The Rise of David Levinsky (7 page)

During the penmanship lesson I was generally kept busy in other directions. The teacher’s wife would make me help her with her housework, go her errands, or mind the baby (in one instance I became so attached to the baby that when I was expelled I missed it keenly).

I seized every opportunity to watch the boys write and would practise the art, with chalk, on my mother’s table or bed, on the door of our basement room, on many a gate or fence. Sometimes a boy would let me write a line or two in his copy-book. Sometimes, too, I would come to school before the schoolmaster had returned from the morning service at the synagogue, and practise with pen and ink, following the copy of some of my classmates. One of my teachers once caught me in the act. He held me up as an ink-thief and forbade me come to school before the beginning of exercises.

Otherwise my teachers scarcely ever complained of my behavior. As to the progress I was making in my studies, they admitted, some even with enthusiasm, that mine was a “good head.” Nevertheless, to be beaten by them was an every-day experience with me.

Overworked, underfed, and goaded by the tongue-lashings of their wives, these enervated drudges were usually out of sorts. Bursts of ill temper, in the form of invective, hair-pulling, ear-pulling, pinching, caning, “nape-cracking,” or “chin-smashing,” were part of the routine, and very often I was the scapegoat for the sins of other boys. When a pupil deserved punishment and the schoolmaster could not afford to inflict it because the culprit happened to be the pet of a well-to-do family, the teacher’s anger was almost sure to be vented on me. If I happened to be somewhat absent-minded (the only offense I was ever guilty of), or was not quick enough to turn over a leaf, or there was the slightest halt in my singsong, I received a violent “nudge” or a pull by the ear.

“Lively, lively, carcass you!” I can almost hear one of my teachers shout these words as he digs his elbow into my side. “The millions one gets from your mother!”

This man would beat and abuse me even by way of expressing approval.

“A bright fellow, curse him!” he would say, punching me with an air of admiration. Or, “Where did you get those brains of yours, you wild beast?” with a violent pull at my forelock.

During the winter months, when the exercises went on until 9 in the evening, the candle or kerosene was paid for by the boys, in rotation. When it was my turn to furnish the light it often happened that my mother was unable to procure the required two copecks (one cent). Then the teacher or his wife, or both, would curse me for a sponge and a robber, and ask me why I did not go to the charity school.

Almost every teacher in town was known among us boys by some nickname, which was usually borrowed from some trade. If he had a predilection for pulling a boy’s hair we would call him “wig-maker” or “brush-maker”; if he preferred to slap or “calcimine” the culprit’s face we would speak of him as a mason. A “coachman” was a teacher who did not spare the rod or the whip; a “carpenter,” one who used his finger as a gimlet, boring a pupil’s side or cheek; a “locksmith,” one who had a weakness for “turning the screw,” or pinching.

The greatest “locksmith” in town was a man named Shmerl. But then he was more often called simply Shmerl the Pincher. He was one of my schoolmasters. He seemed to prefer the flesh of plump, well-fed boys, but as these were usually the sons of prosperous parents, he often had to forego the pleasure and to gratify his appetite on me. There was something morbid in his cruel passion for young flesh something perversely related to sex, perhaps. He was a young man with a wide, sneering mouth.

He would pinch me black and blue till my heart contracted with pain. Yet I never uttered a murmur. I was too profoundly aware of the fact that I was kept on sufferance to risk the slightest demonstration. I had developed a singular faculty for bearing pain, which I would parade before the other boys. Also, I had developed a relish for flaunting my martyrdom, for being an object of pity.

Oh, how I did hate this man, especially his sneering mouth! In my helplessness I would seek comfort in dreams of becoming a great man some day, rich and mighty, and avenging myself on him. Behold! Shmerl the Pincher is running after me, cringingly begging my pardon, and I, omnipotent and formidable, say to him: “Do you remember how you pinched the life out of me for nothing? Away with you, you cruel beast!”

Or I would vision myself dropping dead under one of his onslaughts. Behold him trembling with fright, the heartless wretch! Serves him right.

