Page 65 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Education and the bet hamidrash

warming their backs. The candle was very dim, the wind was blowing,
and snow drifted up against the windows. Everyone felt gloomy in
the half-darkness. Those old men used to tell stories to one another,
and I listened in. Elitzky the tailor, an old man with a long white
beard, who was very religious but knew only how to read the prayer
book, told allegories from the Talmud, called the Bar Chana tales.
He magnified those stories and related them as real events.
One night he told a story that begins like the story of Jonah and
the whale. It tells of a captain who of course was not obedient to the
Lord. He was sailing his boat on the high seas when suddenly he felt
the ship travelling backwards. A big fish had gotten under the boat
and was carrying it to an island, led by a man on a fiery horse. Elitzky
had mixed up Bar Chana with the St. Elmo’s fire and believed in it as
true. The men around him were imbued with fear and moved closer
to him as if they were afraid of the man on the fiery horse. My cousin
Leibel and I knew this story from studying the Talmud, and that it
was just one of many amusing tales told by a rabbi, probably to
amuse his grandchildren. We rolled up an old hand towel and threw it
right in Elitzky’s face. A holler went up from those old men, but they
could not locate the shagetz or goy who had done it. They accused me
of being the mischief-maker, and chased me over the benches and
over the tables. Some of the young men who had been studying then
blew out the candle and we all had fun.
At the bet hamidrash I could never concentrate on my studies. I
preferred fishing, carving wood, painting, making forms for
Chanukah dreidels, and drawing Hebrew letters with text from some
chapters of the Psalms, etc. At that period, my father worked in
Warsaw in the bread business. Pelcovizna was separated from the big
city by four or five miles, and lacking any regular transportation
except horse and wagon, it was impossible for my father to come
home every night. Beside the distance, a two-hour walk, there was the
danger of being attacked or even murdered by highway robbers. The
road was half a mile from the Vistula River, through thick woods and
underbrush, where thieves and bandits had their lairs. My father was
a brave man. He used to walk that road many nights, armed with just
a heavy stick and a knife. Unlike American bad men, those outlaws
did not carry guns, for the Russian authorities would not stand for
61