by Deen, Shulem
“Vouchers!” Gitty sputtered in disbelief when I walked into the house and waved them in front of her. “What are we going to do with vouchers?”
Vouchers were the local currency, printed by the school system, with which it paid the bulk of its employee salaries. Everyone in the village seemed to have a surplus of them. The vouchers were redeemable at local shops, whose owners were then paid in dollars by the school, at a steep discount.
There had been a time when schoolteachers had to wait weeks, sometimes months, for their pay. But that was no longer the case. The school had a makeshift treasury, a small office on the ground floor of the boys’ school with a computer and an old inkjet printer, and could print all the vouchers it needed. Denominations of fives, tens, twenties, still wet from the sputtering wheel of the inkjet were packed into cabinets by a young female secretary.
The vouchers were a source of constant aggravation. Every day, it seemed, one store or another changed its voucher policy. When Pollack’s Dry Goods Store announced that it would accept vouchers, there was a run for the small basement store on Lincoln Avenue, and its supplies of underwear, socks, and baby outfits quickly cleared off the shelves. Einhorn’s Basics and Beyond was forced to follow suit, while Grossman’s Books & Judaica announced that it would no longer accept vouchers.
I thought Gitty was overreacting. There was a lot we could do with vouchers. “We might be able to exchange them for food stamps,” I said.
If vouchers were like a Third World currency, food stamps were as good as the U.S. dollar. Grossman’s Books & Judaica accepted food stamps without question, as did both dry goods stores and the small silver shop in the Winklers’ basement on Jackson Avenue. At the annual yeshiva fund-raising dinner, one man after another counted out food stamp checks for donations and received appreciative nods. Even the elderly itinerant vendor, who stood in the shul foyer every Wednesday evening with his refurbished Walkmans and alarm clocks, accepted food stamps gladly. Unlike the vouchers, a strictly local currency, food stamps could be taken to Monsey and Williamsburg and passed on further.
Soon I had other substituting jobs, often for several weeks, as the regular rebbes took their two-week summer vacations. The vouchers piled up in an envelope in a kitchen drawer, right next to the dairy cutlery. We could buy all the groceries we wanted, or another bundle of pink and yellow baby outfits, but we still had no way to pay our rent or the electric bill.
Chapter Eight
Teaching felt strange to me, vaguely fraudulent. It hadn’t been long since my own days as a cheder boy, and it felt as if I was not old enough, wise enough, learned enough to be teaching my own group of cheder boys. Mostly, though, I was reliving the memories of my youth, this time from the other side of the rebbe’s desk.
As a child, I had been a daydreamer—one of the worst offenses, to have your mind wander from your rebbe’s lesson and your finger drift away from the text in front of you.
“SHULEM, VIE HALT MEN?”
It was the most common question of my childhood, always, when it came, jarring me out of a sweet daydream. From first grade through ninth, each rebbe in his own gruff voice, angry, impatient, or sighing in resignation: “SHULEM, WHERE ARE WE HOLDING?”
Where we were “holding” was the specific passage, line, and word in the text of our Talmuds, which we were to know at all times by keeping our forefingers pressed against the small square letters, moving along as the rebbe led us through the jungle of dense, unpunctuated Aramaic text, the digest of rabbinic discourse in the ancient Babylonian cities of Sura and Pumbeditha.
Whenever the question came, my mind, in a frenzy, would spin through the haze of my daydream as I tried to recall a passage, a phrase, or even a word. I would hear the faint echoes of fragmented clauses, This passage is not according to Rav Sheshes, or Ravina put the query to Rav Ashi, and I would search frantically through the text, until—wait, was the phrase in the Gemara or the Rashi? Or I would find not one but two instances—and which was it? Often I could not find the phrase at all and would wonder, gripped with panic: Was I even on the right page?
If I failed to know where we were holding, the rebbe would beckon silently with his forefinger. I would rise, arms and legs quivering, and head to his desk, where, at his nod toward my arm, I would extend my right hand. The rebbe would grab hold of my fingers, then reach for his rod—the dowel of an old wooden coat hanger—raise it high in the air, and bring it down on my palm. Whoosh. Thwack. At his signal, I would extend my other hand, and the thwacking would be repeated until, by some arbitrary measure, the rebbe was satisfied. With each thwack, my palm would burn and I’d pray for it all to end, for the rod to break, for my rebbe to have a heart attack.