If my body happened to bear some mark of his cruelty I would conceal it carefully from my mother, lest she should quarrel with him. Moreover, to betray school secrets was considered a great “sin.”

One night, as I was changing my shirt, anxiously manœuvering to keep a certain spot on my left arm out of her sight, she became suspicious.

“Hold on. What are you hiding there?” she said, stepping up and inspecting my bare arm. She found an ugly blotch. “Wœ is me! A lamentation upon me!” she said, looking aghast. “Who has been pinching you?”

“Nobody.”

“It is that beast of a teacher, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie, Davie. It is that assassin, the cholera take him! Tell me the truth. Don’t be afraid.”

“A boy did it.”

“What is his name?”

“I don’t know. It was a boy in the street.”

“You are a liar.”

The next morning when I went to cheder she accompanied me.

Arrived there, she stripped me half-naked and, pointing at the discoloration on my arm, she said, with ominous composure:

“Look! Whose work is it?”

“Mine,” Shmerl answered, without removing his long-stemmed pipe from his wide mouth. He was no coward.

“And you are proud of it, are you?”

“If you don’t like it you can take your ornament of a son along with you. Clear out, you witch!”

She flew at him and they clenched. When they had separated, some of his hair was in her hand, while her arms, as she subsequently owned to me, were marked with the work of his expert fingers.

Another schoolmaster had a special predilection for digging the huge nail of his thumb into the side of his victim, a peculiarity for which he had been named “the Cossack,” his famous thumb being referred to by the boys as his spear. He had a passion for inventing new and complex modes of punishment, his spear figuring in most of them. One of his methods of inflicting pain was to slap the boy’s face with one hand and to prod his side with the thumb of the other, the slaps and the thrusts alternating rhythmically. This heartless wretch was an abject coward. He was afraid of thunder, of rats, spiders, dogs, and, above all, of his wife, who would call him indecent names in our presence. I abhorred him, yet when he was thus humiliated I felt pity for him.

His wife kept a stand on a neighboring street corner, where she sold cheap cakes and candy, and those of her husband’s pupils who were on her list of “good customers” were sure of immunity from his spear. As I scarcely ever had a penny, he could safely beat me whenever he was so disposed.

T
HE Cossack had a large family and one of his daughters, a little girl, named Sarah-Leah, was the heroine of my first romance.

Sarah-Leah had the misfortune to bear a striking resemblance to a sister of her father’s, an offense which her mother never forgave her. She treated her as she might a stepdaughter. As for the Cossack, he may have cared for the child, but if he did he dared not show it. Poor little Sarah-Leah! She was the outcast of the family just as I was the outcast of her father’s school.

She was about eleven years old and I was somewhat younger. The similarity of our fates and of our self-pity drew us to each other. When her father beat me I was conscious of her commiserating look, and when she was mistreated by her mother she would cast appealing glances in my direction. Once when the teacher punished me with special cruelty her face twitched and she broke into a whimper, whereupon he gave her a kick, saying:

“Is it any business of yours? Thank God your own skin has not been peeled off.”

Once during the lunch hour, when we were alone, Sarah-Leah and I, in a comer of the courtyard, she said:

“You are so strong, Davie! Nothing hurts you.”

“Nothing at all. I could stand everything,” I bragged.

“You could not, if I bit your finger.”

“Go ahead!” I said, with bravado, holding out my hand.

She dug her teeth into one of my fingers. It hurt so that I involuntarily ground my own teeth, but I smiled.

“Does it not hurt you, Davie?” she asked, with a look of admiration.

“Not a bit. Go on, bite as hard as you can.”

She did, the cruel thing, and like many an older heroine, she would not desist until she saw her lover’s blood.

“It still does not hurt, does it?” she asked, wiping away a red drop from her lips.

I shook my head contemptuously.

“When you are a man you will be strong as Samson the Strong.”

I was the strongest boy in her father’s school. She knew that most of the other boys were afraid of me, but that did not seem to interest her. At least when I began to boast of it she returned to my ability “to stand punishment,” as the pugilists would put it.

