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My sister and I were very diligent pupils, and my father took great satisfaction in our progress and built great plans for our higher education. My brother, who was five years old when he entered heder, hated to be shut up all day over a printed page that meant nothing to him.
Promptly when custom prescribed, Pinchus, the petted only son, was sent to heder. My grandfather being on the road at the time, my grandmother herself carried the boy in her arms, as was usual on the first day.
The winds rushed in from outer space, roaring in my ears, "America! America!" On the day when our steamer ticket arrived, my mother did not go out with her basket, my brother stayed out of heder, and my sister salted the soup three times. I do not know what I did to celebrate the occasion. Very likely I played tricks on Deborah, and wrote a long letter to my father.
At the Heder the boys were telling one another that the Catcher was a monster, who caught boys, made soldiers out of them, and turned them over to the Government, in place of the Jewish grown-ups that were unwilling and unable to serve. And the boys were divided in their opinions: some said that the Catcher was a demon, one of those who had been created at twilight on the eve of the Sabbath.
Such was the lot of the juvenile cantonists. Youths, who had no knowledge of the Russian language, were torn away from the heder or yeshibah, often from wife and children. In consequence of the early marriages then in vogue, most youths at the age of eighteen were married.
The boys came to heder before nine in the morning, and remained until eight or nine in the evening. Stupid pupils, who could not remember the lesson, sometimes had to stay till ten. There was an hour for dinner and play at noon. Good little boys played quietly in their places, but most of the boys ran out of the house and jumped and yelled and quarrelled.
The "titled" inteligenzia, reared in the Russian schools, who had drifted away from Judaism, was now joined by that other intelligenzia, the product of heder and yeshibah, who had acquired European culture through the medium of neo-Hebraic literature, and was in closer contact with the masses of the Jewish people.
He sought to supplement his son Mordecai Aaron's heder education with a knowledge of secular sciences.
Rational instruction in the Bible and in Hebrew grammar, scorned by the Talmudic dialecticians as superficial studies, was banished from the Heder. Happily for the future writer, his father taught him the Bible, and awakened love in his sensitive heart for the Hebrew language and for the glorious past of his people. At the same time, his Talmudic education went on admirably.
My father distinguished himself for scholarship from the first. Five years old when he entered heder, at eleven he was already a yeshibah bahur a student in the seminary. The rebbe never had occasion to use the birch on him. On the contrary, he held him up as an example to the dull or lazy pupils, praised him in the village, and carried his fame to Polotzk.
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