by Israel Kipen
Father would from time to time refer to certain illustrious forebears of our family. Among these was the author of the tractate “Yesod V’Seder Ha’Avodah” by which name the venerable rabbi whose grave in Grodno Father had once been bidden to visit. He duly went there. When he asked to be directed to the grave, stating that he was an eighth-generation descendent of the rabbi, his guides stepped back as a mark of respect. According to family tradition, only ten generations were permitted to come unto his grave. It is sobering to reflect that the tenth generation, along with the eighth and ninth, was to be annihilated and there is no-one left in Europe to return to do him honour.
On the eve of my leaving home in 1940, Father suggested that as I was travelling to Lithuania, I should contact its chief rabbi, Rabbi Avram Dov (Ber) Shapira, who bore the same names as my uncle. When I did make contact, I was well received. Rabbi Shapira was a majestic figure, tall and broad-shouldered and wearing a flowing white beard that added character to a most beautiful face. He lived in a two-storied brick house next door to the Lithuanian Presidential Residence in a short street off the Leisves Alee in the centre of Kovno. His son was Professor of Hebrew at the Kovno University at the time. When, in audience with him, I detailed the family connection as precisely as I was able, sufficient it seemed to gain a letter of introduction from him in Hebrew in which he referred to me as She’er Bsari, that is, as a blood relative. On that visit, I was invited to his Purim Seuda (feast), thereby sharing his table with a number of prominent Polish rabbis, by then refugees. Among them was Rabbi Kotler who managed to reach the United States and became one of the catalysts of the Yeshiva movement there.
As a family we are also related to the rabbinic house of Soloveitchik, the dynasty of Brisk (Brest-Litovsk) rabbis of whom Chaim, then Isaac Ze’ev Halevi (Velvel), and today Joseph Dov Soloveitchik of Boston, the greatest living talmudic authority of the present generation, form a continuous line. We can also trace back our lineage to Samuel Eliezer ben Judah Halevi Edels, known as the Maharasha, this being an abbreviation and acronym of his name. He lived in Cracow some 400 years ago. Another ancestor was the renowned Rabbi David ben Samuel Halevi, known as the TaZ, this being the acronym of his work Turei Zahav, a commentary on the Shulchan Aruch.
The sad bottom line in the story of our family is that of the entire Goldstein-Kipen branch claiming this illustrious lineage, not a single individual on the Goldstein side survived, and on the Kipen side only my father and his family. Of the other branch of Kipens, that which had in the pre-War years moved to Chile, most now live in Israel, but these have no connection with the Goldstein linkage of the family tree.
Education
My education experiences involve the full gamut of what was available in Bialystok in my years there. They encompass the most modern as well as the most archaic in the Jewish education spectrum.
My earliest recollections are of a bright and spacious kindergarten which I attended. In the early ‘twenties, kindergartens were uncommon. Mine was situated in the same complex as the trade school (the Hantverker). The Hebrew “Tarbut” primary school and kindergarten stood side by side. I recall large rooms, games and a concert in which I participated. Many years later, Father was approached by a stranger in a barber-shop, asking, “Does your son still throw buckets of water?” That stranger had been the director of the kindergarten during my period there. It appears that one day I had wanted to play the piano but he had refused me permission to do so. Whereupon, I went to the kitchen, brought back water and poured it over him.
My first true schooling began in Fablinski’s cheder on the first floor of one of the apartments at Kupeckia 19. It was a dingy home with both little light and little air. I must have stayed there two to three years, and then transferred to a proper school in Jurowiecka Street. This was a one-storied long red brick building facing the rather narrow street. The classrooms were big and airy; the desks were well separated and there was plenty of room to move about. The institution was run as a school with a staff and a director, a very imposing man called Dr Tileman who had but recently come from Galicia to take up his first appointment. In one large step he soon after became principal of the prestigious Druskin Gymnasium in which he remained until the war.
