This was the time of year when all the teachers would be preparing their classes for the coming semester, as was the custom among Jews. For my father, this was a bitter, painful "day of judgement". It meant he had to go to each of his "bread-givers", and ask them if they wished to continue entrusting their children to his tutelage...the whole thing went against all his nature. It was a humiliation for him...to swallow his pride and depend on the kindness of a rich neighbor for his livelihood.

In those days, his former love of manual labor would be re-kindled...to stand before the forge with a piece of iron, or with saw and plane over log and board...to be his own man and not need to humble himself. He would be angry with himself for letting himself be led to his fate, like an ox to the slaughterhouse. Angry also with his children, on whose account he had let himself be forced to bow his head, to kneel before his employers. And especially, he was angry with our mother, who had hung this heavy millstone from his neck, by not allowing him to become a tradesman, which was the thing he had always wanted to do...

For us small fry, those middle days of Succoth were no holidays....instead, days of gloom and sorrow. We felt like strangers, lonely and forgotten in our own house.....terrified even to ask for something to eat....hiding so as not to bring attention to ourselves...going about with soft, quiet steps, so no one should hear a peep out of us, as though we were the ones most responsible for the whole state of affairs.

Our attempts not to upset him only seemed to make things worse. The sight of mother’s sad face, and the nervous, frightened eyes of his children, depressed him even more. His fatherly pride suffered, that his wife and children were forced to bear the fate of having a husband and a father who was a teacher.

Mother, with her muffled sniffing and coughing, would bear her hurt and endure her misfortune...it was her bad luck, that while for other Jews, Passover was Passover, and Succoth was Succoth....that for her (may God not punish her for saying so)...they were both sadder than the Ninth of Ab! Sometimes she would try to talk to him: why should he be different from all the other village teachers? Look at Reb Ya’akov-Mayer, the congregation president’s son-in-law, or Reb Shaulkeh, his good friend....they weren’t ashamed to go ask a well-to-do householder for a pupil...why not him? He shouldn’t forget, she argued further, that he also had a household which had to be supported....so he couldn’t afford to turn up his nose. But father didn’t want to listen to any more of mother’s advice. Her speech would be answered by a slamming door, and he wouldn’t come back until the day was over.

And year, my father, in a moment of great agitation, made an angry vow that he would never again "cross the threshold" of his employers. "If they need me so badly", he argued, "let them come to me!"

This was tantamount to a silent declaration of war on his "bread-givers"...it didn’t take long before he found out on whose side lay the power...in that time, he was left altogether without a class to teach. He packed a bag, threw in his prayer shawl and phylacteries, a few books, a couple of shirts), and left the wife and children "in God’s hands". He came to a village...and got a job teaching a settler’s children. The livelihood was meager, but he was satisfied: for a while at least, he had taken charge....

************************

It was that time of year again, when my father’s "employers" were coming to enlist their children in his class, that there came over my mother a feeling of envy: that she, who was also a mother of young children, didn’t have the means to send her children to a "Rabbi"...And seeing that my father’s class was filling up nicely, and that their livelihood would be secured for another term, she went to a chat with my father over their own son’s future...

"You know, Yisroelkeh", she approached him with a soft, trembling voice, "the boy (meaning me) is going to be a eleven years old the day after Yom Kippur (may he live to a hundred and twenty!), and once again he has no partner to study with...and since you don’t have time to teach him by himself, what do you plan to do about his future? Ha?"

Mother clutched her head with both hands, and sat down unable to speak. My father’s last words, and especially the tone with which he spoke them, had struck at her deeply. I understood that with the words, "that older "blessing" of yours", he was referring to my older brother, Aryeh-Leyb. A few years previously, he had studied in the Brisk Hebrew School, with Reb Yankel Kletshelekh; and later in the Yeshiva. Everyone praised his clever head, and predicted great things for him. In the end, however, he began to spend time with students at the secular high school, who led him astray from the path of righteousness. He turned his back on the Holy Talmud, in favor of Russian novels....and then one fine summer day, he suddenly ran off to Warsaw. There he became a an employee in a shop, and at night he read. And to top it all off, he had become a zealous Socialist. "Who knows what will become of him in the end?" my mother would ask in despair.

After what my brother, the "freethinker", had done, his name was never again spoken in our home. And so when my father had said that the same thing could happen to me in Brisk, as had happened to my older brother...those words opened up painful wounds for my mother.

And so as if to show her husband that she would not be deterred....on the very next morning, she put together a few things of mine, packed them in a suitcase, and took me to Brisk to enroll me in the Yeshiva.