Education

Memories relating to the heder are most often accompanied by a harsh judgment of the education given there. This is the traditional type of school where children from the most modest homes studied from the age of four or five: they learned to read and write and received an introduction to Hebrew as well as to biblical texts. School? That's a very grand word: the teacher ( melamed) taught in one room, even a corner, of his small dwelling. Portraits of him are hardly flattering. They emphasize his "primitive" methods, his brutality, and his ignorance, and gladly dwell on his more ridiculous characteristics. Just as our schoolboys like to recall memorable escapades, former heder students still laugh about the tricks they played on their teachers. One of the jokes mentioned several times (another quasi-folkloric subject): those rascals attack the unfortunate melamed's beard, which they paste or cut or scorch!

Georges F.:

You came to heder if you wanted to learn. It wasn't compulsory. In the room there was a big table and two benches, girls on one side, boys on the other. About ten families sent their children. It was the only way to learn to write because we didn't have the right to go to school. Indeed, there wasn't any. I don't remember seeing a school built in my village during my childhood. A generation later, yes; that is, seven or eight years later, they built a school.

Me, I had a rabbi, a poor guy. He was nasty as a rash and beat the children like devils. That rabbi had a daughter and two boys. One boy was sick, with tuberculosis. He was there, lying

there all the time, a young man of about twenty. He would spit. To bring children to that place, in the same room, with that guy with tuberculosis, you wonder how we didn't get it . . .

That rabbi was paralyzed on one side. He used to get so nervous and mad. With kids who were almost savages, he had good reason to get nervous. He stood behind the kids with his stick, and every now and then, with his good hand, he gave us a whack on the back because we didn't answer well. That wasn't so bad compared with others who had both their hands. But there were kids who got their ears pulled off, yes, he pulled an ear so hard he pulled it off. That's how he mistreated them.

Once we decided to revolt. You know what we did to him? He had a big beard. One day, he fell asleep on the table, like this. [Georges imitates him. ] We glued his beard to the table and set fire to it. All the kids, not just me. The guy work up smelling his beard burning.

The scene changes, however, with the Jewish school networks that developed in Poland between the two world wars. The diversity of their orientations reflected the heterogeneity of the population. The Agudat Israel network (568 establishments for boys, in 1937, and 71,000 students) remained loyal to orthodoxy; that of Tarbut (267 establishments in 1935 and 42,000 students) was devoted to the teaching of Hebrew, in a Zionist spirit; while that of C.Y.S.H.O.^[2](170 establishments in 1935 and 15,000 students) was inspired with a Yiddishist and socialist ideal (which, in itself, had several political variants in the Bund and the leftist labor Zionists).^[3]In the Tarbut schools, as in those of the C.Y.S.H.O., the curriculum included "modern" subjects (secular languages and literatures, the sciences, etc.), the use of Polish being limited to subjects like Polish history and literature. Pioneering pedagogical methods were practiced there (particularly in the Yiddishist schools), and our informers remember them with gratitude .

[2] Agudat Israel, a cultural and political movement that developed among Ashkenazi Jews and sought to preserve Orthodoxy against secularist and Zionist trends. Tarbut, Hebrew educational and cultural organization that developed in eastern European countries between the two world wars. Centrale Yidishe Shul Organisatsie, Central Organization of Jewish Schools.

[3] R. Ertel, Le Shtetl, 253–264.

Lazare M.:

I went to heder maybe for a few weeks, until I learned the alef bet, being very small. You started heder when you were four, but the methods weren't. . . . The teacher, the rabbi, knew nothing of psychology or pedagogy.

Until the age of ten, I went to a modern school that was only moderately religious. You learned to read and write Jewish subjects. It was a private school, overseen by an association.

Then, in 1920, when I was ten, they opened a Jewish high school. My uncle, my father's brother, was a teacher in that high school.

"Is he the one who ran the heder?"

No, that one was my mother's sister's husband. He was an old man, with a beard, who barely knew how to write, but he did have a head for Talmud. The other one was a high school teacher who had himself finished school. So he said to my father: "Listen, give me your boy." And he took me into the high school, where I stayed until 1929.

Jewish subjects were in Hebrew; the others were in Polish. The first degree in Hebrew was granted in 1929. That was my class. Until the fourth year, the boys and girls were separate, and then it was mixed. They called it a coeducational high school.

I still remember what I wrote for my matriculation in Hebrew. My subject was Mendele and Sholem Aleichem. Mendele is satire; Sholem Aleichem is humor. Satire and humor aren't the same thing. Humor is gentle; satire is bitter. That's what I developed. My examiner became a very important man in Israel, Dr. Tartakover. He's a Jewish historian, a professor of history in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. He's eighty years old now. He came to Paris three years ago. I have a friend here who knows Tartakover. I said to him: "Listen, I have to see Tartakover. I want to show him something." It's my Hebrew diploma. I still have the original.

You had to pay to go to that high school. The students were rich. I think I was the only poor one there, because of my uncle. There weren't any scholarships, but there was something called

fraternal aid. All the students contributed every month. A little later on, I started tutoring. When I was in the sixth class, I could help the boys in the fifth and earn a little money. To get a degree was hard for a poor kid in Poland.

This year, on April 3, 1980, there was a reunion of the former students of the Jewish high schools of Kalisz. Two hundred people came. From Argentina, the United States, Sweden. From France, there was one person; I would have been the second. But at the last moment, I couldn't go. It still hurts me. I didn't go. Everybody was waiting for me. My classmates were there, or one class next to mine, a year more or less. And I didn't go.

Bernard P.:

I went to the Hebrew high school of Kalisz. Unlike the Tarbut high schools, the language was Polish but there were courses in Hebrew and even instruction in the Bible. Aside from that, it was a high school that conformed to all the same rules as at the state high schools in Poland.

In high school, I spoke Polish; with my friends I spoke Polish; I read Polish books. At home, I spoke Polish. My father generally answered me in Yiddish. But I didn't speak Yiddish. I spoke and read only Polish. It's not that I didn't want to speak Yiddish, but let's say that, in the generation of my friends, we all spoke Polish. My mother spoke Polish well, quite well, whereas my father had some difficulty speaking it. He preferred to express himself in Yiddish.

Helena G.:

When I think of the education I got in our school, I haven't yet seen a school that gives such an education. That's so even now, after forty years have passed. Back home, the teachers with the children, it was . . . you just don't see that today. Now, after all the years, when we see someone from our school, we're like brothers. We are brothers. We had a special education in our school. Maybe not everybody became a writer, but their behavior, their manner of being, was different. They always felt self-confident. First of all at our school, they freed us from our

inferiority complex. If we didn't like something, we could say so aloud. They talked to us of hygiene, sexual questions—at that time!

In the Polish high schools, the number of Jewish students was limited in practice by a quota. The Jews often found themselves in a hostile environment. But there too the education seems to have been incomparably more interesting than that of the heder. Indeed, those high schools appealed to those who aspired to modernity. Many parents, eager for their children to climb the social ladder, made not only material sacrifices but also serious concessions with regard to religious principles (going to school on Saturday) in order to allow them to study within the state system. A typical example is young Julien K., whose father was director of a Yiddishist school in Chelm. He did not study in the latter but rather in the Polish high school.