Tag #106322 - Interview #91108 (Boleslaw Janowski)

In the vicinity of our house there was a cheder, which I started attending at age five or six. Classes were in the morning. There were 30 boys minimum in my class. But I didn’t like that cheder somehow. There was this melamed there, we called him Kanczuk [‘kanczuk’ is a whip made of leather thongs], awful discipline, and I’m belligerent, and I started fighting the discipline. In the end I got out of that cheder and moved to another one 500 meters further on. My second melamed, who had come from Lublin, was a very civilized, liberal man. But I didn’t go there for long, either. It was even a progressive cheder, but somehow I couldn’t get interested in Hebrew. I found it a bit repellent, I don’t know why – that was silly of me, because to this day I don’t know any Hebrew. I quit cheder when I was eight or nine. In all, I was no longer than three years in both cheders.