Chapter: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
A Russian Chronicle
The Tale of Michael L. Zlatovsky
Chapter 2
It was a bewildered, unhappy boy of five who came to live with the family in the Fortress. Used to loving care, a good home, excellent food, and an outdoor life, I found myself neglected in a small house crowded with three families. The food was of poor quality and not too abundant. There was no place to play and nobody to play with. Because my vocabulary consisted of a mixture of Yiddish and Russian and because I had 
color in my face in contrast to the pale, rachitic children of the ghetto, I was dubbed the “red-cheeked Shaigatz” and made fun of until I felt like an outcast.
I was confronted also with another grave problem–that of the cheder, the school of the ghetto. My initiation into the cheder was extremely forbidding. In a large, bare room stood a long table and some benches. At the head of the table was the rabbi, an old man with prominent ear locks. In his hands, he held a strap. On the benches sat several dozen children chanting in an unintelligible language. At my entrance, the chanting stopped momentarily. There was hissing, coughing, and laughter. The word, “Shaigatz,” was plainly heard, to which the rabbi reacted with curses and threatening motions of the strap. I made a move to run away, but the exit was barred by a husky fellow called a “behelfer,” or assistant whose main tasks were to prevent pupils from leaving at will and to carry recalcitrant ones to cheder on his back. Having suffered painful pinches while being conveyed in this manner, I soon gave up the struggle.
It was not long before I lost my ruddy color, completely forgot my Russian, and became one of the crowd. Together, we played pranks on the rabbi, ganged up on the “behelfer,” shared “delicacies” from our meager lunches, played “buttons,” and fought without malice or injury to anyone.
This cheder, among many of its kind, was a first grade where the reading of Hebrew and its translation were taught in a barbaric method, fortified with curses, corporal punishment, and more refined methods of chastisement. Sholom Aleichem, whose stories about children are unequalled in Jewish literature, describes one form of punishment in a story called, “The Pocket Knife.” A boy of seven is fascinated by the sight of a pocketknife belonging to a boarder in his home. It is a wonderful shiny knife with two blades on one side and a corkscrew on the other. Unseen, he gets hold of the knife whenever possible, caresses it, clasps and unclasps it, tries the corkscrew in action, and puts it for a short while in his pocket, creating the illusion that it belongs to him. He is surprised by the owner of the knife who accuses him of stealing and reports him to the rabbi. As punishment, he is required to stand in a corner with his shirt over his head. The pupils, encouraged by the rabbi, approach him one by one, pull the shirt up and down and repeat in a singsong manner, “Motele is a ganef” (thief). As a result of this ordeal, the boy is taken ill, comes close to losing his life, and by way of compensation acquires a pocketknife exactly like the one he coveted.
Because I made rapid progress, I was soon promoted to a cheder of a higher grade where the writing of Hebrew, the Scriptures with its commentaries, and the Talmud or “Well of Wisdom” were taught. After a few years, I left cheder for good, since, according to my father, the teachers in our town had no further learning to impart to me. Actually, I suspect he could not pay the tuition fee. Thus, my childhood came to an end at the age of 12.
I had been very unhappy as long as early memories of a free, “luxurious” life lingered with me. But children have short memories. The recollections of my former life soon became dim and were gradually obliterated. I became accustomed to my new environment. The cheder no longer terrified me and, despite privations, I had my happy moments. The fact that some children in the upper part of town ate white bread on weekdays and lived in houses with wooden floors, as rumor had it, did not bother us, the children of the Fortress. We simply did not believe it. We lived on meager rations but were not often really hungry. The earth floors were good enough for us, and we had our fun.
In summer, life was really good. The long days of constant sunshine, the abundance of fresh fruits, the bathing facilities, the relaxing of discipline in cheder–all these made life pleasant. We played a primitive sort of baseball and “Zurka,” a game in which we endeavored to keep a small stick in the air with long poles, taking sides and driving it back and forth. Our greatest pleasure, however, was derived from swimming. At sunset, we started out from cheder toward the river accompanied by the rabbi. While still walking, we shed our clothes, jumping into the water entirely naked and performing daring antics despite the admonitions of the rabbi.
In the fall came the rain. Streets became a sea of mud. All movements were restricted, and at times even the cheder was closed. Many a roof made of straw would spring leaks, and various utensils strategically placed to catch the water added to the confusion and discomfort of life indoors. In winter, which was short but severe in the Ukraine, we suffered from the cold because of the lack of warm clothing. With the advent of spring, our spirits would rise as the hibernation period ended. Some years when the snowfall in winter had been excessive, the Trubes, ordinarily a shallow river fed by the melting snow and the overflow of the gigantic Dnieper, overflowed its boundaries and inundated a great part of the Fortress to the consternation of its inhabitants and the delight of us children. We waded in the warm water and navigated the deeper places on makeshift rafts. Some daring boys even penetrated a flooded house to rescue a cat or to salvage some forgotten household article to the envy of the rest of the crowd.
