isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

HOME AND SCHOOL
pictures and scenes stored in his memory, and played all the more
strongly on his sensitivity and conscience. The child took his
environm~nt for granted. Only when he was disturbed by an
extreme instance of his father's harshness would he burst into
tears and hide his face in the pillows on the sofa in the diningroom.
He was seven when his parents sent him to school at Gromokla,
aJewish-German colony only a couple of miles away from
Yanovka. There he stayed with relatives. The school he attended
may be described as a kheder, a Jewish private religious
school, with Yiddish as its language. Here the boy was to be
taught to read the Bible and to translate it from Hebrew into
Yiddish; the curriculum also included, as sidelines, reading in
Russian and a little arithmetic. Knowing no Yiddish, he could
neither understand his teacher nor get along with his schoolmates.
The school was almost certainly a dirty and fetid hole,
where the boy accustomed to roam the fields must have nearly
choked. The ways of the adults also bewildered him. Once he
saw the Jews of Gromokla driving a woman of loose morals
through the main street of the village, pitilessly humiliating her
and shouting vehement abuse. Another time the colonists meted
out stern punishment to a horse-thief. He also noticed a strange
contrast: on one side of the village stood the wretched hovels of
Jewish colonists; on the other shone the neat and tidy cottages
of German settlers. He was naturally attracted to the gentile
quarters.
His stay at Gromokla was brief, for after a few months the
Bronsteins, seeing the boy was unhappy, decided to take him
back home. And so he said goodbye to the Scriptures and to the
boys who would go on translating, in a strange sing-song, versets
from the incomprehensible Hebrew into the incomprehensible
Yiddish. 1 But, during his few months at Gromokla, he had
learned to read and write Russian; and on his return to
Yanovka he indefatigably copied passages from the few books
at hand and later wrote compositions, recited verses, and made
rhymcsofhisown. He began to help his father with accounts and
book-keeping. Often he would be shown off to visiting neighbours
and asked to recite his verses and produce his drawings.
1 Later, during his stay in Odessa, he once again took lessons in Hebrew, but the
result was not much better.
II