Bubbe's Place: Stories

Labor Zionist

My family did not live in a Jewish neighborhood. My parents had a small grocery store in a Christian neighborhood, so we could not attend a Folk Shul. Instead my brother, sister, and I, all went to the nearest synagogue for Sunday school classes. There we learned Bible stories and about the Jewish holidays. We learned Jewish history. My brother continued to go to Hebrew school to learn Hebrew, to learn Jewish prayers and how to pray, so that he could become a Bar Mitzvah. Since girls were not treated as equals, my mother arranged for us to have a private tutor. Chaver Weinberg came to our house once a week. He taught my sister and I Yiddish and modern Hebrew. My brother Irv got Yiddish lessons too. I learned no prayers. I studied Jewish history, Bible, and Yiddish literature. I remember reading Bereshit in Hebrew, than translating it into Yiddish and then into English. I remember reading Shalom Alechem's stories in their original language, Yiddish. In the summers we three went to Labor Zionist camps where learning was more informal and much more fun.

Next to my mother, the most important influence on me when I was growing up was Zionism. From the time I was ten until I was eighteen, I went every summer to Labor Zionist camps. The camps were modeled after an Israeli kibbutz. Here I learned a smattering of Hebrew. I learned Hebrew songs and folk dances. On one hand I was taught to admire Jewish intellectuals. At the same time, I was taught that there were too many Jewish intellectuals, and Jews needed to become farmers, workers, kibbutznicks. Somehow I missed the contradictions in these two teachings. I grew up thinking that when I finished high school I would go to Palestine to help establish and build a Jewish state.