While I use the plural “we,” it does not mean that I was an active participant in the pleasures and games of the boys my age. Far from it. A boy with a “good head” who studied the Talmud as I did at the age of nine had a reputation to maintain. Such games as I have described were frowned upon in the ghetto as occupations of a “Shaigetz.” Little by little, I became more isolated and more unhappy.
Luckily, shortly after leaving cheder, I came under the influence of a half -blind teacher–a Hebrew scholar, self-taught mathematician, philosopher and admirer of Spinoza–who suffered more abuse from his own Xantippe than Socrates ever dreamed could exist. He introduced me to the works of modern Hebrew writers and to Jewish history. Under him I studied the theo-philosophic work, “The Guide to the Perplexed,” by the great Jewish luminary, Maimonides, the greatest physician of the Middle Ages. To my teacher, I read the Hebrew newspapers. He, in turn, discussed with me the diplomacy of Bismark and the strategy of Moltke, for like nearly every Jew in the ghetto, he was a self-styled statesman and strategist.
Meanwhile, the situation at home with the inexorable increase in family at the rate of one child every three years became more and more strained economically. I began to tutor privately at home, the pupils being in some cases older than myself. I was poorly paid and often humiliated as when some obnoxious pupil slapped me on the thigh with the palm of his hand in a friendly way, saying, “What do you say, Rabbi, if we quit this nonsense and go bathing instead?” (Off the record, I might add that this same pupil discovered to my dismay that I did not wear underwear at the age of 13!)
But poor people cannot have excessive pride. Poverty, says a Russian proverb, is not a vice but a calamity and, as such, it is not conducive to harmony in a family. Despite privations, there was complete amity among us children but discord and friction between Father and Mother. This was because of their diametrically opposed characters and because of the difference in their attitude toward the observance of orthodox Jewish ritual. Mother was not fanatical; neither was she ignorant, for at least she could read Yiddish, a rarity in the ghetto where women were restricted to wifely duties and domestic work. She also had a sense of humor and was not averse to telling a risqué story not intended for children's ears, although we never failed to overhear. Nevertheless, from force of habit, she observed the rituals rigorously, while Father did not.
Father was a free thinker, a product of the “Haskala” movement, the Hebrew term for enlightenment. It originated in Germany under the leadership of Moses Mendelssohn and was an endeavor to introduce European culture among Jews of the ghetto. While it had brought about assimilation and mass baptism in Germany among the educated classes, in Russia it resulted in a gradual reform of Jewish ritual. It was the poet, Gordon, who came out with the slogan, “Be a man in the street and a Jew in the home.” In other words, don't be conspicuous. Learn the language of the land. Abandon the long coats, the flying beards and forelocks of the men, the wigs of the women. The same ideas were conveyed by essayists and novelists who simplified their style to make the Hebrew language more understandable or began to write in Yiddish. While most of these authors were utilitarian, appealing to reason, an obscure “melamed,” by the name of Mapu, wrote a novel called, “The Love of Zion,” which made a great appeal to the youth, the volatile and impressionable element in every nation. It was crude and naive work, but to the young boys who labored over the problem of whether an egg laid on the eve of a holiday could be eaten–consulting commentaries upon commentaries–this novel was as refreshing as the gentle breeze of the oasis after a long journey in the barren desert. Many a student kept the little book under the bulky folios of the Talmud, reading it furtively and going into raptures over it.
One transgression led to another. Some students abandoned their studies; others were expelled for deviating from the path of orthodoxy. Father, who at that time was studying in a renowned “Yeshivah,” with the aim of becoming a rabbi, was caught in the stream and probably expelled. Be that as it may, he came back to Pereyaslav at the age of 16 and married Mother to whom he had been betrothed at 12. After trying various ways of making a living without any success, he went briefly to a big city and returned a beaten man. Taking the path of least resistance, he joined Grandfather in his trade as a butcher, an occupation for which he was not suited either physically or intellectually. He became a frustrated, self-pitying man and, as such people often do, turned selfish and careless toward the family.
Little by little, the burden of providing for the family was shifted to my mother and to the children. Father played favorites and was especially hard on my older brother, Herschel, and my sister, Eva, the oldest of three girls. She worked hard taking care of the house and the younger children. Despite hardships, she was optimistic, sang pleasantly (when she did not cry), learned to read and write without much help, and was really a talented girl. There is a Jewish saying, “It is not important to be born rich as long as you are born lucky.” She had neither of these advantages, nor did the rest of the children. The tension at home with the passage of the years became unbearable. I finally left Pereyaslav with a little knowledge of this-and-that stored in my head and much less in worldly goods packed in a small wooden box. I was 16 and returned only for brief visits.