Cream City Review

Hebrew school is a misnomer. One learns many things in Hebrew school—Biblical parables, the four questions to be asked on the Passover, Hanukah songs, Zionism, the cruelty of other children, and how to play tic-tac-toe on a laminate desktop—but not Hebrew. Nor any other language, in fact, except a few choice profanities and ethnic slurs picked up from precocious, if nascently sociopathic classmates. At some point, every upper-middle class suburban Jewish kid with Conservative or Reformed parents comes to the profound and unsettling realization that while Chinese school teaches Chinese and German school inculcates German—several of my elementary school classmates could read Goethe by the age of twelve—Hebrew school is merely a pantomime of linguistic instruction, a veritable dumb show of philology, where a successful graduate acquires a toddler's vocabulary and the ability to read block script without comprehension.

My awakening occurred at the age of six. Before first grade, I'd actually looked forward to starting Hebrew school. I'd uncovered an introductory textbook in our attic—a relic of my mother's abortive effort to learn the language as an adult. And I'd already taught myself a few preliminary words and phrases. So imagine my disappointment when, on the first Sunday of September, our curriculum was devoted entirely to Adam and Eve and the serpent. In English. I might just as well have enrolled in a course on Milton. But I was only six years old, so the plan-of-study remained largely outside my control. Yet what followed, from first grade until my bar mitzvah, was a thrice-weekly struggle with my mother over whether I had to attend classes that I found tedious, indoctrinating, and irrelevant. I mastered several new talents: pleading, malingering, even outright deception, such as claiming school was cancelled for an obscure Jewish festival. But my victories proved elusive, my suffering as relentless as Job's.

I can't claim that I learned nothing of my heritage in Hebrew school. Although, for the sake of accuracy, my ancestors spoke Yiddish. As secular Jews in Eastern Europe, they'd have been no more familiar with Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's early lexicon of Modern Hebrew than William Shakespeare's Early Modern English. Those tedious hours struggling to [End Page 17] read the subtitles on Israeli war films could have been more fittingly devoted to parsing out Sholem Aleichem's stories at the Workmen's Circle. Alas, much of what my synagogue taught its pupils was not only tangential, but outright false. We started at age six with the "Biblical" tale of Abraham "slaughtering" his father's idols—an allegory not actually found in the Old Testament, I later discovered, but in an obscure rabbinical midrash. Seven years later, we concluded with dowdy Mrs. L, a teacher of disconcerting and seemingly unflappable zeal, assuring us that when the first Jewish settlers arrived in Palestine during the late 19^th century, they encountered a barren desert inhabited by only a smattering of Bedouins. (I recognize that Palestinian schools have taught comparable balderdash, but I did not have to sit through it.) Along the way, we collected dimes to plant trees in Israel, trees that I later learned to be metaphorical. What progress I'd made in kindergarten with my mother's hand-me-down grammar evaporated rapidly. After seven years of diligent attendance, I knew the words for bird, cat and pencil.