I had enjoyed that school, but after a short period, perhaps less than a year, I was removed to another cheder which was a retrogressive one measured by any standards. This cheder was also on Kupiecke Street, relegated to the end of a very long courtyard. Inside the courtyard was a saw-mill and its shrill sound was a constant accompaniment to our studies. Between the mill and cheder was a small vegetable garden which in summer leant colour and fragrance to the drabness around. The cheder itself was a single small room off the kitchen containing a few desks with barely sufficient space to sit at. The apartment was occupied by our melamed (teacher) who was an old, tall and lean man and who taught all the Jewish subjects himself. These subjects were Bible, a little Hebrew and Mishnayos, a preparation for Talmud. There was no set timetable. We – about a dozen boys – would arrive at nine in the morning and wait for him to appear. It would be lunchtime before we took a break. Our teacher would always be armed with a long-handled broom and no sooner did he notice one of the boys not paying attention than he would swipe the miscreant with it without himself having to move.
The main distractions were the vegetable garden outside and the morning sun streaming through the window, these contrasting with the dreariness of the subjects and the tedium of the teaching.
The lunch break lasted an hour or more, depending on how long our teacher would sleep after his meal. Refreshed, he would then return for a second stretch of the same. We would by then be tired and unavoidably less attentive, this opening us to still greater reproaches than before. It was only with the fading of day that we had a change of teacher and subjects. His son-in-law would arrive, a small and funny-looking man, who taught us Polish and arithmetic using the blackboard for which our melamed had no use. While we welcomed the change from our religious studies, we could no longer concentrate. We thought only of returning home, which we finally did at seven in the evening. In winter, we lit our way by making portable lanterns from empty tins. We struck holes in the tin with a nail, fitted it with a wire handle, placed a candle inside, and so went home after a ten-hour day.
But school life was not all gloom. There were in fact other opportunities for a break, particularly when the melamed had something to discuss with his wife or engaged in argument with her, a thing which was not rare. Then we knew our time was our own and we did as we pleased, such as throwing water around in the kitchen or whatever else took our fancy, except going outside which our teacher would not permit. For my part, however, I had other problems to contend with. Our teachers’ broom was not visited upon me particularly often. I usually knew the lesson and, hence, by his own sometimes indiscreet admission, earned his affection. But such affection was not without its price. That price was to down my lunch quickly and coach one or other of the slower learners during the break while he retired a while. The tutorial room was a narrow bedroom adjacent to the cheder. Two beds were separated by a little table, and it was at this table that I tutored my charge. I would have mixed feelings about this extra-curricular duty. On the one hand I was pleased at being the star pupil; on the other, however, I was continually aware that while I was slogging to impart knowledge in that airless room to a not too bright boy, the others had free time to themselves. I would hear their shouting and their laughter, and would have been prepared to forego my teacher’s affection for a bit of free time for play.
I must have stayed two years in this ‘academy’. It was probably the last remnant of the old system of learning which survived in town and I must have been among the last to pass through it. In retrospect, I do not regret the experience. Old-fashioned as its ways were, the cheder did at least instil a respect for and commitment to learning against the more natural youthful inclinations to the contrary.
I have often wondered why Father
took me out of the earlier school to place me in that antiquated cheder. He must have been aware that, educationally, it was a retrogressive step. He was not an other-worldly man. What prompted him then? I can hazard two guesses. One is that he wanted me to experience the sort of education he had received, thereby maintaining a certain continuity. The other, which may have been more consistent with his intentions as I was later to discover, was to prepare me for study at the Mir Yeshiva, one of the most highly regarded of talmudic academies to which he had considered sending me probably to have me become a rabbi.