The thwacking happened often, and it happened to each of us, but still there was the shame, walking back to my chair, rubbing my bright red palms against my blue or brown corduroy trousers. I never questioned the justice of it, though. If the shape of a fluffy white cloud outside the open window, or the tooting of an angry cabdriver’s horn, or the passing siren of a fire engine induced a daydream, it only followed that I was to be punished for it. If Ravina had a query to Rav Ashi, it would behoove me to pay attention. Because Ravina had important questions, as did all the rabbis of the Talmud, and to be a pious Hasidic boy, to grow up to be a pious Hasidic man, a boy must pay attention to the questions posed by the rabbis, and so not have any questions of his own.
These are the laws you shall put before them. So said God to Moses, who then taught the children of Israel the proper way to bore holes in the ears of their slaves (drag them to a doorpost first), how to treat a slave-girl sold by her father (marry her or set her free after six years), the amount owed to a slaveholder if your ox gored his slave (thirty silver shekels).
Each week, another portion of the Bible: priestly vestments, the half-shekel census in the Sinai desert, the golden calf, the Sabbatical year for the fields, purities and impurities.
Eleven days from Horeb, via Mount Seir, to Kadesh Barnea. I was in the fifth grade, and the class was restless with thoughts of summer. At home, my mother packed my trunk: bathing suits, flashlight, laundry bag, cup and basin for negel vasser—the bedside washing ritual. Also, bags of pretzels and potato chips that would be crummy and stale one week later. In our classroom at the Krasna cheder in Borough Park, Moses was entering his final days; the forty years of wandering through the desert were almost over, and soon we would be off to summer camp, at the end of which Moses would die and we, the student campers, would take off in a caravan of yellow school buses to ride the roller coasters and bumper cars at a nearby amusement park.
At camp, there would be games and activities, field days and color wars, but only in the late afternoons. Until five o’clock, Moses’s words would continue, and we would study them from our dog-eared volumes of Deuteronomy, with the same rebbes as all year round, with their harsh voices, their scoldings, and their rods. All summer, Moses would berate, chastise, and teach the great lessons about loving God with all your heart and all your soul and all your possessions because those who ceased to love God were punished by war and famine and pestilence until the love of God was restored, and then we would go swimming or play kickball out on the grassy field.
Now, however, we were still in Brooklyn, still in the first week of Deuteronomy, and Moses was giving the children of Israel a talking-to about their bad behavior of the past forty years.
“Chaim Burich,” the rebbe called, “what is the meaning of Eleven Days?”
Chaim Burich blinked, looked at the rebbe, then at the rod on the rebbe’s desk. But Chaim Burich did not know the answer.
“Shea! What is the meaning of Eleven Days?”
Shea, too, stared back at the rebbe blankly.
“Shulem! What is the meaning of Eleven Days?”
I did not know the answer, but there was comfort in knowing that I was not alone. One by one, the rebbe’s question went around the classroom, and each boy, in turn, remained silent.
; Finally, the rebbe turned to Nusi, the smartest boy in the class.
“A distance of eleven days,” Nusi’s voice rang through the classroom, his tone unbearably smug.
“Nusi, read to us from Rashi!”
Nusi placed his index finger on the small rounded letters on the lower half of the page: “Says the holy Rashi,” Nusi sang as the rest of us fidgeted in our seats, “The presence of the Shechina was so great that you traveled in three days a distance of eleven days. And then you sinned, and you wandered for forty years.”
The rebbe reached for his rod and walked over to Chaim Burich. Chaim Burich extended his palm, the rebbe grabbed his fingers, and Chaim Burich’s mouth formed a sudden O as the rod met his palm and he let out a breathy, muffled shriek. The rebbe let go of Chaim Burich’s hand and moved on to Shea, then to me, then to Srul Yosef, then to Motty, Berry, Shloimy. Twenty-four boys got their palms thwacked, twenty-four boys rubbed their sore palms on their trousers for forgetting Rashi’s commentary on Eleven Days. All except Nusi, who sat with a half smile, his chin resting on his arm, while the rest of us struggled to hold back our tears.
