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For him it could have been Eton or even Oxford, but it was the Nahman Bialek Hebrew School in a section of Brooklyn that was just beginning to emerge from the Great Depression that had been the central grove in his own academe. He recalled trying to learn a strange language, struggling in class to read the boys' book Dovid'l, working with the same intensity and with the same zeal that he had devoted to learning to ride a bicycle or to hit a baseball. He was in a Hebrew school classroom, but his eagerness to master the challenge before him was no different from the fervor that had suffused his growing years.
The challenge was real because the book, an easy primer for anyone who already knew even simple Hebrew, was very hard for him. At one point in his labor he stopped, unable to figure out what the word before him, l'maaleh, could mean. He remembered raising his hand and asking the teacher what l'maaleh meant.
He said that all he expected was that the teacher would quickly tell him the meaning, but to his astonishment that was not what the teacher did. Instead, the teacher crossed the room, took his right arm, jerked it high, said “l'maaleh,” pulled it low and said, “l'maatah,” and, repeating the high and low pull of his arm several times, kept saying in rhythm, “l'maaleh,” “l'maatah,” “l'maaleh,” “l'maatah,” over and over, accompanying each word with the specific, and—he finally realized—appropriate, movement.
It was now several decades later, and since then he had learned and later forgotten Hebrew as he had learned and forgotten other languages too; but he realized he had never forgotten the Hebrew words for up and down. He now was surprised that as a schoolchild he had not felt the humiliation