A Golus Education

...Placed in a strange grade five, reduced to .an unfamiliar language, he was most acutely embarrassed by the external sign of his estrangement— ation, and being the older, to keep it down...

...the Jewish Peretz School and our Jewish Peoples' School, or folkshule (two shades of Labor Zionist...

...in art, we drew flags...

...Mother, with barely a word of English and little domestic experience, was left to run the household and supervise the children...

...Angels may no longer pass, but Jews do, and the sign on the doorpost alone tells where to knock...

...His misadventures all turned on the chasms of incomprehension that fell between him and his teachers on one side, him and our parents on the other...

...Teaching was the way of putting ideology into practice...

...in the foreground was the broader society where we had to stake our claims...

...When they planned a curriculum, edited a textbook, introduced a new song, they were forging a synthesis out of their own divided lives, and "raising a fresh generation" in this ideal image...

...Every afternoon, after school, we would stake out part of a "Jewish neighborhood" and begin our shy progress from door to door...

...Our favorite teacher would simply smack a student across the cheek when things got out of hand...

...Our teachers were products of the Haskalah: raised in traditional East European Jewish families, they had thrown off the yoke of "medieval superstition," refusing to accept on faith what could not be grounded in reason...

...As a result, its dignified openness to the vying sectors of Jewish life, admirable in itself, later became the flexibility of indecision...

...So my brother plays dumb...

...In one important respect, however, it is poorer by far...

...Our place of incarceration was a Protestant primary school in a middle-class English-speaking section of Montreal known, inappropriately enough, as Notre Dame de Grace...

...Our reading program drew heavily on the youthful, post-Haskalah Yiddish literature that shared so many of the school's attitudes and ideas...

...This alignment has recently come under attack, but the educational system in those days fairly guaranteed the choice, offering the Jews the lesser Protestant evil of the Lord's Prayer and a daily class in Scriptures over hours of Catholic catechism and a teaching staff of mostly nuns and priests...

...Did he believe he was serving the cause of justice or was he cynically manipulating his prey...

...According to its teaching, there was nothing that a Jew must do...

...at Chanukah we were thoroughly observant, even to the blessing of the candles...

...The peculiar confessional nature of education in the Province of Quebec, as guaranteed by the British North American Act, resulted in the creation of two separate school systems, one Protestant and English, the other Catholic and predominantly French...

...Is she sick...

...and if I were to tear our half the pages ! Cheat on the spaces at the top and bottom...

...If they are sorry, I, at least, am not...

...My notebook came alive with horror...

...We were issued little brown booklets with an assortment of tickets in white, blue, pink, and yellow, for prices ranging from a dime to a dollar, and sent out to canvass for the Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Labor in Palestine...

...When fashion changed, the Yiddish component of the curriculum was steadily diluted, until today some speak of providing a "taste" of Jewish languages...

...Peretz, in which the religious fervor of the Tzadikim, the Masters, is translated into a passion for social justice, and the skeptic becomes a Chassidic disciple not because the rebbe can ascend to heaven, but because he anonymously warms a poor invalid's hearth...

...The search for synthesis became a process of social adjustment as Jewish secularism, which was once in the vanguard in America, fell steadily on the defensive before those with firmer positions...

...We did not read original Chassidic texts, but the literary renditions of such writers as I.L...

...As it is, when I got to college I was turned down for the drama section because the director said I played Shakespeare with a Yiddish accent...

...But he was expected to swallow his humiliRuth Wisse teaches Yiddish literature at McGill University...

...Socialism was never discussed in a local context (I'm certain most of our teachers voted liberal, not socialist) and the word itself was eschewed, yet in speaking of Jewish Palestine and later, of Israel, the socialist factor was stressed: that was the land of idealists...

...I don't know...

...It would have been dangerous to hold us back too long, and so prevent us from mastering the new languages and customs...

...At a school assembly the principal explained the extermination of European Jewry: if each of you children were to take an empty notebook and write on every line of every page the name of a child, and if we were then to collect from this whole auditorium all your notebooks, the names would still not equal the number of Jewish children killed by the Germans...

...How come some babies are twins...

...I don't know____" The nightmare never let him out of its grip...

...at the other extreme, we were surprised to find Jews where we were almost too awed to look for them...

...The burden of adaptation fell heaviest on him, as it always does on immigrant children who are well past cuteness but too young to have learned the social defenses of adults...

...Even the mode of discipline held no surprises...