One day one of my schoolmates aroused her admiration by the way he “played” taps with his fist for a trumpet. I tried to imitate him, but failed grievously. The other boy laughed and Sarah-Leah joined him. That was my first taste of the bitter cup called jealousy.

I went home a lovelorn boy.

I took to practising “taps.” I was continually trumpeting. I kept at it so strenuously that my mother had many a quarrel with our room-mates because of it.

My efforts went for nothing, however. My rival, and with him my lady love, continued to sneer at my performances.

I had only one teacher who never beat me, or any of the other boys. Whatever anger we provoked in him would spend itself in threats, and even these he often turned to a joke, in a peculiar vein of his own.

“If you don’t behave I’ll cut you to pieces,” he would say. “I’ll just cut you to tiny bits and put you into my pipe and you’ll go up in smoke.” Or, “I’ll give you such a thrashing that you won’t be able to sit down, stand up, or lie down. The only thing you’ll be able to do is to fly-to the devil.”

This teacher used me as a living advertisement for his school. He would take me from house to house, flaunting my recitations and interpretations. Very often the passage which he thus made me read was a lesson I had studied under one of his predecessors, but I never gave him away.

Every
cheder
had its king. As a rule, it was the richest boy in the school, but I was usually the power behind the throne. Once one of these potentates (it was at the school of that kindly man) mimicked my mother hugging her pot of pea mush.

“If you do it again I’ll kill you,” I said.

“If you lay a finger on me,” he retorted, “the teacher will kick you out. Your mother doesn’t pay him, anyhow.”

I flew at him. His Majesty tearfully begged for mercy. Since then he was under my thumb and never omitted to share his ring-shaped rolls or apples with me.

Often when a boy ate something that was beyond my mother’s means—a cookie or a slice of buttered white bread—I would eye him enviously till he complained that I made him choke. Then I would go on eying him until he bribed me off with a piece of the tidbit. If staring alone proved futile I might try to bring him to terms by naming all sorts of loathsome objects. At this it frequently happened that the prosperous boy threw away his cookie from sheer disgust, whereupon I would be mean enough to pick it up and to eat it in triumph, calling him something equivalent to “Sissy.”

The compliments that were paid my brains were ample compensation for my mother’s struggles. Sending me to work was out of the question. She was resolved to put me in a Talmudic seminary. I was the “crown of her head” and she was going to make a “fine Jew” of me. Nor was she a rare exception in this respect, for there were hundreds of other poor families in our town who would starve themselves to keep their sons studying the Word of God.

Whenever one of the neighbors suggested that I be apprenticed to some artisan she would flare up. On one occasion a suggestion of this kind led to a violent quarrel.

One afternoon when we happened to pass by a book-store she stopped me in front of the window and, pointing at some huge volumes of the Talmud, she said:

“This is the trade I am going to have you learn, and let our enemies grow green with envy.”

BOOK II

ENTER SATAN

T
HE Talmudic seminary, or
yeshivah,
in which my mother placed me was a celebrated old institution, attracting students from many provinces. Like most
yeshivahs,
it was sustained by donations, and instruction in it was free. Moreover, out-of-town students found shelter under its roof, sleeping on the benches or floors of the same rooms in which the lectures were delivered and studied during the day. Also, they were supplied with a pound of rye bread each for breakfast. As to the other meals, they were furnished by the various households of the orthodox community. I understand that some school-teachers in certain villages of New England get their board on the rotation plan, dining each day in the week with another family. This is exactly the way a poor Talmud student gets his sustenance in Russia, the system being called “eating days.”

One hour a day was devoted to penmanship and a sorry smattering of Russian, the cost of tuition and writing-materials being paid by a “modern” philanthropist.

I was admitted to that seminary at the age of thirteen. As my home was in the city, I neither slept in the class-room nor “ate days.”

The lectures lasted only two hours a day, but then there was plenty to do, studying them and reviewing previous work. This I did in an old house of prayer where many other boys and men of all ages pursued similar occupations. It was known as the Preacher’s Synagogue, and was famed for the large number of noted scholars who had passed their young days reading Talmud in it.