Max describes limited educational opportunties in small towns. Max's parents sent him Bielsk, where he stayed for one year with his widowed maternal grandmother to attend cheder school there. Discipline in Bielsk at the hands of the melamed. Level of education in the Bielsk school.
If cheder --for boys only-- ends at 13, we can infer that Max spent his formative teenage years in W-L -- before emigrating at age 16???
IMAGE: Two old Jews
LISA: Lisa, interviewing her grandfather, Max Could the Jewish kids go to the secular schools?
MAX: Max, interviewed by Lisa or talking with other family members No. Not in a small town like this. In the big cities [there] used to be gymnasias, a high school [or] something. But in the small towns, they didn't have a choice of schools. There was [only] one scholar [teacher] per school. So they teach you Russian! Jewish people, they had to give their children an education. They had to send them to a Jewish melamed with a long beard and with a conchick in his hand. You know what a conchick is? A leather whip... with a cat of nine tails...
LISA: Oh, my god! You got hit with that?
MAX: Me? I was a good boy.
LISA: You mean you never got into any trouble?
Did Max view mistreatment by the melamed as an unremarkable feature of his life? Perhaps so –– that too could be seen as a consequence of the very close intimicy of shtetl life. Max redirects the question:
MAX: I got trouble with my eyes. I [was] used to lamps, there was no electricity. We used to have lamps with kerosene in it. And this was supposed to light up the room. And I [assure] you it wasn't enough. And my bad eyes... I was suffering more than the others. The lamps would not have a very big light. Nevertheless on Friday, we'd have some sort of examinations of what we learned all week. It wasn't a picnic, because I had to remember everything. I read it, but I remembered every word of it.
Lisa wanted to know more about schools in Jewish Eastern Europe, and uncovered that Max didn't spend his entire youth in Wysokie:
LISA: Was this the kind of school you went to until you left Russia?
MAX: No – then my mother, my father and mother sent me away to Bielsk. It was another town larger than ours. There were more schools. I stayed with my mother's mother for one year. She was already a widow. So I stayed there and went to the cheder.
Many times I used to sneak away... and the melamed used to come up to my grandmother... Boys will be boys! So what do you think the melamed did with me? You wouldn't guess. Heh, heh... [he'd put me] on a chair, and he had a whip, with six or seven tails, and he'd snap at one end... So what happened? Start going to school!
Implication: the school opportunties in Bielsk were significantly better than in Wysokie. We don't have a reliable way of evaluating this. We can look at population: Bielsk was larger than Wysokie, but not significantly so. We can look at location: Bielsk was closer to the center of traditional Poland, but it was still a small town in the periphery. Was this enough to make a difference?
Alternatively, was there an ulterior motive to sending Max to live with his grandmother? Did Max have similar run-ins with the melamed in Wysokie and again in Bielsk? Not clear.
What is clear: the cheder system had severe deficiencies.
[4]
NARRATOR: Lisa, backgrounding/commenting. A Jewish boy in Russia started his education at the age of four, when he entered the cheder, which was usually conducted by a melamed /5/ of his father's choice. By the middle of the nineteenth century there were six thousand such schools in the Pale, with fifteen thousand melamdim. The cheder curriculum was traditionally a non-secular one, with its emphasis placed on the learning of the alphabet, Hebrew, Torah, and the basis of the Talmud. Unfortunately, the quality of the cheder education was very poor, as the result of the decrepit physical conditions of the schools, the backwards teaching methods, and the harried instructors themselves.
MAX: I wouldn't say it was a secondary school, to me it was the contrary. To me it was a higher school, because I went there after I went in the small town, to cheder what you call, and all year I would call it – gymnasia, gymansium– because the teachers were higher class, and the subjects were higher class…
NARRATOR: While the term "secondary school" refers to the next step in education after elementary school for most Americans, to Max the term implies a lower scholastic standard. Although there was a Talmud Torah, or upper level school, in Wysokie Litewskie dating from 1853 /6/, Max's parents decided to send him to a larger town anyway. These studies usually lasted until the boy went to work, or was lucky enough to go on to Yeshiva, the Talmudic Academy.
At what point, for what year, was Max in Bielsk. Best guess, based on the above: the year after cheder, when he was 13 to 14 years old.