Excerpt from Songs for the Butcher's Daughter

Chaim Glatt was a gaunt, gangly adolescent, with pimples glowing red beneath the fuzz of his beard. He said little but kept his nose always tucked in an enormous volume of Talmud. For a boy who seemed to study without ceasing, he had not advanced very far though the yeshiva's ranks. I was amazed he still sat in the room's cold back corner and so I puzzled over him whenever the teacher looked away. He passed the days smoothing a finger over his wisp of a mustache, staring with empty eyes and slackened jaw at the book before him. Occasionally a line of spittle would drip from his gaping lips to the rough surface of the desk below, which often held not just his books but both of his elbows and much of the twigs that were his upper arms.

The boy was a mystery! Was he unable to learn? Was he destined to be an old man with a child's brain? If so, Der Lerer would have thrown him out, as he had several other boys that year.

"Kishinev needs cobblers as well as scholars," the teacher would say as he sent the expelled boys to his cousin the shoemaker. "Soon we will all leave here and without proper soles beneath us where will the Torah be?"

Once or twice each week Der Lerer took note of Chaim's failure to pay attention to his lessons and, assuming the boy had been dozing behind his book, he would try to catch him out. Yet that's when Chaim proved he indeed had his wits about him. Always he provided an answer that was not only correct but carefully chosen so as to require no further elaboration.

When Der Lerer called out to Chaim one day, "Glatt, are you listening? Would you be please be so kind as to lower that volume you are hiding behind and tell the class  one of the five ways a shoykhet might make a kosher animal treyf?"

The rest of us had spent the better part of the previous week memorizing these arcane terms from the Shulchan Arukh. Through endless repetition of the terms Hebrew terms sh'hiyah, chaldah, darsah, hagramah, and iqur we would struggle to remember that the forbidden knife techniques in kosher slaughter were also known aspressing, pausing, piercing, tearing, and covering. For an hour each day that week we had repeated a tuneless jingle:

Each time through, the song left out one of the five phrases and so attention had to be paid to include the correct terms. It was meant to keep us from mindless repetition, but in fact it guaranteed it.

When called upon to answer Der Lerer's question any other boy would have jumped to his feet and recalled the rhyme, though he likely would not have known the meaning of the words.

"Glatt, are you listening to me?" Der Lerer asked again. "Lower that volume and recite! Or are you embarrassed that you have not been paying attention? Are you unable to memorize a simple list? Can't you name even one way a shoykhet might defile a beast during slaughter?"

Without so much as a glance above his book, Chaim said, "Der Lerer, before you ask again let me remind you that pressing me to explain the obvious might lead to me pausing my reading, which would cause me to look upon you with such piercing eyes that you would soon be tearing your beard out by its roots for fear of what I would do to you if you uttered another word. Considering this, don't you agree that it would be best for my covering to remain where it is?"

It was clear to the rest of the class that any additional interrogation of Chaim would have forced Der Lerer to betray his own ignorance. The sad eyes our teacher displayed at such moments gave the impression that his most indifferent student was training him like a dog.