Heder

The Heder was the foundational educational institution of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, the place where every Jewish boy was initiated into the sacred texts and traditions of his people. It was not merely a school but a religious obligation, so central to communal identity that no Jewish boy was allowed to grow up without at least a rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew. The scantiest income had to be divided to provide for a boy's tuition, and to leave a boy without a teacher was considered a disgrace upon the whole family, to the remotest relative. For the children of the destitute, a free school supported by the charity of the pious ensured that even the poorest could receive instruction. Consequently, every boy was sent to heder almost as soon as he could speak, continuing his studies until his confirmation at thirteen years of age, or as much longer as his talent and ambition carried him.

The Sacred Initiation and the Hero of the Family

The entry into the heder was a rite of passage steeped in religious symbolism. When Mary Antin's brother Joseph was five years old, he was carried to the heder on his first day covered over with a praying-shawl, so that nothing unholy should look on him. He was presented with a bun on which were traced, in honey, the words: "The Torah left by Moses is the heritage of the children of Jacob." This sweet initiation marked the beginning of a boy's transformation into the hero of his family. After a boy entered heder, he was served before the other children at table, and nothing was too good for him. If the family were very poor, all the girls might go barefoot, but the heder boy must have shoes; he must have a plate of hot soup, though the others ate dry bread. When the rebbe came on Sabbath afternoon to examine the boy in the hearing of the family, everybody sat around the table and nodded with satisfaction if he read his portion well, and he was given a great saucerful of preserves, praised, blessed, and made much of. This exalted status was reinforced by the boy's own morning prayer, "I thank Thee, Lord, for not having created me a female," a phrase that made explicit the heder's role in a world where it was not much to be a girl.

The Daily Regimen and the Rebbe's Discipline

The heder was a place of intense, all-day study. Mary Antin, who sometimes went to her brother's heder to bring him his dinner, observed the boys as they sat on benches around the table, with their hats on and the sacred fringes hanging beneath their jackets. The rebbe sat at an end of the table, rehearsing two or three of the boys who were studying the same part, pointing out the words with his wooden pointer so as not to lose the place. Everybody read aloud, the smallest boys repeating the alphabet in a sing-song while the advanced boys read their portions in a different sing-song, each raising his voice to its loudest to drown out the others. The good boys never took their eyes off their page, except to ask the rebbe a question, but the naughty boys stared around the room and kicked each other under the table until the rebbe caught them at it. He had a ruler for striking the bad boys on the knuckles, and in a corner of the room leaned a long birch wand for pupils who would not learn their lessons. The boys came to heder before nine in the morning and remained until eight or nine in the evening, with stupid pupils sometimes having to stay till ten. There was an hour for dinner and play at noon, when 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 Exclusion of Girls and the Kitchen Schoolroom

The heder's most profound significance for Mary Antin lay in what it excluded. There was nothing in what the boys did in heder that she could not have done—if she had not been a girl. For a girl, it was enough if she could read her prayers in Hebrew and follow the meaning by the Yiddish translation at the bottom of the page. It did not take long to learn this much, a couple of terms with a rebbetzin, a female teacher, and after that she was done with books. A girl's real schoolroom was her mother's kitchen, where she learned to bake and cook and manage, to knit, sew, and embroider, and in country places to spin and weave. While her hands were busy, her mother instructed her in the laws regulating a pious Jewish household and in the conduct proper for a Jewish wife, for of course every girl hoped to be a wife; a girl was born for no other purpose. This division of education was a direct reflection of the community's deepest values, where marriage was a sacrament and to rear a family of children was to serve God. While men, in addition to begetting, might busy themselves with the study of the Law, woman's only work was motherhood, and to be left an old maid was the greatest misfortune that could threaten a girl.

Joseph's Nightmare and the Limits of the Heder

The heder was not always a place of joyful learning. Mary Antin's brother Joseph, 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. He cried and protested, but their father was determined that he should not grow up ignorant, so he used the strap freely to hasten the truant's steps to school. The heder was the only beginning allowable for a boy in Polotzk, and to heder Joseph must go. The poor boy's life was made a nightmare, and the horror was not lifted until he was ten years old, when he went to a modern school where intelligible things were taught, and it proved that it was not the book he hated, but the blindness of the heder. This episode revealed the heder's limitations as a vehicle for modern education, and it foreshadowed the family's eventual turn toward a different kind of schooling in America, where the rigid certainties of the Pale would give way to a new world of public schools, free libraries, and the promise of equal opportunity for all children, regardless of gender.