In 1953, Henry Saltzman graduated from Brooklyn College and took a job teaching secular studies at a ḥasidic elementary school in Brooklyn. Although a Jew from a Yiddish-speaking home, Saltzman was far less pious, and far more Americanized, than his pupils, who belonged to the Satmar branch of Ḥasidism, known for its religious zeal. Saltzman tells the story of this experience in an autobiographical novel, titled Oy! Oy! Oy!: The Teacher Is a Goy. Fred Siegel writes in his review:
Saltzman struggles to educate his class of ten-year-old boys in the ways of the wider culture. He bypasses the dull curriculum he’s been given in hopes that his innovative lessons about vocabulary, geography, and current events will tempt his students to learn about and even appreciate America, their land of refuge. But it’s a delicate dance, and he repeatedly stumbles on ḥasidic sensibilities. First, he looks different. Saltzman wears standard clothing for men of his time in New York: no peyot, no yarmulke, no tsitsit. “He took pride in displaying, by means of a bare head, his freedom from their inhibitions and rules.”
It’s no surprise, then, that one of his future students shouts out defiantly after his job interview: “‘Oy Oy Oy the titchur is a goy.’ . . . There it was. The ugly word meaning Gentile out in the open again, as it had been all through his childhood. Only this time, he was the object of its scorn.”
Yet despite these early missteps, Saltzman’s knowledge of Yiddish makes him the perfect teacher and interlocutor. Deftly fielding the boys’ occasional insults, both intended and unintended, he gradually draws them into a love of secular learning. The class is a ragtag group that includes Holocaust survivors, refugees from displaced-persons (DP) camps, and neglected sons from enormous families. He discovers that the boys, with their limited, Yiddish-accented English, are fascinated by new words. . . .
Amid an epidemic of anti-American wokeness, Henry Saltzman’s thinly fictionalized memoir of mid-20th-century Americanization comes as a welcome respite.
Read more on City Journal: https://www.city-journal.org/the-magic-of-good-teaching