by Ezra Glinter
During the summer, when each of the graybeards sits in his own corner, days can pass without a word being exchanged. But when winter comes, they sit together with their backs to the stove or facing the glowing coals and talk about their wives: they’ve spent a lifetime with them—and still don’t know them! Whatever their children do is well and good, and all the nonsense the grandchildren prattle is pure wisdom. Ah, that these old mothers and grandmothers in wigs, 121 who have cried their eyes out over holiday prayer books and Yiddish supplications, should become so foolish in their old age! Some stroke of good fortune! What ridiculous joy! They’ve lived to see children’s children. Well, whose footsteps are they following, these children’s children? A cat can have grandchildren too, but a Jewish woman of valor 122 shouldn’t have a cat’s brains. The grandsons don’t even come to their grandfathers and grandmothers any more for a blessing. They are already blessed with knowledge; they know it all and understand everything. The chicks are now teaching the hens. But you, silly hen, why are you running after them? Chickee, why are you clucking in rapture? The men laugh and look at the closed and sealed double window, half of which is covered with frost, while the other half is clear, like a person with a cataract in one eye and clear vision in the other. The old men remember the birds’ merry chirping by the window during the summer. Swallows still stray into the Old Shul during the spring, but kids who are just learning the alphabet—never!
And it just so happened that on such a wintry night, forged in frost and darkness, a young boy came into the synagogue. He wore a big hat with flaps over his ears, big shoes, and a long, broad, cotton-lined little overcoat. He squeezed in among the old men by the stove with his hands behind his back like an elderly scholar and pressed his little back against a couple of the heated tiles. The white-bearded old-timers moved aside to give the honored guest more room. They regarded him for a long while, then asked him:
“Whose father are you?”
The little boy’s black eyes flashed; he sniffed with his frozen reddish little nose and laughed:
“I’m not a father yet. My father’s name is Avrohom and he’s called Avromke the Old Clothes Man because that’s what he sells in the courtyard. My mother has her own shop down the street where she sells clay pots and tin pails.”
“So what’s your name?” they asked him. “Do you have any little brothers? And where do you go to school?”
He replied to each question separately, like an adult.
“My name is Itsikl. And I don’t have any little brothers. I have little sisters. And I study at the Dvora Kuperstein School. 123 But right now I’m not going to school. It’s too cold.”
The old men wrinkled their brows; they wracked their brains but couldn’t recall hearing about such a school.
“We know of a study house named after the saintly Dvora Esther,” 124 they told Itsikl, “but we’ve never heard of the saintly Dvora Kuperstein, nor of a shul named after her.”
Once again Itsikl burst out laughing.
“It’s not a shul where you go to pray. It’s a school where you learn how to write Yiddish and do arithmetic and draw with a pencil and sing too.”
“And do you know how to pray? Do you wear tzitzis?” the men asked him.
“I don’t know how to pray and I don’t wear tzitzis,” he answered.
Did you ever hear of such a thing? The old men shook their heads sadly at one another. All along they had been under the impression that only the grandsons of well-to-do families grow up like gentiles. Now they see that today the children of the poor can too.
The men found a prayer book with large letters to enable Itsikl to learn the alphabet. It’s a topsy-turvy world, the old men muse. When they went to school one teacher taught ten boys; now a minyan of bearded men surround one little Jewish boy, and the ten grandfathers tell him:
“Read, Itsikl, read!”
But it’s like talking to the wall. The lad is seven or eight years old and he can barely crawl through a page of Hebrew—no doubt when it comes to crawling over a fence the little rascal can do that with ease. He even brags that he can sail through a Yiddish text but he doesn’t know the morning prayer “I give thanks to You,” nor can he recite a blessing. Just listen to what Itsikl says! In the Yiddish school he is taught to sing little ditties. Sure! Can you imagine them teaching him the Psalms for the morning service? So it turns out that the workers who once rebelled against the Russian czar and sang songs in the streets have heirs. Itsikl told them that his teacher had taken the class for a walk in the fields and shown them flowers. Itsikl seems to be a smart boy, but he talks like a fool. Why does he need field flowers? Is he about to become a village peasant?
The next evening Itsikl came back; now the men welcomed him as one of their own and left him a spot right by the middle of the stove. One of the grandfathers offered him a piece of dark honey cake, his reward for saying a blessing. Another grandfather took a couple of copper coins and a silver ten-kopek coin out of a little chamois purse with nickel buttons and presented it as Hanukkah money to a grandson not his own.
“True, it’s already two weeks after Hanukkah—but it’s never too late to pay a debt,” the donor said, and sat down to teach Itsikl to read from the prayer book.
But the man who had given Itsikl the dark honey cake was peeved at his neighbor for snatching away his pupil. When the lesson was over, the cake giver whispered into Itsikl’s ear:
“Do you perhaps have a friend? Bring him here with you and he’ll also get a piece of cake.”