From cheder, I moved on to the Tachkemony school. This was an educational complex owned and run by the religious Zionist Mizrachi movement which had a wide network of other such schools throughout Poland. The Bialystok school had both a primary and a secondary division. The primary school, situated on the first floor, held to a normal structured curriculum with a substantial amount of Hebrew and religious studies integrated into its secular programme. In the higher school, which was on the ground floor, the curriculum was structured differently. Here, the learning day was divided into two almost equal halves. The morning was allocated exclusively to the study of Talmud; the afternoon hours were given over to a full secular curriculum attuned to meet the Polish gymnasium requirements. There were only four classes in the higher school. The last four years of high school had to be taken elsewhere. The grounds were spacious and the classes roomy. Lessons were conducted according to a timetable with a bell sounding every hour. The Talmud teachers, while patently religious men, wore modern dress and their beards were clipped. They fused their religious beliefs and observances with the Zionist ideology the school espoused. They were also professional teachers, although one had been a businessman in the provinces who had fallen on hard times and returned to teaching for a livelihood. The head of the school was a man called Maizel, a stern administrator, and both punctilious and idiosyncratic. As a rule, he did not teach Talmud himself, but substituted for any regular teacher who might have been away.
The progressive grading of talmudic studies from year to year was clearly noticeable. The degree of sophistication, the depths of argument entered into, the analyses of textual problems posed by the Talmud, and our responses to them also became progressively more complex, while our successive teachers were rabbis with increasing expertise.
Author at the age of 13, seated right.
In the afternoon given over to secular studies, we had a different teacher for an hour for each separate subject. Most of these were not particularly inspiring. There was, however, one exception. This was our teacher for Hebrew Literature, Aryeh Leib Fajans. He was the son of the Chief Rabbi of Bialystok and a man of encyclopaedic knowledge who could locate any given word anywhere, not only in the Bible but also in the Commentaries. I always looked forward to his classes. He would make Bialik and Tchernichowski come alive and render their poetry relevant to our everyday. He would also teach us Hebrew songs, singing in a sonorous voice which I found exciting and delighted in. In time he left for Palestine, where he later became a distinguished member of the Vaad Halashon, the National Institute for the Hebrew Language whose task was to update the ancient language to meet the requirements of a modern scientific and industrial age.
The student body consisted of many boys from the provinces. There was a kitchen annexe attached to the school that provided hot meals at reasonable prices for those who needed it. Soon after coming to the school, I noticed that some of these out-of-town boys did not go to the annexe for a meal. Watching them, I came after some enquiries to realise that they simply did not have the money to pay with. The kitchen manageress confirmed my suspicion. Accordingly, with the principal’s permission, I began collecting money from the other boys during recesses, walking about the playground with receipt book in hand. I gained student support and entered into an arrangement with the kitchen management whereby the disadvantaged boys would eat with everyone else without being made to feel uncomfortable about it.
The most memorable event of my years at the Tachkemony school was a visit by the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik in 1932 in Poland. Bialik was the living embodiment of Zionism. His poems had stirred two generations of Jews to a sense of national awareness. His presence in the flesh had a galvanising effect, particularly for boys raised in the spirit of his poetry. When he came, all students were gathered in the school’s synagogue. Our teacher Fajans’s welcoming address was full of emotion, his quotations from the poet’s “Al Saf Bet Hamedrash” (“On the Threshold of the House of Prayer”) so appropriate. Bialik’s round face broke into a smile of acknowledgement and appreciation and he then spoke to us, in a way we all understood. That experience was the major event in my life to that time and an inordinate privilege. His death in 1934 was a heavy blow to world Jewry.
My four years at the Tachkemony school gave me a solid grounding in Jewish knowledge through the study of Talmud and of Hebrew language and literature. Talmudic studies helped me to understand the fundamentals and origins of Hebrew and to become conversant also with the Aramaic that was so often intertwined in its text and its commentaries. What contributed to the earnestness with which we approached these studies were the country pupils who were generally older than those of the city and appreciative of the opportunity to acquire learning. Hence they were not inclined to waste their time and that mood transmitted itself to the rest of us.
