Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva
A young non-Jewish teacher tells of a chaotic year teaching English as a second language in an all-boys grade school run by an ultraconservative Hasidic sect in Brooklyn. To them he's the ultimate outlander. To him, the school is a place of pandemonium, the boys driven wild by the rigid schedule. Rabbis make the rules. English is a threat and a waste of time. Pictures of women must be blacked out of books and newspapers. But if Albarelli begins as a condescending observer of an exotic tribe, he soon gets very close. He gets the kids' attention with stories about them, stories he gets them to tell. Like Chaplin, he finds farce and melancholy, frenzy and longing. There's absurdity and also a strong sense of loss, of caged, excited birds, and worlds shut out. His words are poetic in their simplicity, the dialogue right on with the Yiddish idiom. Read this book aloud.Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved