MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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at the place we had arranged, I retraced the course on my own and
found the family mildly hysterical by the time I got home.
Fortunately for me the yeshiva was not one of those grim,
dingy holes pictured by ghetto photographers at the turn of the cen–
tury. But neither was it one of the spanky modern postwar schools
that admitted girls and conducted classes in conversational Hebrew
and taught its kids to dance in time to the new Zionist music. In my
classes Hebrew was strictly a written language reserved for sacred
texts and austere commentaries. The Bible, the Mishnah, the
Talmud, and debates of later sages were analyzed for us in Yiddish,
mama-loshin,
the mother tongue of the European ghettoes that had
just been savagely decimated. Hebrew was the language of the
study, what the Almighty himself spoke- as distant as Sinai and
revelation; Yiddish was the language of the street and the home, in–
timate and familial. For me, with Americanized parents who had
come here young, this was an anachronism . I loved to listen to the
racy gossip of my aunts and uncles, but Yiddish at school was a dry
homiletic tongue that had no juice in it, a language of rote and pro–
scription that was external to me and that hemmed me in.
As a rule jews don't find orthodoxy confining except when they
already are breaking away from it. Orthodox Judaism is a self–
contained system irradiated by tradition and belief, sustained by
habit, and enforced by communal and family sanctions. Eating
kosher food or separating milk from meat is scarcely a burden to
those who would never dream of doing otherwise. At school I dimly
knew I could be chastened or ostracized for breaking the Sabbath or
keeping my head uncovered. (Small knitted yarmulkas- an Israeli
fashion- had not yet come in, and I must have worn my baseball
cap eighteen hours a day.) In all my times at Yankee Stadium or the
Polo Grounds I don't remember even
wanting
a hot dog; it was sim–
ply unthinkable; it lay outside the pale of my experience, and I didn't
miss it. Yet just by being at all those games I showed that
P1Y
Jew–
ishness was less than a total system. A secular America had firmly
laid its hand on me.
The structure of the school day was an emblem of my internal
split: four hours of religious studies each morning, four hours of
regular schoolwork in the afternoons. The yeshiva was really two
parallel schools, and different people ran each half. Though the
afternoon teachers abided by the forms of religion, their orthodoxy
was never too closely examined. Many had jobs in the public schools
earlier in the day; the pittance they were paid by the yeshiva could
