Tag #138201 - Interview #77963 (laszlo nussbaum)

Already in Torda I had to attend the cheder. My grandfather insisted on it. What has remained is that I still can read a few prayers without understanding anything of them. There was a strange approach to teaching in cheder at those times. They taught us to read in a completely unknown language, Old Hebrew, though we didn't understand a word; we just learned the letters and we knew how to read them. I still read my prayers in such a way that I don't understand a word of them. At that time there was another weird habit: for religious Jewish children, in order to understand the Bible, they translated the text to Yiddish. I didn't know Yiddish, they taught me for a while to translate the Hebrew to Yiddish, from one to the other, though I understood neither of them. There are lots of such traditional anomalies.