Cheder wasn’t all palm thwacking. Aside from Talmud and Bible studies, the Krasna cheder had a proper “English department.” From four to six in the afternoon, four days a week, we were taught to read and write English and elementary mathematics.
Most of the students scoffed at these studies, taking their cues from many of the adults, who considered it a waste of time and a distraction from Torah study. Even our rebbes, the religious-studies teachers who were with us from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, showed disdain for “English” by explaining that it was a grudging concession to the secular government and its laws. Some boys routinely left school at four, saying that their parents forbade them to study English, while the rest of us looked on in envy, wishing that our parents, too, were so pious.
English studies began in third grade. My first English teacher, Mr. Bernstein, was a tall, thin man, perpetually red-faced from shouting, with a tiny yarmulke on his head. He would enter our classroom each day, carrying his shiny black briefcase in hand, promptly at 4:00? PM. He would nod cordially to the rebbe, who would nod back in his superior way. The small red-and-blue knitted yarmulke was no match for the rebbe’s broad-brimmed black hat. It was one of our earliest lessons: smaller hats always showed deference to larger ones.
Over time, I came to enjoy those two hours. Daydreaming was little impediment to mastering the correct spelling of cat and house. Two plus two equaled four, there wasn’t much to it. This wasn’t some ancient rabbi asking another ancient rabbi how to explain an extra letter or word in the Bible, which, in my mind, seemed neither extraneous nor consequential.
English studies proved pleasant for another reason: There was no palm thwacking. English teachers could shout, stamp their feet, blow their cheeks into a bright purple sheen, but they could not lay a hand on us. Still, as was common knowledge among us students, English teachers were to be despised as purveyors of profanity—“Aynglish, foy!” went the refrain.
Once, during morning recess in the third grade, I had the notion to heap public scorn on Mr. Bernstein by drawing a picture of him sitting on the toilet. My fellow classmates stood around my desk observing my impromptu art performance. Mr. Bernstein’s humiliation on the pages of my notebook felt righteous.
Our rebbe, a humorless Satmar Hasid from Williamsburg, thought differently. When he entered our classroom at the end of recess and found the class gathered around my desk, he approached and studied my drawing. As it turned out, I hadn’t understood his priorities. It was not Mr. Bernstein’s honor that offended our rebbe but the fact that I had dirty things on my mind. Bathrooms were tumeh, profane places, and the things done in bathrooms were also profane, and so they were not to be spoken about and certainly not to be illustrated in our notebooks.
The rebbe grabbed my upper arm with his hand, lifted me out of my seat, and, clasping my arm firmly, led me to his desk.
“Halt arois di hant.”
Whoosh, thwack. Other hand. Whoosh, thwack. Other hand. Whoosh, thwack. The rest of the class looked on with profound boredom as our rebbe, his arm cantilevered across the air from his shoulder, swung his wooden rod up and down in an almost robotic motion, the rod swishing through the air and breaking its course on my palm while the rebbe, keeping time with his swing, issued the plaintive admonition: You. Thwack. Shall. Thwack. Not. Thwack. Profane. Thwack. This classroom. Thwack. With dirty images. Thwack, thwack, thwack.
It was now fourteen years since my third-grade rebbe thwacked my palms for my profane drawing, eight years since my ninth-grade rebbe slapped me for eating a bag of potato chips during a lesson on liabilities for digging pits in public places. All that thwacking and slapping now came to mind as I tried to teach Srulik Schmeltzer’s sixth-grade class the laws of discarding leavened bread on the day before Passover. The boys chatted throughout the lesson, as if I weren’t there, some even getting out of their seats and strolling around.
“Chaim Nuchem Braun, can you please sit down and keep quiet?” I called to a skinny boy who had stood up to look out the window and shouted something to a friend across the room.