...at Passover, unlike the Reform Jews and later the Recon-structionists, we studied the shfoch chamoscho, pleading with God to pour out His wrath on the nations that knew Him not, but omitting the hallel, offering Him no praise for His efforts...

...I don't know...

...To her credit, Mrs...

...When he asked one day for a pair of ordinary trousers, mother reminded him that Hitler was rounding up his naked cousins and uncles all over Europe...

...I don't know...

...In the manner oigolus schools everywhere, a disproportionate amount of time was devoted to holidays...

...It was not perfect, but who has known better...

...In this, too, the school seemed to support our families, pushing us westward: we were expected to shore up a good Jewish background, just that...

...Vicariously, smarting with the guilt of our absence, we acted out the exalting drama of our people, acted out because we could not act in...

...Nondogmatic in ideology and approach, the shule could nod appreciation to yeshiva boys and kibbutznikim, embracing both as partners in the Jewish synthesis...

...A benign censorship had protected us from the very passages that could have affected us most deeply and personally, leaving only a generalized moral problem, and the rather self-congratulatory awareness that Yiddish dealt with injustices everywhere, not only those done to Jews...

...For in contrast to the yeshiva boys, the functional Zionists or the "radical Jewish workers, " the shule made no specific demands, insisted on no daily or ultimate course of action...

...the Talmud Torah (Zionist-Traditionalist...

...the atmosphere of warmth (or overbearing concern), the single-minded emphasis on intellectual prowess, were entirely familiar...

...I remember much less, but in my dreams, too, when someone threatens, the doorknob breaking off in my hand as I close the lock, the stalker always appears in the unlikely guise of a teacher from the Protestant schools...

...When you wake up in the morning, is your sister at home with you...

...When he was so inclined, my brother could render listeners helpless with nervous laughter recounting those early school experiences...

...AGOLUS EDUCATION RUTH R. WISSE In memory of Ben Roskies, 1931-1974 It might have been nice to begin more subtly, but the start of my education was grim: I vomited daily for the first two months of kindergarten until my parents mercifully agreed to keep me home...

...An affiliate of the Labor Zionist movement, the school placed a heavy overall emphasis on Israel, or better said, on the kibbutzim...

...Our grade seven play, an original production that absorbed much of one term, featured the basic scenario that would later become familiar to a generation of moviegoers: the tableau of refugees landing in secret in the dead of night...

...Midwinter and spring climaxes coincided rather with Chanukah, Purim, and Passover, which could be interpreted—and were—as national festivals and celebrated with many customs and rituals exclusive of prayer...

...there was no rod, of course, but only an angry voice and the threat of the principal's (father's) wrath...

...Where else but in North America has the contract been defined so bluntly...

...How do you break a cherry...

...Because the shule had no high school, but only an afternoon division for high school students, we passed, on graduation, into the Protestant system that served the local purpose of a public high school...

...We won the school flag one year, 20 of us having collected $435...

...The communal need for security was then so powerful that all Jewish institutions, the shule being only one of many, had to bend to its service...

...There were special circumstances, of course...

...Why does Kotex come in three sizes...

...It attracts the grandchildren of men and women who once kept safely aloof from its old country ways, and has become almost fashionable...

...Once a year, however, in the spring, we were expected to practice what was preached...

...My years in the shule coincided with the most critical period in modern Jewish history...

...The range of Jewish choices at the time that my parents made theirs was fairly broad: beginning at the extreme left, there was the Morris Winchevsky School (Communist...

...Once, when the blackboard and bathroom walls had begun to reflect our imperfect understanding of this latter subject, our teacher initiated a hatbox discussion—unsigned questions in disguised handwriting—that lasted two days...

...We, who had never been taught, thus learned the significance of the m'zzuzah...

...This was the decisive step into the real world...

...Will she be coming back to school...

...Ignorant of its specific function, we were free to regard the tickets as the symbol of pioneering Israel, and to set ourselves goals we believed to be commensurate with its fighting spirit...

...Nowadays, we may mourn the demotion of so much splendor to mere humanism and message morality, but our teachers believed in rational progress, assumed that "religious Judaism" was now part of the superceded past, and tried to guide us toward their version of the brave new world...

...our scientific curiosity was nurtured only in English...

...There were obvious discrepancies between Orthodox Jewish practice and our own, and though we never grasped their logic, we understood that our departures represented a forward move to modernity, from faith, that is, to secularism...