Itsikl brought his little sister, Sarah, who was one year younger, a tiny girl with a moist face and small as a fish. She was all bundled up, wrapped in a little woolen shawl and wearing big knitted mittens like an old lady. As Sarah’s older brother helped her remove her mother’s wraps, her damp black silken hair glistened. The cake man smiled and said:
“So it’s a girl after all?”
But the grandfather was so eager to have a pupil he turned his reasoning on its head. A girl has to know how to light candles and be able to read the Yiddish supplications. Moreover, she’s named after our matriarch, Sarah.
“Soreleh, 125 do you see this little critter with a bent back and with a little head on the top and on the bottom? Do you know what letter this is?”
“It’s an alef, ” she answered with the hard dry voice of a woman shopkeeper who can’t stand a customer vexing her for naught.
“But you see, Soreleh, you didn’t know that when under the alef there’s this tiny sign that looks like a little step, then the alef is pronounced ‘aw.’”
With his back bent over almost in half and with a walking stick in hand, one of the old men looked like the letter hey. This man now approached Itsikl with a practical suggestion.
“Bring over some of your friends from the street. Tu B’Shvat 126 is coming soon and everyone will get carob. 127 They can warm up by the stove and fool around as much as they like, as long as they’re willing to learn how to become Jews.”
For this Itsikl found eager customers much more quickly than he could find buttons to play with. Half a dozen boys appeared in the Old Shul. One of them was a tall boy with sunken cheeks and protruding ears red from cold. He had big teeth and whinnied like a horse: ho-ho-ho! When he talked he kept his hands in his pockets to show he wasn’t afraid of anyone. His nickname was Leybke Ox, because when he fought, he kicked and butted his head, starting low and aiming up just like an ox with its horns. Nevertheless, for him too a teacher was found, a man who compared to Leybke looked like a kitten next to a gigantic mouse.
But the fighter had a thick head, and his teacher recalled in amazement that in days gone by great scholars emerged from sons of poor families. Nowadays, it turns out, one can stem from a poor family and still be a boor. Never mind, Leybke’s teacher consoled himself, with me that cabbage head will end up learning how to read Hebrew. By now the young voices of boys studying the Five Books of Moses already rang out in the study house. Next to each one sat an old man, s
waying back and forth.
“Say it, little boy, say it. Bereyshis, in the beginning. Boro, created. Elokim, God . . .”
In the wintry outdoors, the wind blew the snow from the roofs to the streets and from the streets onto the roofs. The icy cold crept under fingernails and sliced into foreheads. A blizzard whirled before the men’s eyes, but the graybeards of the Old Shul proceeded slowly through the storm. Wearing fur caps pushed down over their ears and thick woolen scarves pulled up over their noses, the old men groped their way forward with their walking sticks to keep from sinking into the snowy void.
Awaiting them in the study house were their pupils, whose voices tinkled like little silver bells—and for their young charges the teachers were ready to risk their lives.
In vain the old men’s children cried out, “Where are you heading to, Papa? It’s a danger to life and limb out there.”
“You think you’re still a youngster, father-in-law? They’ve even closed the schools because of the severe frost, and yet you still insist on going out.”
Their own wives yelled even louder. “He’s become a tutor in his old age! You’ve got your own sons and grandchildren, may they live and be well.”
The graybeards did not answer. They just stared wide-eyed at their wives, seething in silence, as though they were in the middle of the Grace After Meals and were not allowed to interrupt their prayer. But once he was outside and on his way, one of the old men laughed into the woolen scarf that squeezed his beard and covered his mouth.
“What a cow she is! Can you call what she has sons and grandchildren? All she has is a houseful of gentiles and boors. And to them she kowtows, as if to a pagan god. Foolish woman! Doesn’t she realize that students are one’s true children?”
III
THE OLDSTERS KEPT their promise and did not stop the boys from running around the bimah and playing hide-and-seek between the benches and prayer stands. While the students were fooling around, the teachers sat by the stove, their heads lowered into their shoulders, and slowly rocked back and forth over their holy books, seemingly oblivious. Still, they couldn’t pretend they didn’t see a thing when the little scamps discovered the trapdoor to the little storeroom under the bimah from which they dragged tattered prayer books, Bibles and ethical tracts. These books containing God’s name had long been waiting to be laid to rest in a coffin and buried like a dead person in a cemetery, accompanied by eulogies. 128 But these torn holy books and loose pages never expected little rascals to rummage through them looking for lost treasures.
The grandfathers pushed their brass-rimmed glasses up onto their wrinkled foreheads, regarded the mess the little brats had made, and laughed. Because of advanced age their arms dangled down to their knees, and as they walked, their hands shook like empty pails on a yoke. Yet they took the trouble to bend down to the ground to pick up the stacks of scattered, torn-out pages, while softly and calmly teaching their pupils that treading upon holy books is a great sin.
“If you boys have so much fun tearing up prayer books and Bibles, here’s what you can do. Pray and study every day, and then the books will fall apart of their own accord.”
So either because the rascals feared the distress of having to pray and study so much, or because they realized that the old men were crawling about on all fours, they suddenly swooped down to the floor to gather up the torn pages containing God’s name and quickly stuff them back into the little storeroom under the bimah.
