“Comes August, I see my wife’s on pins and needles. She makes the rounds of the director, the inspector, the inspector, the director. ‘Why are you running around like a chicken without a head?’ I ask. ‘What do you mean, why?’ she says. ‘What world do you live in? Haven’t you ever heard of the quota system?’ Wouldn’t you know she was right, too! The boy was turned down a third time. Would you like to know why? Because he didn’t have two fives. With two fives, they said, he might have made it. Might have made it — did you ever?! Well, I’ll spare you the details of what I had to put up with from the wife. But it was the boy I felt sorry for; he just laid his head on his pillow and cried and cried … The long and short of it was that we hired another tutor, a high school student himself, who was to coach him for the second year again — but this time by the intensive method, because your second year is no frolic; there’s not only mathematics and grammar, there’s geography, and penmanship, and the Devil only knows what. Not that I’d give two cents for the lot of it, to tell you the truth. A page of Talmud, if you ask me, takes more brains than all those subjects put together, and probably makes more sense too. But what could I do about it? He wasn’t the first or the last Jew …
“Anyway, he began a new regime. Up in the morning — hit the books! Time out for prayers and breakfast — back to the books! All day long — stick to the books! In the middle of the night you could still hear him jabbering, ‘Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative’—I tell you, it gave me an earache! Eating and sleeping, it goes without saying, were out of the question. ‘To take a human being,’ I said, ‘and put him through all this for no good reason — why, I wouldn’t do it to a dog. It will make the boy sick in the end.’ ‘Why don’t you bite your tongue off!’ said my wife. Well, don’t think he didn’t go off to the wars and bring home a pair of straight fives! And why shouldn’t he have? You won’t find a head like his in all of Russia! All’s well that ends well, eh? Until the big day comes when all the names of the new students are posted on the wall of the school — all of them, that is, except my son’s. Was there ever a weeping and wailing! With a pair of straight fives, yet: why, it was cold-blooded murder! The wife ran here, the wife ran there, the wife ran everywhere. In fact, she ran herself ragged until she was told to stop wasting her time — or, to put it more bluntly, to beat it. That’s when she began to raise the roof at home. ‘You call yourself a father?’ she said. ‘Why, if you had a father’s heart you’d use your influence, you’d look for connections, you’d find some way to the director …’ There’s a woman who thinks on her feet for you, eh? ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘isn’t it enough for me to keep track of a thousand different dates and bills and order forms and memos and other headaches? Do you want me to ruin myself just because of your high school, which is coming out of my ears already?’ A man is only human, after all; push him too far and he explodes. Not that she didn’t have her way again. You see, when she wants it, she gets it …
“Anyway, what can I tell you? I used my influence, I looked for some way to the director — and I took some stiff guff in the process, because everybody wanted to know what I was doing and everybody was right. ‘Reb Aharon,’ they all said to me, ‘you have a nice little business, knock wood, and an only son to take into it — why go looking for trouble?’ Go tell them you have a wife at home who has the high school bug so bad that it’s high school, high school, high school all day long! Still, if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m no shrinking violet; with a bit of luck I found my way to the director. In fact, I walked right into Mr. High-and-Mighty’s office and laid it on the line — I can hold my own, praise God, with the best of them, the cat never got my tongue yet. ‘Chto vam ugodno?’ he asks me, offering me a seat. ‘Gospodin Direktor,’ I say, ‘my lyudi nye bogaty, no u nas,’ I say, ‘yest malenka sostoyanye i odin khoroshey, zametshatelene maltshik,’ I say, ‘katore,’ I say, ‘khotshet utshitsa. I ya,’ I say, ‘khotshu. Na moya zshena,’ I say, ‘otshen khotshet.’ ‘Chto vam ugodno?’ he asks again. So I move a little closer and repeat the whole spiel. ‘Look here, Professor,’ I say, ‘rich we’re not,’ I say, ‘but poor we’re not exactly either. And we have a boy at home,’ I say, ‘a fine youngster, who wants to go to school. And I want him to go too. And my wife,’ I say, ‘would give anything for him to go.’ I underlined that ‘anything’ to make sure he understood, but leave it to the dumb goy not to get it! ‘Tak chto-zhe vam ugodno?’ he asks for the third time, beginning to get good and annoyed. So I stick my hand in my pocket real slowly, and pull it out real slowly, and gave my little speech again real slowly too — only this time, while taking all day over the ‘anything,’ I put my hand into his … In a word — success at last! He finally got the point, took out his notebook, and asked me for my name, my son’s name, and the year we wanted to enroll him in. Now you’re talking, I thought — and out loud I said that the name was Katz, Aharon, and that the boy’s name was Moshe, though we all called him Moshke, and that the third year of junior high school would suit us just fine. He read it all back to me — Aharon Katz, Moshke Katz, the third year of junior high school — and told me to bring the boy for enrollment in January. How’s that for a change of tune, eh? A little grease helps turn the wheels, doesn’t it! The only problem was that January was still a long ways off. What could I do about it, though? If we had to wait, we’d wait. We weren’t the first or last Jews …
“Well, comes January, the whole merry-go-round begins again. Between this, that, and the other thing, we’re told that there’s going to be a big meeting of the director, the inspector, and all the teachers, after which there will be an official announcement of who’s accepted and who’s not. When the day arrived there wasn’t a sign of the wife in the house; no hot meal on the table, no samovar, no tea, no nothing. Where was she? In the high school, of course. Or rather, not in it but in front of it, standing out in the cold by herself from early morning. The weather turned freezing, it began to snow, you couldn’t see past the tip of your nose — and there she was, still waiting for the meeting to be over. A scene from the opera! ‘For God’s sake,’ I wanted to tell her, ‘you know as well as I do that the man not only gave his word, he actually pocketed …’ Do you follow me? Just try talking to a woman, though! She waited an hour. She waited two. She waited three. She waited four. All the students had already gone home and she was still standing there. At last, when you’d have thought she couldn’t wait a minute longer, a door of the building opened and out stepped one of the teachers. She collared him at once and asked him if he knew what the meeting had decided. Indeed he did, he said: eighty-five new students were accepted — eighty-three Christians and two Jews. Who were the Jews? One was named Shepselsohn and one was named Katz. Well, as soon as the wife heard Katz she was off like a shot for home with the grand news. ‘Mazel tov! Thank You, thank You, dear God! Oh, thank You! They took him! They took him!..’ I tell you, she had tears in her eyes. I was pleased as punch myself, of course, but I wasn’t about to dance in the streets; that’s a woman’s way, not a man’s. ‘You don’t look any too thrilled by it,’ says the wife to me. ‘Just what makes you say that?’ I ask. ‘Why, you’re as cold as a fish!’ she says. ‘If only you knew how overjoyed your son was, you wouldn’t be sitting there like that; you’d already have gone to buy him his uniform, his cap, and his schoolbag, and you’d be planning a party in his honor.’ ‘What kind of a party?’ I ask. ‘What is this, his bar mitzvah? His engagement?’ I said it calmly enough, because I’m a man, not a woman, but it made her so mad that she stopped talking to me altogether — and a wife who won’t talk is a thousand times worse than a nag, since a nag at least has a human voice, while a deaf mute … try talking to the wall! To make a long story short, what do you think happened? She had her way again. Oh, when she wants it, she gets it …