However, this time I was in for a surprise. When I arrived, Yura sat at the table studying. An open prayer book and some neatly rolled tefillin were in front of him. That was amazing! But most unusual was how serious Yura was, on account of the forthcoming ritual. You really should have seen how proudly he demonstrated his achievements to me.
I had to admit that Yura read fairly well, as far as I could judge. But to praise each other for our academic achievements and good behavior was definitely against our rules. And I began to joke about Yura’s private parts, which were growing in full view. I asked him whether his teacher sat at the table or under the table and who beat whom with a stick. I also remembered to remind him about his inability to sit still for a second. To make fun of each other was our regular custom. Yura could become enraged and work himself up for a fight, which happened quite often. Today, this was a different Yura in front of me. He didn’t jump up; he didn’t start to yell. He didn’t throw a prayer book or anything else at me. He looked at me as if I were a little boy and he an adult. He smiled scornfully and shrugged his shoulders:
“You simply envy me because no one celebrated your Bar Mitzvah.”
I don’t remember what I answered, but I felt I had suffered a defeat.
It was true, my Bar Mitzvah was not celebrated, and my thirteenth birthday, in general, had not been considered a special event.
Probably, our family was the most distant from Jewish tradition, the most assimilated among all our relatives. Was it Uzbek? No, Russian, more likely. And that wasn’t surprising since we lived in Chirchik, a multiethnic city that was largely Russified. Mama cooked non-kosher: we ate lard and mixed our tea and dinner dishes. Saturday at our home was a normal day. We didn’t observe Jewish holidays. And I had Russian, Uzbek, Tatar and Tadjik boys among my friends. But Yura wasn’t just my friend; we were also related by blood. In a word, if I sometimes felt I was a Jew it was only due to the fact that I was reminded about it from time to time. And it was done rudely, and it hurt, as I’ve already written about.
When I grew up, I became more sensitive, not only to insulting nicknames but also to some small things that happened.
Once, while I was visiting Edem and Rustem, their mother addressed them in Tatar, with me around. Did it mean she wanted to tell them something in confidence? That was impolite. It also emphasized that I was of a different ethnicity. It hurt. Though I remembered right away that my relatives did the same when they talked confidentially in our language to me.
As you know, the basis of our language is Tadjik. But Bucharan Jews, having altered it slightly, consider it their own. That’s what they think. But once, after a Tadjik boy I knew heard my mama say something to me in Bucharan Jewish, he asked me, “Tell me, do you have your own language?” “Yes, this is our language,” I answered, surprised. He shook his head and objected, with a trace of reproach, “This is Tadjik, you see? And you are Jews.”
It seemed a little thing, but I was hurt again, even though I almost never spoke that language: we boys all spoke Russian among ourselves. Russian was also heard at home.
The time had come when the “Jewish issue” began to engage me more than before. Conversations about people leaving for Israel were heard more often. It wouldn’t be that bad if it happened to strangers, to people we didn’t know well. One of our relatives, Yura’s grandfather on his mother’s side, had left. And here, at last, the preparations for Yura’s Bar Mitzvah had begun.
On that day, I left him with strange feelings of resentment, envy and even anger. I didn’t know which of them was strongest. Just imagine, he seriously thought that he would become an adult at the age of thirteen. And I was already fifteen! Just look at him! He had already managed to learn to read in Hebrew. Hadn’t my Grandpa said to me hundreds of times in the last few years, “Let me teach you. You read books in Russian all the time, but you don’t know your own sacred tongue.”
That’s why I changed my mind. That evening I told Grandpa, “All right, let’s begin…”
The “sacred tongue” didn’t come easily to me. I knew two alphabets: Cyrillic and Roman, for I studied German at school. Both of them just naturally fit into my head simply and easily. And here were these letters you had to read not from left to right but from right to left while also paying attention to the dots: it turned out that dots replaced vowels. Gosh! And some people swear that Russian is one of the most difficult languages!
I later came to understand that the notions “difficult” and “easy” are very relative. A Chinese child, for example, masters the characters, and they are more difficult than the Hebrew alphabet. But those comforting thoughts didn’t enter my mind at that time.
Our lessons began. After he finished his morning prayer, Grandpa sat down next to me on the couch, adjusting his tefillin to the box. The wrist of Grandpa’s left hand was covered with deep furrows from the small strap since he wound it very tightly around his hand. The creases wouldn’t smooth out quickly since old hands swell up. Holding the prayer book in his furrowed hands, Grandpa passed his twisted finger over each line, from right to left, and pronounced the letters loudly, those same letters: alef, bet, vet and so on. After he was finished, he told me, “Repeat.” I repeated, cocking my eyes at the prayer book, which had the Russian transcription by each Hebrew letter.
By the way, only I could understand the transcription: Grandpa couldn’t read Russian. I didn’t know how he had learned to read. He most likely remembered how to pronounce the letters, syllables and words by rote. And he remembered everything perfectly – he could say a prayer without stopping. Well, and I was peeking. Grandpa got angry, “Why are you peeking? Listen and memorize!” He put his legs together, placed the book on his knees and covered the Russian transcription with his hand. Now, we repeated the letters together because I would constantly forget how to pronounce them. Grandpa naturally got angry again. I began to cheat, speaking very quietly so Grandpa couldn’t hear. He would ask me again and again, holding his ear with his hand, and at that moment I could peek at the transcription. If I remembered correctly, I yelled at the top of my lungs, and Grandpa said approvingly “hosh” which meant “all right, good” in Uzbek, also one of our native tongues.
When we switched from the alphabet to syllables, it turned out that those pages didn’t include transcriptions. I had to memorize by rote as Grandpa read for there was nothing to peek at. Oh my! I had seen the prayer book in Grandpa’s hands since I was a little child, but it had never occurred to me that it was so difficult to read. And Grandpa didn’t just remember everything, he pronounced all the prayers with emotion, in a singsong manner, swaying back and forth. He uttered those incomprehensible words as if he were saying something very important to God. It was impossible to believe that, at the same time, he didn’t actually understand the meaning of what he was reading. “You need to feel it.” But how did he feel? What did he feel?
The lessons on the couch soon came to an end: Grandpa was always in a hurry to get to work in the morning, so he decided to have our lessons during breakfast to save time. But then things got even worse. He ate noisily and spoke indistinctly. I wanted to eat. None of that contributed to my industriousness or ability to remember the Hebrew words.
As I understand it now, that and the complexity of Hebrew were not the reason. The trouble was my unwillingness to study Hebrew. Perhaps the fact that Grandpa wasn’t an exemplary teacher was partly to blame, but, one way or another, I developed no consuming interest in the ancient language.
I couldn’t give up the lessons. I would tell Grandpa myself, “Let’s do it.” During our lessons, as we were repeating letters, syllables and then words together, some of them managed to stick in my brain. But as soon as Grandpa was about to leave, after instructing me sternly to learn this and that, I became overwhelmed with incredible laziness. The day I’m thinking of wasn’t any different from many other days.