But with grownups the old men were not as good-natured and patient as with the little pranksters.
One day a man in a fur coat with a broad sparse beard and gold-rimmed glasses wandered into the Old Shul for the afternoon service. Seen through the beard, his chin was as naked and visible as a stone in a field. During the Silent Devotion the elders swayed, deep in morose contemplation, like a row of bent willows whose branches hang down to the water’s edge. The guest stood straight, rooted like an oak. His frock coat with a vent in the back was brand new, unlike the old men’s threadbare and rumpled caftans. The stranger heard something going on in the study house: a commotion and scampering of feet, as though demons were dancing overhead. He turned from the wall where he was reciting the Silent Devotion and saw a group of urchins playing tag amid the benches and knocking over prayer stands that crashed to the floor with a bang. Two of the urchins were going wild on the bimah, leaping at each other like goats and dragging the coverlet off the reading table. But what most astounded the guest was the old timers’ attitude. They swayed back and forth calmly as if they didn’t hear the tumult, or as if it didn’t bother them. In that case, the guest decided, he wouldn’t interrupt his prayers at a point where it was forbidden to do so, and he turned back a second time to face the wall, swaying piously. Suddenly, behind his back he heard whispers and soft laughter, and at once remembered the fur coat that he had draped over the bimah railing before beginning to pray. Now he turned again and saw that what he had intuited had come to pass: the little devils were gathered around his fur coat, plucking hairs from the collar and tying together the edges of the pelts that were sewn in as a lining. But as soon as the scamps saw the enraged man striding towards them, flailing his hands without a word, they scattered.
After prayers the guest asked the old men if there was a school for little boys in the Old Shul, and who was the teacher.
“Yes, we have a school here in the Old Shul and all of us are the teachers,” said one of the beaming and happy grandfathers.
“Can’t you stop these bathhouse bums from going wild? I would drag these little bandits out of the synagogue by their hair,” the guest said, his face flushed with anger.
But the old men became angry too—so incensed that their hands began to shake.
“So pick yourself up and leave. Go in good health but don’t tell us what to do. You think we’re back in the old days? Nowadays you can’t utter a word of rebuke to students. You have to deal kindly with them, with complete tenderness.”
The man in the fur coat left, shrugging his shoulders: if you can no longer lift a leather strap to these bandits, why it’s the end of the world!
On Tu B’Shvat, the teachers fed their pupils carob, just like, during that same week, boys fed crumbs to little birds on the Sabbath of Song. 129 Since Soreleh had weak teeth, full of tiny black holes, and was unable to eat the hard, dry carob, Leybke with his big horsey teeth ate up Soreleh’s portion and even mocked her brother.
“Here, Itsikl, take these seeds and plant them in a flowerpot and then they’ll grow into your own carob trees.”
Itsikl did not take the carob seeds, but he was afraid to call Leybke “Ox” lest he butt or kick him. Now Soreleh was crying and her teacher, the man with the cake, consoled her:
“Tomorrow I’m going to bring you a whole piece of cake. And today I have another present for you. Since you’re a girl, I brought you a little blackboard and chalk, and I’m going to teach you how to write.”
But it was of no use that the old man also became a teacher of writing, for soon Soreleh stopped coming.
“She has to stay at home and take care of our youngest sister,” Itsikl told Soreleh’s teacher, “because my mother has to be in the shop with her clay pots and tin pails.”
The cake man felt heavy at heart, for he had gotten to like Soreleh so much. But the other teachers were not overly concerned that a similar problem might also befall them.
“It’s just a girl after all. She’s not obliged to have any know-how in the tiny letters.”
Right after this, however, Lebyke too stopped coming to the synagogue and Itsikl reported that since the snow had frozen, the Ox spent days on end sliding on his little sled. Since no one had derived much pleasure from Leybke anyway, the teachers compared him to the raven that Noah sent forth from the ark. 130 The raven did not come back, even though the flood still covered the earth.
“When the waters receded, the little dove too did not return,” the old men sighed. Ah, woe, they had to pray for freezing wea
ther and blizzards to keep their students from running away.
In order to hold onto the boys when freezing weather would no longer drive them into the study house for warmth, the old men made moralizing comments like:
“The Torah, Itsikl, is like water. Without Torah the world would be like a desert.”
“The Torah, Meirke, is like fire. Without Torah the world would be as dark as a cellar where you keep potatoes.”
The little boys liked to hear their teachers’ comments for several reasons. First of all, it was a break from studying. Secondly, they were spoken to like grownups. And thirdly, the teacher’s white beard looked like an entire wintry forest. But the forest is full of winter frost, while the teacher’s beard is warm and so dense one could hide in it. And besides, the teacher doesn’t pinch like a father or yell like a mother. The teacher speaks softly—so softly you can barely hear him. He strokes your head and his beard strokes your cheeks. Sometimes he cries, but not loudly like a child. The teacher cries inwardly. One can hardly hear his sobbing, but tears stream from his eyes until his beard becomes as wet as a washcloth. But if you ask him why he’s crying, he gives you a very strange answer.