Simon Goldman - June 6, 2003
Bad experience in cheder [interruption in interview]
break your head, but I don't think so. All I know is that... Do you know Maurie Chandler?
Yeah, I was just going to say Maurie Chandler.
Maurie Chandler, I haven't talked to him how he survived.
He was on a farm.
Yeah, he told me that. I didn't know if he went to church or not.
He did.
Oh, okay. I really talk too much to Maurie.
He used to teach kids catechism, which is a joke. I mean, he would tell them what to do.
Well, but, as I said, you know, if you read it, you read some of the Jewish Bible and a Catholic Bible, there's a lot of similarities. There's a lot of stuff that we have that they have, you know. And that's what saved me, saved my neck too on the farm because when I started, they started questioning me, you know, even at my age at that time I should know something about it. So when I read the Bible they had there. I could tell 'em by heart some of the stuff.
From cheder.
Yeah. No, not much cheder because uh, I had a bad experience with cheder and, you know.
Tell me about that. You didn't tell me.
Well that, that was uh, even before the war. Because I got beaten up by, you know, the, the rabbis in uh, in those days, there's no, no monkey business. Either you sit and study or you get, they used to beat, beat me up. Maybe I wasn't uh, paying attention, you know. But they beat me up and I would never go back.
How did your father feel about that?
Well, you know. If the rest of the family, the older kids would be different, you know, maybe. But, you know, since my older, two older brothers learned. So.
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