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I considered myself absolutely, eternally, delightfully emancipated from the yoke of indefensible superstitions. I was wild with indignation and pity when I remembered how my poor brother had been cruelly tormented because he did not want to sit in heder and learn what was after all false or useless.
My mother, full of grief at the parting from home and family and all things dear, anxious about the journey, uncertain about the future, but ready, as ever, to take up what new burdens awaited her; my sister, one with our mother in every hope and apprehension; my brother, rejoicing in his sudden release from heder; and the little sister, vaguely excited by mysteries afoot; the uncles and aunts and devoted neighbors, sad and solemn over their coming loss; and my father away over in Boston, eager and anxious about us in Polotzk, an American citizen impatient to start his children on American careers, I knew the minds of every one of these, and I lived their days and nights with them after an apish fashion of my own.
Nevertheless the expectation of the Russian Government under Nicholas I. that the new schools would take the place of the time-honored educational Jewish institutions, the heder and yeshibah, remained unfulfilled. Only an insignificant percentage of Jewish children went to the Crown schools, and even these children did so only after having received their training at the heder or yeshibah.
My father distinctly remembers that she wept on the way to the heder; partly, I suppose, from joy at starting her son on a holy life, and partly from sadness at being too poor to set forth the wine and honey-cake proper to the occasion. For Grandma Rachel, schooled though she was to pious contentment, probably had her moments of human pettiness like the rest of us.
When he buckled on his satchel of books in the morning, and strode away straight as a soldier, no heder boy ever walked like that, I stood in the doorway and worshipped his retreating steps. I met him on his return in the late afternoon, and hung over him when he laid out his books for his lessons. Sometimes he had long Russian pieces to commit to memory.
So little chaps, youngsters who knew not what their life was going to be, came to know early that brothers, sons of one father, may at times be a source of trouble to one another. That was at the beginning of the summer. The teachers decided that we remain within the walls of the Heder most of the time, and show ourselves outside as little as possible during the period of danger.
He was served before the other children at table, and nothing was too good for him. If the family were very poor, all the girls might go barefoot, but the heder boy must have shoes; he must have a plate of hot soup, though the others ate dry bread. No wonder he said, in his morning prayer, "I thank Thee, Lord, for not having created me a female." It was not much to be a girl, you see.
Boys of school age often became husbands and fathers, and continued to attend heder or yeshibah after their marriage, weighed down by the triple tutelage of father, father-in-law, and teacher. The growing generation knew not the sweetness of being young. Their youth withered under the weight of family chains, the pressure of want or material dependence.
The two representatives of the "clergy" put up a warm defence for the traditional Jewish school, the heder, endeavoring to save it from the ministerial "supervision," which aimed at its annihilation. Finally a compromise was effected: the traditional heder was to be left intact for the time being, but the proposed Crown school was to be given full scope in competing with it.
Girls could not be scholars and rabbonim. I went to my brother's heder, sometimes, to bring him his dinner, and saw how the boys studied. They sat on benches around the table, with their hats on, of course, and the sacred fringes hanging beneath their jackets.
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