School is not an Option

“Stop crying.  You have to go to school,” says a woman with a West Indian accent.  They’re standing behind me on a traffic island at the Grand Army Plaza.  “School is not an option,” she continues.  “You have to go to school.”  I’m too polite to turn around and look at them but I can imagine the scene, for I’ve enacted it myself:  my crying daughter telling me that she doesn’t want to go to school and my telling her that she has to. 

That was in 1972, the year we moved to Jerusalem for what we thought would be a two-year stay.  Our daughter was six and a half years old and in the second grade, the only non-Hebrew speaker in her class.  No wonder she didn’t want to go to school.  Engulfed in a foreign language, understanding almost nothing and thus bored when not bewildered, confronted not only with a strange language but also with a strange script, unable to connect with the other children in her class, and taught by a well-regarded veteran teacher who nonetheless treated her as if she were retarded, she must have been miserable.  That this has been the experience of young immigrants throughout the world could not have comforted her. 

With the benefit of hindsight, we now wonder if we should have enrolled her, along with her younger brother, in the first grade, where she could have learned to read Hebrew along with the other children, where her relative maturity might have given her an advantage, and where she would have escaped that terrible teacher,  who, as it turned out, stayed with her class through the fifth grade.  We didn’t place our daughter in the first grade with her brother because we thought it inadvisable to set up the inevitable comparisons that would be made between them. 

My father was visiting us at the time, and I suspect that the reason I was so insistent that our daughter go to school that day was that I didn’t want to displease him.  He would have had little patience with me if as a child I had asked to stay home from school.  But she was my child, not his.  Perhaps we should have let her stay home, although I don't remember if it would have been possible in light of our commitments that day.  Staying home for one day might have given her strength for all the days to come, indeed, had we only known it, for all the years to come.  We should at the least have taken time out to listen to her, whether or not it would have made her late for school or made us late for our appointments.

"School is not an option," said the woman behind me, reminding me of an event that has haunted me for the past 40 years.  If ever I descend into dementia, I hope that this memory at least will be erased.