A long, long time ago before the invention of matzah ball mix, Jewish mothers, instead of running a limo service for their kids, were busy in their kitchen.
They were into food processing, not transportation. They made a hot breakfast every morning, tuna salad with just the right amount of eggs and relish for lunch and stewed chickens at night.
And Jewish merchants — at least most of them — lived in apartments above their stores. And everybody’s grandparents spoke Yiddish.
In this bygone day young Jewish boys went to Hebrew school. They also called it cheder, which translates to “room.” Or “jail cell” as some of my classmates said.
From the playgrounds of summer to the cheder of fall was torturous to an 8-year-old. Me and my pals would have voted for Hank Greenberg over the Baal Shem Tov (who was probably a lousy first baseman) as the most significant Jewish figure of the millennium.
Our dreams of destiny centered on Yankee pinstripes, not double-breasted dark suits and wide-brimmed, black hats.
Attitudes toward children in these backward times were shocking. Children were considered apprentices to adulthood. They were looked upon as deficient to adults in experience, wisdom, and intelligence.
Therefore, they were under the legal and de facto direction of Mama and Papa. Such a social environment is as mysterious to our modern minds as the social dynamics of 10th century BCE Babylonian courtship. But believe me, that’s the way it was.
When Mama said, “go to sleep,” you closed your eyes and dreamed. When Mama said, “go to Hebrew school,” you said, “yes ma’am” in Hebrew and looked around for a Hebrew-English dictionary.
The baseball Boys of Summer became the Cheder Hochems of Fall. It was a shocking transition, as our little minds perceived it, from freedom to tyranny.
First of all, the teacher wore a double-breasted suit and since he wasn’t a cross-dresser, that meant he was of the male gender — a social group familiar with paddles and other blunt instruments of persuasion.
Secondly, he radiated an authoritative manner (how else to pound sense in an 8-year-old mind more interested in Yankee Stadium of 1940 than Solomon’s Temple of 1000 BCE?).
Had we been wiser — had we ever even slightly skimmed a book of Eastern European history — we would have realized that we had stepped into a time machine that carried us back to 19th century Poland, a temporal space shuttle especially designed to persecute Jewish American kids.
It was clearly a time warp. Our cheder was exactly like hundreds of such classrooms sprinkled through the Pale of Settlement a couple centuries ago. More Jews, at that time, were confined to the Pale than lived in America and Israel combined.
And every shtetl had its cheder, its room of learning. It was the Eastern European equivalent of the American one-room schoolhouse, with the exception that in the European version the students were hungry, were dressed in rags and slept on straw pallets instead of beds. And the teacher’s paycheck was a potluck supper from his students’ mama.
We understood none of these differences. But we did catch on to the fact that the czar of our classroom worshipped two educational icons: discipline and repetition.
Pedagogically speaking, we were in Vilna, not Memphis, Tenn. Our teacher (“warden” some of the bolder kids called him) did not hesitate to use physical punishment. He was as politically incorrect as Captain Ahab at the Save the Whales Convention. He did not watch his words. His favorite adjective was “dummy” which he used often, and with accuracy.
But in the real sense of the word he was a caring man. He cared for us enough to deliver a quick punishment with his ruler if it motivated our mastery of Hebrew grammar or vocabulary.
Brief physical discomfort to the young body in return for lifelong enrichment of the young mind. Not a bad trade-off. We were lucky to be prisoners of such an educational system. But what 8-year-old under the shadow of that ruler could understand, much less say thank you. It was an educational timed-release capsule. It took us several decades to experience the benefits.