Morning bible readings in the 1950s grammar school I attended were natural and normal and how our school day began. There were no Muslims or Hindus in the classroom, and with just four Jews in the entire school there was no protest when New Testament scripture took precedence during the week leading to Christmas and the bright spring days heralding the coming of Easter.

My own two children grew up versed in Jewish studies. At least, they knew about the Patriarchs – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – and the meaning of Passover, the myth of Purim, and a scattering of other Jewish lore. I doubt that they can tell me anything about Maimonides or Spinoza or of the teachings of other great thinkers who influenced philosophy and the mystic understandings of Judaism. That’s okay.

What’s not okay in my mind is that they know little of other religions. They sometimes had questions about Christmas and Easter. They sometimes asked about the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. I answered as best I could, relying on knowledge acquired as a child listening to New Testament Bible stories in the classroom and learning the Lord’s Prayer with its demand that “Thy will be done.”

These days, the only way for children to learn about other religions is to wait for a Comparative Religions class in college. Or to be studious and grab a book off the library shelf in a dusty part of a book repository where few venture. There are also lectures to listen to and adult learning “tapes.”

In the public schools there is nothing. Which goes far in separating Church from State, but deprives children of learning about the “Other.”

Once, in third or fourth grade, my teacher asked me to speak to the class about Chanukah, the Festival of Lights that often coincided with Christmas. Delighted, I told my grandmother (I lived with my grandparents) and was surprised by her admonishment to keep my mouth shut.

I didn’t fully understand, but I knew better than to object or question her judgment. She was one of those massive women who ruled her family with stern looks and quick hands. A matriarch, she sat in judgment over family squabbles, questions of child discipline, and opinions about political leaders, with a firm commitment to never questioning religious authority.

She was also frightened of the Cossacks. Never mind that they didn’t parade up and down Front Street, that the police on patrol in the neighborhood were friendly, and no neighbors harbored grudges. Still, there was in her memory the night she watched the Cossacks raid her village. Men broke into her home and beat her father. Things burned. Fear ruled. She was three years old and, even fifty-some years later, fear lingered.

Something terrible might happen if I spoke in school about a Jewish holiday!
Dealing with anti-Semitic attacks at school wasn’t an unusual event. I often found myself under attack at the end of the school day when I walked home. I often fought with my fists. Sometimes I won and sometimes I didn’t. I learned to judge which opponents I’d defeat if I stood my ground and which enemies were best left in the dust when I ran away.

I seldom told anyone at home about these fights, except if I had visible bruises that couldn’t be explained away. Of course this was nothing compared to what my grandmother’s father endured, but to my grandmother they were proof that the Cossacks were always on the prowl.

I think she lived her life as that three-year old, always afraid of what might come out of the night to attack her and her family. She sometimes told the story of leaving her village and sneaking through the forest with her mother and father, her two older brothers and one older sister, crossing borders, losing her only toy – “Dolly” – and embarking on an English ship somewhere in Germany. She said the first words of English that she learned were “up on deck,” which the sailors yelled at the steerage passengers to get them into the fresh air for a break from the stink and squalor of the lower level.

Her family, like all the others, were peasants hurled into a new world rife with terrors. Her father, my great-grandfather, was a small man who quivered when he walked, smelled faintly of sour fish, and looked down at me with rheumy eyes.

That’s how I remember him.

But he’d once been as dynamic a leader of his family as Abraham in the bible stories. He’d been young and vigorous, intent on providing for his wife and children, determined to build a new life in a new country. I don’t think he was afraid of the Cossacks. They didn’t follow him to America.

But they stalked his daughter, prowling across the ocean in her young mind, ever present to make her ever mindful of dangers that lurked outside the home.
At school, I listened to bible stories and thought they had little to do with me. They were tales as removed from my everyday experience as were the myths of Thor and Jupiter that I absorbed later in my education. No one offered to lecture us children about the horrors of WW2, and the perils of everyday life, as reported in the newspapers, on the radio, on TV passed through me without leaving an impression.

I’m glad of that. I’m glad that my childhood years weren’t marred by outside tribulation. No Cossacks rode in the night for me. On Front Street, where I lived, I had only to deal with an occasional childhood enemy who’d pop up and then disappear. Forever.

The End