...The peculiar configuration of events that made them pioneer secular Jewish education brought us in out of the cold and gave us happy shelter...

...The sublimated religious energies of the faculty found welcome release in the sanctification of the Jewish State...

...Today, the shule (though no longer by that name) occupies a couple of large, sunny buildings where a more prosperous community now lives...

...You had to do a sustained job of vomiting in those days to make a point...

...How many times can people do it in one night...

...Where is your sister...

...We promised ourselves and our teachers to continue in the mit-shule, the evening division, but although some of us kept this promise for a year, or two, or even three, the locus of importance had moved to the Protestant sector...

...We were among the 626 Jews admitted into Canada that year...

...English subjects (and French) were taught for half a day, Jewish subjects for the rest...

...Though they had to compress into just over two hours the five hour daily curriculum of the Protestant schools, our English teachers still found time to venture into intriguing areas of pedagogic no-man's land—home economics, sports, art, and, at best of times, sex...

...The Yiddish of our family, even to the Lithuanian pronunciation, was the language of most of my teachers...

...In composition class, we wrote letters to the United Nations...

...The shule of those years was a kind of halfway house, easing our passage from immigrant uncertainty to confident citizenship...

...But there, there—who could summon up visions powerful enough to approximate what was happening there...

...They taught with the dedication of those who know they are wise and good and right...

...Optional bar mitzvah instruction was introduced in response to shifting parental demands...

...The school calendar was of great help in this, since Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the most problematic holidays for the secular Jew, fell too early in the academic year to require extensive classroom treatment, and the equally inconvenient Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, commemorating the granting of the Torah at Sinai, fell much too late...

...the beleaguered kibbutzim, fighting off Arab hordes...

...More intimate, less national, was the excitement of the English half of our day...

...On the whole, the ideological content of our curriculum was not applied to our immediate situation, but wafted over us, like so many bridegrooms of Chagall...

...Our focus was always on the horrors and the drama out there—the crematoria, the burning ghettos, the splintered resistance, the refugees, and resolutions, the birth of a very fragile homeland...

...As I was later to discover, we had read, without being so informed, a heavily censored version...

...The Books of Ruth and Esther, the temptations of Joseph and David, many of our Yiddish poems and stories, included good data of this kind, but the Jewish teachers tended to moral interpretations and national longings...

...If some people still believed in God, we continued to use the term for its historic connotations...

...A familial balance was struck in the shule between the studious men who taught us Jewish things and the younger, sometimes native-born women who handled the rest...

...Along with our several Canadian cousins and Jewish neighbors, we were sent to Protestant school, I for those abortive two months, my brother for the duration of the year...

...the volunteers (ours were from Canada) leaving for the inevitable war...

...Their youth coincided with a period of dramatic intellectual and geographic upheaval, providing rich opportunities for innovation and adventure, less so for the quieter pursuits of research or poetry...

...As the war ended, we followed with feverish intensity the fight for the State of Israel...

...and the Adath Israel (Mizrachi...

...It was then 1940 and our very lives were something of a special circumstance, my father having just engineered, with incredible luck and skill, our flight (as in fleeing) from Czernovitz to Montreal...

...It boasts an overflowing high school which is perhaps the strongest proof of our collective security...

...This was followed by a cathartic outburst of either anger (if the student remained intransigent) or guilt (if the blow caused a nosebleed), both versions of the scene customary enough in my mother's kitchen...

...A decade earlier, in the 1930's, the Montreal Jewish community had been offered something like an independent school board of its own, but, fearful of the implications of such segregation, the Jewish leadership preferred an arrangement whereby Jews, "for purposes of education," would be considered Protestant and, in return for paying taxes to the Protestant Board, would be permitted to send their children to its schools...

...At the time we attended the shule, Yiddish was still the language most of the students spoke, or refused to speak, at home, so the level of comprehension was high...

...Thus were we prepared for the fund-raising responsibility that for as long as we remained golus Jews would be ours...

...A steady 70 percent of Jewish parents from that time to this has taken advantage of the partnership as did my parents that unsteady first year...

...It stood on what could have been designated as the border between the older, east-end immigrant section of the city and the rapidly expanding western sector, that safe harbor our parents so anxiously sought for themselves and for us...

...Chassidism was a democratizing movement...

...But their frame of identification helped transform the once lowly position of the cheder melamed into a worthy, even hallowed, profession...

...None of our teachers made the reduction so explicit, yet they shared the assumption...

