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It wasn't hard to enforce this fiat.  Most books were unobtainable, and if obtainable there was no money to buy them with.  Free public libraries were unknown -- even if they weren't my grandparents would have been horrified, and I mean horrified, if their children had entered such a place.  God only knows what they might have found to read -- they might have read sex novels!  The whold idea was too shocking to think about.  Reading was for the scriptures and other sacred books.  Or commentaries on the commentaries of the sacred books.  With the inevitable result that while my parents were literate they were uneducated, for they never read anything apart from the compulsory texts.  Actually, in their later years in Canada, they did read the newspapers.  Mother read only the Jewish newspapers, but father read the Toronto Daily Star as well.  The nearest they ever came to reading a "book" was the serialized novels in the Jewish newspaper.  These they used to wait for almost impatiently every day, and father used to read the day's installment aloud to mother each evening, They used to get very involved with the characters in the story, and would discuss the pros and cons for hours.  I used to listen occasionally, but as a child I found all the love stuff boring.  (I changed later on.)

The word for a novel was Romahn, and father wanted to know the English word for Romahn.  None of us knew, naturally, so he asked on eof his Canadian fellow-workmen at the factory where he was employed.   Father explained in his broken English what a Romahn was and even translated bits of the story by way of illustration.  But I guess Canadian workmen in the early 1900s weren't ardent novel readers because he didn't know either.  After a time however the word Romahn must have triggered some hidden spring because he suddenly hit on it and told father that the English word was: Roman (as in Caesar!).   That evening papa came home and produly informed us that the English word for Romahn was Roman.  I was about six or seven at the time, but the seeds of doubt in these matters were already sown, if not actually sprouting.  It's true that I didin't know what Romahn was in English either, but Roman just didn't sound right.

A few years later I came across the word 'language' in a book and I didn't know how to pronounce it.  I didn't know what it meant, either.   Although my father was entertaining a visitor at the time , I butted in and , pointing to the word, asked him to pronounce and explain it.  Father couldn't of course, but this friend was a man who had come to Canada years before and father asked him to tell me waht it was.   He glanced at it an instantly said it's pronounced lenk-vitch and explained what a lenk-vitch was.  I clearly recall how very uneasy I felt about lenk-vitch, althought I did call it that for some time.

But to return to that wonderful river in the middle of the forest of Balobos-chine.  What an unspoiled paradise it was.  The modern fashion of pollution was unknown -- you could drink the water right out of the river -- and as for fish, you could bring them up with a dipper.  With a cow, some chickens, a vegetable patch and any amount of gefillte fish, the local populace ate like tycoons (at least in summer).  As father lived all of his youth on the banks fo this Amazon in the heart of the Russian Matto Grosso, it never occurred to him that it was an enchanting place.   He was as unaware of its beauty as were the animals on the farms.  No one ever told him it was lovely and he never gave it a thought.  Once, some forty-five years later, I induced father to spend a week-end with me in Muskoka.  I can still see him standing on th shore of Lake Joseph at twilight looking out at the beautiful wooded islands across the still water.  A nostalgic melancholy descended on him and he said: "I spent my boyhood in a heavenly place like this, and I didin't know it."

I'm sure he realized that children never know it.  And those who remain children never know it either.  For a savoring of something over and above the unconscious enjoyment of it -- every child knows that the only emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream -- is possible only to the mature, to those who have placed intuition in the forefront of thier consciousness, and perhaps finally only to those who have intimations of mortality, Gurdjieff said long ago that without "shock" there is no progress, no learning, whether it's the "shock of recognitiion" or some other kinkd of shock.  That's why so many students, probably most students, go through the motions of elementary and secondary "education" and university and, as Fitzgerald's Omar almost said:

        but evermore
        Come out by the Door as in they went.             (XXVII)

Now and again, however, graduation itself provides a bit of a jolt and more than one student has come up to me after the ceremonies and said: "God, sir, how I wish I were starting university NOW! How much more I could get out of that vanished opportunity."  But as Dylan Thomas once wrote: "... time allows/In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs..."

I wonder if father's reflective sadness that evening on the shores of Lake Joseph would have been lightened if I had been able to read him Thomas's "Fern Hill" in which those lines appear.

It's surprising how many people think that education and awareness are things that one aquires at school, like getting your flu shots in September to see you through the winter.  And when they get their degree from the university they are now educated, and don't have to give that boring business another thought. Graduates of art schools and conservatories are very unlikely to feel this way.  They know they haven't even scratched the surface, and that the rest of their lives will be a rigid discipline and an endless course of study.

In Renoir's 78th year he painted his last picture on the morning of his death: some anemones that the maid had gathered for him.  He forgot his arthritis as he worked on it for several hours, and when he finished he said: "I think I am beginning to understand something about it."  And that night he died.   That's when his education ended.  Since living is the opportunity for education, what does it matter that the young cannot take advantage of it? Shaw said that youth is wasted on the young.  And if awareness comes late, one can have a happy old age, and be grateful that it came at all.

The winters in Balobo-chine were hard and long.  No happy swimming in the river then.  Food was monotonous and not plentiful, and illness was an ever present danger.  For one thing there were no doctors -- the nearest doctor was hundred versts away and there were no telephones.  And in any case how would you pay him?  His fee for coming a hundred verts up and back by horse and sleigh in the dead of winter would be more than all their humble belongings were worth.   In ancient rural China, I'm told, they would sell a daughter -- this couldn't be possible here.  And as one wouldn't even consider having a doctor unless the patient was definitely in extremis, sending someone a hundred versts to fetch one would only mean that on his arrival the unforturnate one was already dead and buried.  They were of course not entirely without help, for there was a wide sotre of peasant old-wives' remedies which were often effective.  My mother's mother, for instance, to leap a little ahead in my story, had seventeen children, of whom ten died in childhood.   When the next child was born, a girl, my grandmother was advised by the old wives sorority to name her Alte, whcih means: the old one.  And when the following child was born, a boy, she was advised to name him Alter, the masculine form of the same name.   And it workd like magic -- my uncle Alter lived into his seventies, and my aunt Alte died only a few years ago in Toronto in her eighties!  So docotrs obviously don't have all the remedies.

My father was stricken with an illness when he was twelve -- no one knew what it was, it might have been scarlet fever, diphtheria, pneumonia, meningitis -- anything.  All they knew was that he was on his back, a very sick boy, for four months.  They called it a g'legger, a Jewish word meaning something like 'a lying in'.  So if you conked out for three or four months, most of the time near death, what you had was a g'legger.  The usual remedies were tried, but the most effective was the twice and thrice-daily prolonged prayers.  And when the prayers were answered he sat up one day, pale and drawn, but clearly over the crisis, and his mother, hovering, and anxious, and wanting to cheer him a little, said: "What would you like, Khayim-Laibele, can I get you something or make you something?"   And father, aged 12, said, could he have  a cigarette.  Whereupon dear old Slava, whom I never knew, promptly rushed out to the little village cantina an brought him back a package of cigarettes, those Russian cigarettets of which even then, in 1888, the upper half consisted of a filter.    Something we have just begun to adopt here eighty years later!  He sat there contentedly puffing it, his very first cigarette, and he never stopped smoking from that day until his death half a century later.