“Chaim Nuchem Braun, can you please sit down and keep quiet?” the boy mimicked, then grinned at his friends as he walked to his seat and the class burst into laughter. I could feel the blood rush to my head as my body froze. I could not process any thoughts beyond the feeling of humiliation. I felt a kind of physical weakness in my body, a tremor in my jaws, and I clenched my teeth to keep it from showing. It was the second day of a two-week job. I could not imagine how I would last two weeks. But how could I, a twenty-two-year-old man, be cowed by a class of ten-year-olds?
At 12:45, I walked the two blocks home for an hour of lunch, before I would return for the afternoon. Along Clinton Lane, near the site of a new home construction, I spotted a “wire” on the ground, at the side of the road. It looked almost exactly like the one my fourth-grade rebbe had used instead of a rod, a white length of round, hollow rubber. It was the perfect size, twice arm’s-length, just right to fold in half and hold at one end.
Halt arois di hant. I remembered the hundreds of times I had heard it. Hold out your hand. Without thinking, I picked up the rubber cord, wrapped it around my fingers, and then placed it inside my coat pocket.
There were the usual bouts of shouting and laughter across the classroom that afternoon, and I began to grow accustomed to it. I would not use the wire in my pocket, I decided. I would deal with the boys as best I could and somehow get through it. The next day, however, the boys grew even rowdier; when I called to Berry Glancz to stop speaking to the boy sitting next to him, his response sent me over the edge.
“Ich feif dich uhn.”
He muttered it under his breath, not brazen enough to say it out loud, but the words were unmistakable. The language of defiance in the schoolyard, or among siblings in their rivalries, a child’s bluster. Ich feif dich uhn. I fife my horn at you. I do not care for you or for your orders or your requests or desires, and so I blow my whistle at you. I shoot a burst of hot air in your face. Because you are nothing to me.
But I was not nothing to this boy. I was his rebbe. I reached into the inside breast pocket of my coat, where the rubber cord lay coiled flat against my chest. In a flash, I stood over Berry. For a moment, I intended to order him to “hold out your hand.” Instead, as if my body acted on its own, I delivered a strike to boy’s upper left arm, a hissing sshhwisscchh-thwack! that frightened even me with its violence. Berry’s hand flew up to cover the spot I had struck, his mouth forming a sudden, silent “AH!”
I could see the anger in his eyes but did not care. He could fife and fife, but I was the one with the authority to use force, to strike him, and I watched as this realization sunk in and he looked back at me, angry but silent. The rest of the class, too, was silent as I made my way back to my desk. They remained silent for the rest of the afternoon, and the
day after and the day after that.
Silent and contemptuous. I had gained the boys’ obedience but not their respect. I had demonstrated not strength but weakness, and I saw in their eyes that they knew it. They had broken me, and I hated them for it.
In the teachers’ room down the hall, the rebbes would talk about changes. The rebbes in New Square were always more brutal than the rebbes in Borough Park. I had heard the stories. One rebbe beat a boy with his gartel mercilessly until the boy lay on the floor howling for hours. Another thwacked a boy’s palms several hundred times, until his welts began to bleed. One of my friends told me of a first-grade rebbe who had spanked his backside so raw that he couldn’t sit for days, all because the rebbe had accused him of taking a small bag of candies from his desk drawer, only to find the candies in a different drawer a few minutes later.
Now the punishments were more measured. Some only slapped the students, instead of using a rod. “Feel the sting in your hand,” one fifth-grade rebbe said to me earnestly. “If it hurts the child, it should hurt you, too.” Others thought the rod was acceptable but that strikes must be meted out judiciously. Whipping a boy until he howled for hours was no longer advisable. Berel Eisenman, a teacher for nearly two decades who was once known to be the most brutal of all rebbes, had done a complete turnabout. “I no longer use a rod. Now I use ice cream pops.” Instead of punishing for bad behavior, he rewarded for good. The other rebbes thought his approach too lenient. Even the principal shook his head. “Children need to be hit sometimes. That’s never going to change.”
Walking home from school, I thought about Berel Eisenman’s words. Ice cream pops, there was an idea. I did not want to hit students. I wanted them to like me. I wanted to be a “good rebbe,” and so, when I finished the two weeks with Srulik Schmeltzer’s sixth-graders, I took on Reuven Mashinsky’s seventh-graders, and had a new method.
