A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [163]
Occasionally when he had to (or dared to) call out to her during a class, because he had either burned the beef patties or scalded himself, he did not call her Isabella but Mum, which is presumably what her herd of cats also called her. As for her, she called her youthful husband some name taken from the world of birds: Sparrow or Finchy or Thrush or Warbler. Anything except Wagtail, which was the literal meaning of the name Nahlieli.
There were two primary schools within half an hour's walk for a child from our home. One was too socialist, and the other was too religious. The Berl Katznelson House of Education for Workers' Children, at the north end of Haturim Street, flew the red flag of the working class on its roof side by side with the national flag. They celebrated May Day there with processions and ceremonies. The headmaster was called Comrade by teachers and pupils alike. In summer the teachers wore khaki shorts and biblical sandals. In the vegetable garden in the yard pupils were prepared for farming life and personal pioneering in the new villages. In the workshops they learned productive skills such as woodwork, metalwork, building, mending engines and locks, and something vague but fascinating called fine mechanics.
In class the pupils could sit anywhere they liked; boys and girls could even sit together. Most of them wore blue shirts fastened at the chest with the white or red laces of the two youth movements. The boys wore shorts with the legs rolled up as far as the crotch, while the girls' shorts, which were also shamelessly short, were secured to their thighs with elastic. The pupils called the teachers by their first names. They were taught arithmetic, homeland studies, Hebrew and history, but also subjects like the history of Jewish settlement in the Land, history of the workers' movement, principles of collective villages, or key phases in the evolution of the class war. And they sang all kinds of working class anthems, starting with the Internationale and ending with "We are all pioneers" and "The blue shirt is the finest jewel."
The Bible was taught at the House of Education for Workers' Children as a collection of pamphlets on current affairs. The prophets fought for progress and social justice and the welfare of the poor, whereas the kings and priests represented all the iniquities of the existing social order. Young David, the shepherd, was a daring guerrilla fighter in the ranks of a national movement to liberate the Israelites from the Philistine yoke, but in his old age he turned into a colonialist-imperialist king who conquered other countries, subjugated peoples, stole the poor man's ewe-lamb, and ruthlessly exploited the sweat of the working people.
Some four hundred yards away from this red House of Education, in the parallel street, stood the Tachkemoni national-traditional school, founded by the Mizrahi religious Zionist movement, where the pupils were all boys who kept their heads covered during class. Most of the pupils came from poor families, apart from a few who came from the old Sephardi aristocracy, which had been thrust aside by the more assertive Ashkenazi newcomers. The pupils here were addressed only by their surnames, while the teachers were called Mr. Neimann, Mr. Alkalai, and so forth. The headmaster was addressed as Mr. Headmaster. The first lesson every day began with morning prayers, followed by study of the Torah with Rashi's commentary, classes where the skullcapped pupils read the Ethics of the Fathers and other works of rabbinic wisdom, the Talmud, the history of the prayers and hymns, all sorts of commandments and good deeds, extracts from the code of Jewish law, the Shulhan Arukh, the cycle of the Jewish high days and holidays, the history of the Jewish communities around the world, lives of the great Jewish teachers down the ages, some legends and ethics, some legal discussions,