Rebbe

The Rebbe, the Hebrew teacher of the heder, stands at the center of Mary Antin's portrait of traditional Jewish education in Polotzk. In the world she describes, the rebbe is not merely an instructor but the custodian of a sacred inheritance, the man through whom the Torah passes from generation to generation. His position is defined by the community's conviction that no Jewish boy may grow up without at least a rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew, a duty so absolute that to leave a boy without a teacher was a disgrace upon the whole family, to the remotest relative. The rebbe is the instrument of that obligation, and his classroom is the forge where the heritage of the children of Jacob is hammered into the next generation.

The Rebbe's Place in the Heder

The rebbe's authority is exercised in a room of controlled chaos. He sits at an end of the table, rehearsing two or three of the boys who are studying the same part, pointing out the words with his wooden pointer so as not to lose the place. Around him the boys sit on benches with their hats on, the sacred fringes hanging beneath their jackets, each reading aloud at full volume—the smallest repeating the alphabet in a sing-song while the advanced boys chant their portions in a different sing-song, everyone raising his voice to its loudest to drown out the others. The good boys never take their eyes off their page, except to ask the rebbe a question, while the naughty boys stare around the room and kick each other under the table until the rebbe catches them. His discipline is physical and immediate: he has a ruler for striking bad boys on the knuckles, and in a corner of the room leans a long birch wand for pupils who will not learn their lessons. The school day is long—the boys come before nine in the morning and remain until eight or nine in the evening, with stupid pupils who cannot remember their lessons sometimes staying till ten—and the rebbe presides over all of it, the fixed point of authority in a room that runs on lung power and sing-song.

The Rebbe and the Hierarchy of Learning

The rebbe's dignity is inseparable from the gender hierarchy of Jewish scholarship. After a boy enters heder, he becomes the hero of the family: served before the other children at table, given shoes even when the girls go barefoot, fed a plate of hot soup while the others eat dry bread. When the rebbe comes on Sabbath afternoon to examine the boy in the hearing of the family, everybody sits around the table and nods with satisfaction if the boy reads his portion well, and he is given a great saucerful of preserves, praised, blessed, and made much of. The rebbe is the agent of this transformation, the man whose examination turns a child into a family's pride. The prayer the boy recites—"I thank Thee, Lord, for not having created me a female"—is the theological echo of the rebbe's world, where girls could not be scholars and rabbonim. The rebbe's very existence is bound up with this exclusion: he teaches boys the sacred texts, and his status rests on the fact that what he teaches is reserved for them.

Reb' Lebe, Teacher of Girls

Yet the rebbe also appears in a diminished form, as the teacher of girls, and this second incarnation reveals the full structure of the system. Reb' Lebe, the girls' teacher, is no great scholar—great scholars would not waste their learning on mere girls—but he knows enough to teach girls Hebrew. He is tall and lean, with a lean, pointed face and a thin, pointed beard that became pointed from much stroking and pulling downwards. His hands are large, his beard not half a handful, his fingers long, and his nails, Mary Antin confesses, are not very clean. His coat is rusty, and so is his skull-cap. The description is precise and unsparing: Reb' Lebe is only a girls' teacher, and nobody would pay much for teaching girls. The poverty of his appearance is the material sign of the low value placed on female education, and the contrast with the heroic rebbe of the boys' heder is exact. For a short time Mary and her sister Fetchke go for their lessons to Reb' Lebe's heder, in the bare room off the women's gallery, up one flight of stairs, in a synagogue. The place is as noisy as a reckless expenditure of lung power could make it: the pupils on the bench shout their way from aleph to tav, cheered and prompted by the growl of the rebbe, while the children in the corridor waiting their turn play "puss in the corner" and other noisy games. Even in this degraded setting, the rebbe retains his authority: lean and rusty as he is, his pupils regard him with entire respect and follow his pointer with earnest eyes across the limp page of the alphabet or the thumbed page of the prayer-book.

The Rebbe's Significance in Mary Antin's Education

The rebbe is thus a figure of double meaning in Mary Antin's narrative. On one hand, he is the guardian of tradition, the man who transmits the Torah and whose examination of a boy before his family is a ritual of communal validation. On the other, he is the embodiment of the limits of that tradition, a man whose rusty coat and unclean nails mark the low status of the girls he teaches. Mary's own education begins under the second kind of rebbe, and her parents' ambition—to have their daughters learn to translate as well as pronounce Hebrew, to study Russian and German and arithmetic, to go to the best pension and receive a thorough secular education—is a deliberate flight beyond the rebbe's world. The rebbe represents what she is leaving behind, and also what she carries with her: the earnest following of the pointer, the respect for the teacher, the discipline of the sing-song recitation. When she later enters the American public school, she brings with her the habits of the heder—the reverence for learning, the willingness to submit to the teacher's authority—even as she leaves behind its hierarchies and its rusty-coated instructors. The rebbe is the first teacher in her life, and the standard against which all subsequent teachers are measured, whether by contrast or by continuity.