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K

olbasov Poland 1890s.

Avrome’le sat at the back of the cheder. He was always in the back; he didn’t have a tatte and his mama didn’t have enough coins to give the melamed each week.

He listened carefully. The melamed went from table to table reading from a siddur with the four-year-old group learning Chumash with the six-year-olds. Sometimes a question appeared in Avrome’le’s mind. He put his forehead in his hands and tried to think. Other boys raised their hands with kashes but his mama didn’t pay the melamed so he wasn’t allowed to ask.

Still he was happy. As well as learning alef-beis and davening and Chumash Avrome’le watched the melamed closely. He saw how his face creased into happy lines when he spoke about Yom Tov. He watched the tears that rolled down the melamed’s cheeks when he said Al Naharos Bavel after eating a slice of black bread at noon.

Days passed and Avrome’le came to cheder each morning. Years passed and Avrome’le learned diligently. Until the day he was bar mitzvah and then it was understood that the luxury of learning in the little cheder could be his no more. Nor the simple comforts of home: Mama’s Shabbos kigel and a cozy warm spot by the stove. Like his brother Mendel before him Avrome’le would have to go find work to help his family.

Avrome’le took the pekel his mother tearfully packed: a blanket some clothing a little food siddur tefillin a few pennies. Did some boyish sense of adventure lighten his step as he left his mother and little siblings behind in the Polish shtetl that was all he’d known? Did he realize how alone he would be?

“You should find work in one of the kehillos in Germany” his mother told him. Avrome’le traveled mostly on foot yet frugal as he was by the time he arrived in the great city of Hamburg the food and coins were almost gone. He wandered around the city dazed by its size and strangeness dizzy with hunger and longing desperate for a familiar face a Yiddish word.