On finishing at the Tachkemony school in 1934, it was almost taken for granted that I should proceed to the Hebrew gymnasium to complete my secondary education. To Father, it was the best of the available options even if it fell short of his ideal. While the other gymnasia used Polish as the language of instruction, which my parents saw as assimilationist and therefore unacceptable, the Hebrew gymnasium taught in Hebrew, it was strongly Zionist in orientation and religiously traditional. My sister Shifra had been a pupil at that school, so my parents knew what they could expect for me and my move there became a foregone conclusion. Further, it had a student population of 800; its laboratories were spacious; it had a doctor’s surgery and a gymnasium that, with its stage, doubled as a school hall.
For my part, I was particularly eager to attend the Hebrew gymnasium. Its religious and Zionist principles matched my own, its coeducational nature had a positive social value, while its standards of tuition were excellent, many of the teachers carrying doctorates in their respective teaching fields. Indeed, the very excellence of its standards caused me to lose a year. I should have entered into the fifth class, but Tachkemony graduates were accepted only into the fourth. Because of this, my sister and I found ourselves in the same year, but in different classes. The day I started, I was placed in a class where a lesson in Hebrew literature was proceeding under the outstanding teacher Moshe Zabludowski. He was a short rotund man with pink cheeks and clever piercing blue eyes. He sat me in the front row, gave me a pencil and paper and asked me to write on a given subject. I had scarcely completed the first sentence then he came back, glanced at the two lines I had written and said: enough. He had concluded his judgement from that one sentence. I never looked back after that, particularly in my Hebrew studies.
The student population ranged across a wide social spectrum, from well-to-do families through lower middle class to clearly poor children, even if these were in a minority. The gulf between the extremes was easily felt, and particularly by the poorer children. Being tall, I was seated at the back of the class with another tall boy who was, however, terribly thin, almost to the point of emaciation with a limp left hand without independent use. To hold his paper on the desk, he would raise the left hand with his right and place it in the required position. He was intelligent, taciturn and serious and ever mindful of his handicap. I made friendships with the other students, both boys and girls, and went to their homes, particularly sensitive to our differences in living standards as we were still in Kupiecka No. 7 at the time. Nevertheless, I integrated well and by year’s end was unanimously elected chairman of the class committee, something quite u
nexpected as I was still, in effect, a novice.
At the time, the division between humanities and sciences, with the right to choose between them, was unknown. Twelve subjects were taught and all were mandatory. My own predilections and skills had always tended to the humanities. Mathematics was not a strong subject of mine and became progressively more troublesome as I advanced through the school; similarly with physics, chemistry, and other sciences.
My second year at the school in 1935 coincided with a double celebration: the 800th anniversary of the birth of Maimonides and the completion of the first decade of the existence of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Our school honoured these events with a special function. In preparation, our teacher Zabludowski appointed a classmate of mine Moshe Porozowski to deliver a lecture on the Hebrew University and myself to speak on Maimonides. Of the two assignments, mine was the more difficult and laborious one. Teacher Zabludowski invited me to his home where he directed me to thick tomes on Maimonides and explained the extent of the research I should have to undertake. The task seemed beyond my years and capacity. Far better would it have been for a seventh-year student rather than a sixth-year one like myself to tackle the subject, allowing that the eighth-year matriculation class could not permit itself such sideshows. Book by book I worked on the subject and when Zabludowski looked through the material I had assembled, he told me to proceed with the writing of my lecture. This was my first attempt at scholarship and I approached it with considerable trepidation.
On the occasion of the celebration, the school hall was packed. My companion Moshe Porozowski and I sat on the stage, one on each side of the principal and surrounded by the other teachers. I was to be the first to speak and I dreaded the thought that I might not meet my teachers’ and others’ expectations. As it turned out, the evening proved successful; so much so that the next day my teacher suggested that if I was prepared to translate it from Hebrew into Yiddish, he would seek to have it serialised in the daily newspaper Unser Leben. I was alarmed by the suggestion, afraid of becoming exposed to the possible criticism of the entire community. Therefore, I did not proceed with the translation. Soon after, a series of articles about Maimonides did appear in the paper and I came to regret my timidity.
