Product Description

Gerry Albarelli's TEACHA! STORIES FROM A YESHIVA chronicls a year in the life of a non-Jewish teacher and his students at a wild Hasidic yeshiva in Brooklyn.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #774917 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 104 pages

From Booklist
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 Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A playfully rendered, surprising account...[Albarelli's] imaginative descriptions and wonderful sense of rhythm make his account a delight..." -- New York Times Book Review, April 22, 2001

A lovely little memoir...a rare glimpse at the closed world of Jewish fundamentaliism....A very interesting read." -- New York Press, February 2001

About the Author
Gerry Albarelli taught English at a Hasidic yeshiva for five years. He is originally from Bridgeport, Connecticut. He currently lives in New York, where he is the administrator of the Actors Studio.

His forthcoming MIDNIGHT MASS: STORIES OF ITALIAN-AMERICAN CHILDHOOD will be published in 2002.

Customer Reviews

One teacher's baptism by fire (to mix a metaphor...)
This book reminded me of another book about a teacher who was plunged into the chaos of an inner-city school, namely, "Dangerous Minds." The writing format is different ("Dangerous Minds" is a novel, this is a memoir) but the experiences are similar. Here is this new teacher, hired to teach English in a school where the culture and the kids are so totally different from what he is used to, that, as the rabbi who hired him says, "Think of it this way, you're going to Mars."

In this case, teacher Gerry Albarelli is hired to teach English in a Brooklyn yeshiva run by one of the most conservative of the Hasidic sects. (He never says which one, but, judging from various clues in the story, my guess would be Satmar.) Here, English is a second language and the boys are not the least bit interested in learning it. Everyone in their insular community speaks Yiddish anyway, and even the principal's English leaves much to be desired. Add to this the bewildering (to Albarelli, at least) world of Hasidic life and its rules. The experience becomes, if I may badly mix a metaphor, a true "baptism by fire."

The school days are long, from 6AM to 6PM -- the Hasidic world's solution to the daycare shortage. Religious classes are in the morning when the boys are rested. English classes? They come at the end of the day, when the kids are all bouncing off the walls with pent-up energy. The boys consider secular subjects to be time for recess -- and their classroom behavior shows it! It doesn't help that the stories in the textbooks are about suburban middle-class Gentile families whose lives have nothing to do with the Brooklyn world that these boys live in.

Eventually, Albarelli wins the respect of his students through storytelling and acting out little plays that they make up in class, in order to practice their English. He never becomes a Hasid (or even a Jew) but does learn enough about the culture to begin to understand and respect it. After five years, however, he moves on to another position, leaving behind forever the chaos and exhuberance of the boys in this school "on Mars."

My first reaction, upon reading this book, was embarrassment. Would it give a bad impression of Hasidism to the public? Then I remembered some of my own experiences as an Orthodox Jew teaching in the public schools in rural Minnesota. I, too, have had my share of spitballs, paper airplanes, flying pencils, kids who won't stay in their seats or even listen to what I say -- not to mention plenty of cross-cultural ignorance. (If I ever write my own equivalent of "Teacha!" it will be called "Why Do you Wear that Little Hat?") Albarelli's students regard him as less than a "real man" because he has no beard or sidecurls; my students consider me a wimp because I don't play sports. The rules may be different, but kids are all on the same basic search for identity and belonging. More than anything, Albarelli's book demonstrates that students are students everywhere. These boys may be Hasidim, but they are also kids growing up in the inner city. Anybody who has ever taught in a less-than-perfect school (And tell me, what school is perfect?) will relate to this book.

Touching and humorous tales from a "different" world
Although I am usually not a fan of the minimalist style used in this brief book, I thoroughly enjoyed these autobiographical sketches--which I read in one sitting--and found myself wanting more.

Albarelli presents colorful--if broad-stroked--portraits of some of the adults at the yeshiva and elsewhere in Brooklyn (the stick-wielding Rabbi Katz, the new teacher who can't overcome his shyness, the landlady who never seems to leave the luncheonette), but he never really presents his students as individuals. Indeed, Albarelli notes that, a couple of weeks into his teaching stint, all the students "still looked the same" to him. My only disappointment with the book (which barely qualifies as a complaint) is that, in the end, the students are similarly indistinguishable to the reader.

Still, anyone will laugh out loud at Albarelli's comic and moving (mis)adventures and will want to know more about the Hasidic community for which he worked as an English teacher.

Sweet, funny, touching... and REAL
In this short but sweet book, Albarelli, a non-Jew, ventures behind the walls of one of Brooklyn's many yeshivas, discovering the often-touching human face behind the stereotypes, and learning more about himself as a process.

Albarelli is clearly the hero of his own story, particularly in contrast to the other English "teachers" in the yeshiva, who treat the kids like animals. But the students, too, and the principals, come across as heroes, if heroes of a different kind. Albarelli paints the school's characters with crude strokes -- writing down their Brooklyn Yiddish accents almost syllable for syllable, for instance -- but the overall effect is surprisingly delicate.

Though Albarelli never fully becomes one of the chassidim, in the end, he is accepted and -- even more important -- he is beginning to understand their world and world-view. This book is a surprising gem, a sympathetic but realistic portrait of a universe most of us will never see for ourselves. I read it in an afternoon, but its sentences -- reading almost like self-conscious fiction -- and its message will likely stay with me for years.