...Since they did not accept in its stead any other dogma—atheism or Marxism, for example—they allowed us a good many residual customs and even rituals that were taboo in the communist school...

...They were not cruel to us, certainly, not kind either...

...As children we were unin-structed in the principles of selectivity...

...When I was finally withdrawn, I was simply kept home, without explanation...

...I knew the same authoritative inconsistency at home where the dishes were changed at Passover and every crumb of chometz abjured, while the rest of the year's diet and crockery were blissfully traif (we ate ham but never pork...

...I could only be grateful, at that point, that I was not more seriously handicapped...

...If a door had a m'zzuzah we read it as an invitation and were puzzled when anyone refused...

...On such educational red-letter days, the Jewish part of the program faded into irrelevance...

...the Avraham Reisin School (Bundist...

...Although the vast majority of Quebec's population was French, the Jews, like all other immigrants to Quebec, tried to shore up their position by entering the cultural sphere of the English, the dominant socioeconomic group...

...In many instances, it must have been only the sudden need to emigrate that propelled them to Canada, and no more than the accident of an interrupted career that lured them into day school teaching...

...At the same time, there was an acknowledgement of klal yisrael, the whole people of Israel, and a greater tolerance for the varieties of Jewish belief than I have ever subsequently found in any Jewish institution...

...M. was not beyond blushing, but her unflinching replies gave us to understand that we, too, had to maintain a mature dignity...

...The remainder supported "parochial" schools, Jewish day schools of various ideological inclinations where the Rumanian schoolboy knickers that made him clownishly conspicuous among the Canadian boys all in pants...

...I was startled when an Israeli friend said to me, about her education in Rehavia: "You would never have known that we were Continued on page 62 living through the most memorable period in Jewish history...

...He is called to the principal's office to account for my sudden disappearance from school...

...Around us, in Canada, anti-Semitism was slowly on the wane, our families were slowly on the rise, all was indecently calm...

...Our text omitted the climactic lynch-ing-crucifixion where the perverted Christianity of the whites demands the hideous death of the Christ-victim, and oddly enough, also cut the episode in which a young Jew joins the manhunt against his father's humane wishes...

...In observance, the school was again like our home: respectful of tradition but secular...

...We knew that the student populations of the two high schools most of us would be attending were almost entirely Jewish, but the schools themselves, including every member of the teaching staffs, were WASP, a term not then in use, except conceptually...

...my older brother was to be my guide...

...As if in proof of the socialist stories we read, the poor streets, Hutchinson and Jeanne Mance, often yielded more than the tree-lined avenues...

...As for us, we were never in doubt...

...merely cold, which was then punishment enough...

...I remember our Bible teacher saying, in grade five or six, that the expression, "God spoke to Moses," was simply an old-fashioned formula for "Moses felt" or "Moses thought...

...They quite lacked, however, a taste for the ineffable, and could not understand such predilection in others...

...The prophets were explained as social reformers, their God a metonymy for idealism...

...By our calculation, the future of Jewish Palestine was thereby assured, and we felt ourselves heroes— minor heroes, to be sure—in its struggle...

...Our Jewish teachers were such men as had never gone into primary education before, and, barring another Haskalah or another mass migration, never would again...

...the tense UN Assembly when partition was passed with the vote of Uruguay...

...Now, in retirement, they are active in interests that had to be curtailed during those years: mastery of classical Greek, new editions of midrash and modern Hebrew poetry, novels and memoirs of their own...

...It said in my valedictory, as in all those before and probably since, that the folkshule was our second home...

...Father, determined to settle us comfortably in this foreign haven, spent most of his time at work, many miles from the city...

...She did the sensible thing and sent us to the nearest school...

...Fortunately, within a year of our arrival, our parents had learned of other possibilities, moved to a different neighborhood, and registered us in the folkshule, a Jewish day school affiliated with the Labor Zionist movement...

...But my guilt was assured because I could never make it less...

...Did the story exonerate the sheriff, we debated, or hold him particularly accountable...

...I recall in particular one intense class discussion, of Joseph Opa-toshu's Yiddish story, "Lynching," in which the sheriff persuades a hunted "nigger" to surrender by promising him protection and a fair trial, then "loses" his prisoner to the lynch-hungry mob...

...But mother has warned him repeatedly—a warning made more sinister by the war—never to divulge home information to strangers...

...Perhaps they regret not having come to age a generation or two later when they could have been professors and academicians—an easier, more gracious prospect...