CHAPTER VI[ToC]
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
History shows that in all countries where Jews have equal rights with the rest of the people, they lose their fear of secular science, and learn how to take their ancient religion with them from century to awakening century, dropping nothing by the way but what their growing spirit has outgrown. In countries where progress is to be bought only at the price of apostasy, they shut themselves up in their synagogues, and raise the wall of extreme separateness between themselves and their Gentile neighbors. There is never a Jewish community without its scholars, but where Jews may not be both intellectuals and Jews, they prefer to remain Jews.
The survival in Russia of mediæval injustice to Jews was responsible for the narrowness of educational standards in the Polotzk of my time. Jewish scholarship, as we have seen, was confined to a knowledge of the Hebrew language and literature, and even these limited stores of learning were not equally divided between men and women. In the mediæval position of the women of Polotzk education really had no place. A girl was "finished" when she could read her prayers in Hebrew, following the meaning by the aid of the Yiddish translation especially prepared for women. If she could sign her name in Russian, do a little figuring, and write a letter in Yiddish to the parents of her betrothed, she was called wohl gelehrent—well educated.
Fortunately for me, my parents' ideals soared beyond all this. My mother, although she had not stirred out of Polotzk, readily adopted the notion of a liberal education imported by my father from cities beyond the Pale. She heartily supported him in all his plans for us girls. Fetchke and I were to learn to translate as well as pronounce Hebrew, the same as our brother. We were to study Russian and German and arithmetic. We were to go to the best pension and receive a thorough secular education. My father's ambition, after several years' sojourn in enlightened circles, reached even beyond the pension; but that was flying farther than Polotzk could follow him with the naked eye.
I do not remember our first teacher. When our second teacher came we were already able to read continuous passages. Reb' Lebe was no great scholar. Great scholars would not waste their learning on mere girls. Reb' Lebe knew enough to teach girls Hebrew. Tall and lean was the rebbe, with a lean, pointed face and a thin, pointed beard. The beard became pointed from much stroking and pulling downwards. The hands of Reb' Lebe were large, and his beard was not half a handful. The fingers of the rebbe were long, and the nails, I am afraid, were not very clean. The coat of Reb' Lebe was rusty, and so was his skull-cap. Remember, Reb' Lebe was only a girls' teacher, and nobody would pay much for teaching girls. But lean and rusty as he was, the rebbe's pupils regarded him with entire respect, and followed his pointer with earnest eyes across the limp page of the alphabet, or the thumbed page of the prayer-book.
For a short time my sister and I went for our lessons to Reb' Lebe's heder, in the bare room off the women's gallery, up one flight of stairs, in a synagogue. The place was as noisy as a reckless expenditure of lung power could make it. The pupils on the bench shouted their way from aleph to tav, cheered and prompted by the growl of the rebbe; while the children in the corridor waiting their turn played "puss in the corner" and other noisy games.
Fetchke and I, however, soon began to have our lessons in private, at our own home. We sat one on each side of the rebbe, reading the Hebrew sentences turn and turn about.
When we left off reading by rote and Reb' Lebe began to reveal the mysteries to us, I was so eager to know all that was in my book that the lesson was always too short. I continued reading by the hour, after the rebbe was gone, though I understood about one word in ten. My favorite Hebrew reading was the Psalms. Verse after verse I chanted to the monotonous tune taught by Reb' Lebe, rocking to the rhythm of the chant, just like the rebbe. And so ran the song of David, and so ran the hours by, while I sat by the low window, the world erased from my consciousness.