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When I was about six years old, my mother brought an old, ugly spinster to teach me Hebrew. Miss Smuckler was a Hebrew and Yiddish teacher at a Jewish school in Iasi. I was usually an obedient little girl, but I didn’t want to listen to her, I gave her a hard time; I didn’t want to answer her questions, I was stubborn. When I was little I didn’t like ugliness in any form, I liked beautiful people, and Miss Smuckler was ugly, so her lessons didn’t go that well!
My mother didn’t punish me and she didn’t insist on me continuing the Hebrew lessons, she had done that for my grandfather’s sake mostly. She also knew from her own grandfather what it felt like to be forced to learn something you didn’t like. She had been in the same situation: her father wanted her to learn Hebrew, the Talmud, as the only child, but she wasn’t especially drawn to that. And her father complained to his father, my mother’s grandfather, and he said, ‘Let her be, she will be an ‘oyfgeklert,’ that means a free spirit, a free thinker in Yiddish.
My mother didn’t punish me and she didn’t insist on me continuing the Hebrew lessons, she had done that for my grandfather’s sake mostly. She also knew from her own grandfather what it felt like to be forced to learn something you didn’t like. She had been in the same situation: her father wanted her to learn Hebrew, the Talmud, as the only child, but she wasn’t especially drawn to that. And her father complained to his father, my mother’s grandfather, and he said, ‘Let her be, she will be an ‘oyfgeklert,’ that means a free spirit, a free thinker in Yiddish.
Period
Location
Iasi
Romania
Interview
Felicia Menzel