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Institutions of Jewish Learning [104] Moshe Leib Lilienblum, The Sins of My Youth (1873) Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Hatot neurim, in Kol kitve Moshe Leib Lilienblum, vol. 2 (Krakow: Joseph Fisher, 1912; originally published 1873), pp. 206–243 (excerpted), 251–256 (excerpted), 323–408 (excerpted).1 Days of Chaos2 After my father divorced his first wife, without providing the settlement that was usually required3 (because she had stayed in the house of a gentile without a chaperon), he married a second woman. After five years, their one and only son was born, the author of this work, on the 29th of [the Hebrew month of] Tishre 5604, or the 10th of October [Julian calendar]; (the 22nd according to the foreign [Gregorian] calculation) 1843. [. . .] My father’s mother always said that she was the granddaughter of two great and wealthy rabbis (even geonim). [. . .] My mother’s father was a kohen,4 distinguished in Torah learning and in fear of sin; he never uttered a falsehood in his life. [. . .] My father, even though he was great in poverty, was not great in Torah; he was a laborer, who lived by the work of his hands, who enjoyed his studies; he was quite proficient in Mishnah and aggadah;5 he would attract his friends of various occupations to Torah study, and he had quite a good reputation in his native city. [. . .] It is superfluous to say that my father tried with all his might to raise me, his first and last son, to be a great Torah scholar and fearer of sin. [. . .] In 5611 [1850–51] my mother’s father began to teach me Talmud, and I lorded it over my friends who had not yet merited beginning Talmud study. In 5613 my mother died in a cholera epidemic, even though she carried an amulet, on which was inscribed letter pairs, that were coupled from the letters of verse 30 of Psalm 106,6 and from the letters of the four-letter name of God; folded within the parchment was some grass, which was cut with a golden key. This catastrophe did not make such an impression on me, since my father and my mother’s father did not wish to be estranged, and my mother’s sister, a virgin of sixteen, did not want her dead sister’s only son to be raised by a stepmother. Therefore, my father, who was then forty-seven, married my mother’s sister, the virgin previously mentioned . This foolish woman wasted her life because of me, never attending to the fact that in another twenty years my father would be old and weak, and she would be a subject to a miserable fate in the prime of her life. There was nothing unusual about my education . [. . .] I learned Talmud, and its commentaries . In 5613 [that is, before he was ten] I began to prepare a page of Talmud by [354]   education & culture­ myself, before the lesson with the teacher, and in 5614, I could decipher by myself a certain Maharsha.7 [. . .] My parents saw this and were elated, and those in the town who knew me predicted that I would be a great scholar in Israel. It is superfluous to add that beside Talmud I learned nothing, except some [Hebrew ] grammatical rules that my grandfather taught me; he was an expert in grammar. [. . .] My place of birth, even though it was not a city or a town, still had a gymnasium, in which some Jewish boys studied, and nobody thought to challenge them. But my father thought it would be crazy to take his only son, who would grow up to be a great Torah scholar in Israel, to a gymnasium in order to learn things that a Torah scholar could learn in the bathroom without even trying. For my part, I would not have been happy in a gymnasium in which children were routinely and cruelly flogged, as I heard from my friends (who undoubtedly heard it from their parents and teachers, who fabricated the lie to scare them); not only that, but those who were hit were not permitted to cry. Similarly, my friends claimed that when a student was flogged, the teachers at the gymnasium closed a drawer on his head so he would not flinch; who could hear of such cruelty and want to be a gymnasium student? My father the expert in aggadah, would give a lesson in it, gratis, to the other laborers every Sabbath and holiday. Therefore, we had [the...

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