Manes Sperber
REMINISCENCES
It was surely a curse to be born at the beginning of the
century, in a Jewish shtet! in East Galicia. A Jewish child had to
start learning to read when only three , spending many hours under
the rod of strict teachers, first to master his letters and soon to
translate difficult Hebrew texts . The gentile children, however,
started school at six or even seven , and learned to read gradually,
and moreover in the language that they knew. Nor did they have to
pay constant attention lest they stumble over the innumerable bar–
riers , the commandments and prohibitions which the child had to
obey to the letter as soon as he understood the words in which they
were formulated . Should one therefore have envied the others for
not being Jewish? This question not one of us considered, since we
were convinced that it was a matchless blessing to be born a Jew .
That the others despised us , hated us, persecuted us, cast them into
injustice . Their guilt in this matter also proved what a misfortune it
was not to be a Jew.
On the other hand it was true, alas, that the misery of the
Diaspora hung over us, that strangers had us in their power. For ex–
ample , why did we have to use their language, rather than using
ours? And because we were exiles, in the
Galuth,
we had to learn two
or three times more than the others. Though we complained of this
necessity, we were actually not unhappy over it, on the contrary . I
have reason to be grateful , for instance, that as a result I love
languages, that I love every language, that the magic of words is as
enchanting to the elderly man as to the child in Zablotow who
always had to steer his way between the Ukrainian and the Polish ,
between the Yiddish , and the Hebrew, and the German . Not every
language strikes me as beautiful, but I sensed very early that each
had its unique qualities, and that the world would not be the same if
only one of them were missing.
Wasser, woda, majim
meant the same
thing, just as, so I later learned,
aqua, eau,
and
water
did . But I
sensed very early that each of these words had a vibration that
Editor's Note: Translated from the German
by
Clara Winston .
