Ludvipol: A Modern Shtetl
Our Two-Year Reprieve
mill and destroyed. Instead of teaching about Eretz Yisrael, self- empowerment, and self-sufficiency, educators had to teach about Russia, Communism, and solidarity. Jewish cultural life, always closely connected with education, suffered. Studying in Russian was supposed to inculcate in us Russian national values. The Russians were very proud that they had de- feated Napoleon. We learned a Russian poem about how the Russians did not surrender Moscow to Napoleon, even under siege. Rather than surrender, they burned the city down and left only ashes for him. In another famous poem, a grandson says, “Tell me, Grandfather...” and the grandfather answers, “It’s not for nothing that Moscow was burned down to ashes. There were very brave people in those days who sacrificed their lives to save the city. A difficult fate was bestowed on them.... Their desti - ny was death,” and so forth. We studied another Russian poem about a prisoner who sits in jail, in a dark cellar behind metal bars, like a wounded eagle, and dreams about freedom...how he wishes he could spread his wings and fly out into freedom and be liberated. We also studied a writer of Russian allegories named Ivan Krilov. To describe a greedy man, he wrote a famous story about a wolf and a lamb: “On a very hot day, a small lamb was standing by a tiny river drinking water. In the grass was sitting a wild wolf that had already made up his mind to kill that little lamb and eat it. But the wolf’s conscience bothered him a little bit, and he walked over to the lamb and said, ‘Why are you polluting my water?’ The lamb, who sized up the situation, replied, ‘Your Honor, look at me. I’m a little lamb, with a long neck, and I stretch my neck into the water — I am not polluting the water.’ The wolf said, ‘Oh, if you’re not polluting, then maybe your cousin was polluting or maybe your uncle,’ and ate the lamb.” The moral was, “The guilty one always blames someone else.” We had to study the writings of Sholom Aleichem, Mendele Mocher Sefarim, and other Jewish writers who wrote in Yiddish. A stop was put to all of our Zionist activities. All Zionist parties
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