Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [68]
Nathan’s early fascination turned sour when he realized his father was grooming him to follow in his footsteps. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life slitting chickens’ throats, especially when he felt that Mordechai would end up as a rabbi.
Moreover, his father’s bloody hands and bespattered apron always had a chicken smell. Even the weekly ritual bath at the mikva failed to completely deodorize him.
Yehuda was paid a few kopeks for each bird. In a good day he could pocket a few rubles, scarcely enough to sustain his family. He found a variety of odd jobs, mainly sharpening knives and scissors, to augment the family income.
There were benefits. He could take out some of his pay in chickens, so there was usually enough to eat. Sophie knew how to utilize every part of the bird, except the parts that were not kosher. Extra chickens were traded for carp at the fish market or vegetables and milk from the gentile farmers. Even during the years of drought, when half the chickens died of heat prostration, there was some food on the table.
The main benefit of being the shohet was that it was an honorable, if undesirable, profession. Life in a shtetl town centered around the synagogue. Yehuda Zadok was a learned man in Talmud and his job accorded him a certain communal respect.
The synagogue had a rigid social structure. The building was always constructed so that the most sacred place, the Ark, was on the Eastern Wall which faced Jerusalem. Seated along the Eastern Wall, according to rank, prominence, and respect, were the rabbi, cantor, and other town dignitaries. The last seats were reserved for the shohet and the shammes or sexton.
The townspeople sat in the main body of the building facing the Eastern Wall. The closer to the Ark, the higher the communal rank. Wealth, of course, could acquire such a seat. Behind the first rows were the ordinary people and the poor. Farthest removed, along the Western Wall, were the beggars, town misfits, and visiting strangers. A small balcony, veiled off by latticework, was reserved for the women.
Yehuda Zadok was gentler than most of the heads of households. Generally the father’s outlet against eternal frustration was to impose an authoritarian reign. Corporal punishment of children was common and wife beating was not uncommon. Yehuda seldom whipped his children, except when the futility of daily existence periodically crashed down on him. But his hands were always swift in delivering a single clout to the head or yank on the ear, usually Nathan’s.
A crisis was brewing in the Zadok household, as Nathan and Mordechai were reaching an age where plans were to be made concerning their future education. Until now, his sons had attended cheder, a small one-room school connected to the synagogue. The subjects were Yiddish and Hebrew and, later, the Talmud.
The cheder was little less than a glorified cell; the teacher often a cruel ignorant authoritarian. His reward was to hold power over ragged, half-starved little boys. The hours were exhausting and the rabbi or teacher ruled with a leather strap. Textbooks were a few tattered volumes and modern methods and subjects were unknown. Nathan had been an adequate student, a survivor. Mordechai was singled out as exceptional and received tender treatment. By the age of nine he was a veritable fountain of Talmudic and religious knowledge.
The next stage would normally be to go up to yeshiva, a larger school, which also taught state-approved secular courses in Russian and mathematics.
Yeshiva posed a serious problem for Yehuda Zadok: there was a tuition of a ruble and fifty kopeks a week as well as other expenses for books and materials. A rich man’s game. It was boiling down to making a choice between Nathan and Mordechai. As the oldest, Nathan was entitled to attend yeshiva first, but two sons in an advanced school was a luxury that a shohet could scarcely afford. Yehuda had been thinking all along of sending Nathan to a trade school so he could help with the family finances until he became a shohet.
Nathan