| Len's uncle
Secular Hebrew
So I studied at the Yeshiva for a number of years, and then I left the Yeshiva, and I went to a big city. I wanted to get secular learning. To learn secular Hebrew even. There were some young men who used to go out of the city and they returned home for vacations. “Conequaly”, they called it in Russian, and they were seeking out young boys of the Yeshiva as—I should have said they were looking for converts—in order to sell secular learning to boys who studied nothing but religion. They studied the Talmud, and nothing but the Talmud. In many places, the yeshiva never taught Tanach, never taught the Bible. They taught nothing but the Talmud and its adjoining books, but never Tanach.
So they [the Conequaly] sought out boys, and they taught them Tanach, and they gave them Hebrew books to read. That was the first time I had... The first book I had ever read in my life of modern literature [was] by Yehuda Leib Gordon, the great poet. They called him YALAG, briefly, and he impressed me a lot. He impressed me so much that he drew me away from religious life almost completely, and he himself was a very hardened Jew. He loved his people. He was a Zionist, raised Zionist, but he was against this strict rabbinical law that caused the Jewish backs to bend, that took the erectness from them, pride, and so forth.
Then I read several other books. I read Smolensky. Also I was given these books by those people, by these young men, these young students, university students. When one at the Yeshiva got caught reading those books, he was warned. He was given a warning, and the second or third time he was caught, they got him out of the Yeshiva.
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