The Invisible Wall by Harry Bernstein

gazing at the boiler room of the mill, and the furnace that was kept going all night. A big, brawny man naked to the waist, face blackened, was shoveling coal. He paused to look up at us and grin, the flames dancing behind him. He waved, and his lips moved, but we could not hear the words. We waved back, and stood watching fascinated until someone remembered that it was time to go.
    At last, we came trooping into the cheder, guilty, blinking in the strong light. The rabbi stood waiting for us, warming his back against the fireplace, angry and impatient, the long cigarette holder in his hand with the cigarette almost burned down to the end.
    â€œSo here you are, finally,” he burst out. “Where have you been? Playing a little footer, perhaps? Smashing peoples’ windows? Well, let’s see how much Hebrew you know. Sit down.” He added contemptuously, “Scholars!”
    We scrambled for our seats, glad this was all the reprimand we got. The benches were arranged in rows before the fireplace. This room might well have once been the fancy drawing room my sister Rose always dreamed about. It was a large room, airy and light during the day, with a high ceiling and a wide, ornate molding around the borders. Bow windows looked out onto what had once been a garden, with wooden seats in front of them. The marble fireplace took up almost one entire wall, and had a large mantelpiece. The floors, now dark and stained and worn, were probably the original oak floors.
    It was redolent of an elegance that belonged to the Victorian era, and the aristocracy about which Rose always fantasized. It had given way to the musty smell of siddurim, and was filled these nights with the voices of a dozen or so young Jewish boys chanting Hebrew words, and the bellowing voice of a rabbi trying to drum knowledge of an ancient past into their heads.
    Our lesson lasted about an hour, and during that time the poor rabbi must have aged far beyond his forty or so years. We tormented him endlessly, with the strange noises that Sam Roseman made, sending us into fits of suppressed laughter, with the spitballs that he and his friends threw at one another, but mostly with the mistakes that we made in our Hebrew. The rabbi moved among the benches with the cigarette holder in his hand and the cigarette smoldering, raging, shouting, pointing with a yellow tobacco-stained finger at some spot in the siddur, and sometimes boxing an ear when his rage became uncontrollable.
    It must have been a tremendous relief to him when the hour of instruction was over. “Go home,” he’d say, his voice hoarse from shouting. “Go to your mothers and tell them I have done all I can, but I do not know how to perform miracles. Tell them only God can do that.”
    I recall that as we rushed out he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, and muttered slightly to himself. He had other troubles besides us. He had a son who was refusing to go to the synagogue.
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    SOONER OR LATER that winter we all came down with a cold, sometimes two or three together, so that there was a constant sneezing and blowing of noses, and my mother was forever busy tearing up old bedsheets and turning them into handkerchiefs, or snot rags, as we called them.
    My turn came, and mine was a bad one, with a burning fever that kept me in bed, and then, best of all, home from school for another few days after I got out of bed. I was not sorry. By this time I shared my brothers’ fear and hatred of St. Peter’s. I was glad to be home, and it was like the old days that I remembered so fondly, being with my mother all day, sitting on the floor near her playing with my few broken toys.
    She was always busy and bustling about, especially now that she had her shop, and her long skirt with the apron over it would rustle as she hurried to answer a knock on the door that meant a customer.
    I usually followed her around and sometimes went to the door