages of the
Bible and the Talmud crammed into his head. When learning the
Bible we had to read the original and interpret it in Yiddish, which
meant repeating it in two languages at the same time, a difficult task.
The teacher who began to teach me the Bible, which means reading
one page a week, repeating it three times a day until I could read it to
my father on Sabbath day, was a very nice man, Hirsh Yiddil.
He was a very nice person whose clothes, as poor as he was, were
kept clean. His long flowing beard was similar to that of Frederick
Barbarossa, the crusader. Unlike Barbarossa, who drowned on the
way to Jerusalem, Hirsh Yiddil was a good swimmer who bathed in
the Vistula twice a day, and showed his pupils how to swim. Once a
day he combed out that broad beard which reached his sternum,
using a comb. He also combed it with his fingers when a pupil stalled
at words difficult to pronounce. Then Hirsh Yiddil would bow down
his head, staring at the boy, who tightened his lips and flattened his
chin, about to burst into tears. The teacher’s beard-combing, using
both hands to spread it flat against his chest, acted as a brake on his
anger, and he would tell the next boy to continue reading.
He was a great smoker, rolling his own cigarettes. The tobacco
was not like the Bull Durham that we have here, but inexpensive
Russian Turkish tobacco. To economize on matches, on which the
government collected revenue, he had a sharp knife with which he
split a match into four quarters. When lighting it, he held his index
finger on the one-quarter match head, rubbing it very gently on the
box’s narrow abrasive side. Considering how often he re-lit one
cigarette, four or five times to save tobacco, his matches were
probably as important as the tobacco.

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