mister berger

most kids stopped going to junior congregation after the fourth grade. mister berger who taught the fourth grade ran junior congregation and thus there was some logic to considering oneself to have graduated junior congregation once one had finished mister berger's class. my brother never had to deal with this dilemma as his good voice had gotten him accepted into the choir and thus he had another place to go on saturday mornings, and although i recall he did not last long in the choir, cantor brownstone was known as a tyrant of sorts, his association with the choir, however brief, sundered his association with junior congregation. but my voice was not good enough to qualify me for the choir and thus i continued to attend J.C.

i recall heading there early, the first kid present, in fact interviewing other kids about the death of jfk. one kid told me that he didn't care about the death of the us president and wouldn't care even if diefenbaker had been shot (even though by that time pearson was the prime minister of canada) i think the same kid was also the one who told me that his father rooted for the ussr in the olympics, for they had come from russia and they still rooted for russia. i also recall the near rape of karen dana, lifting her dress and being dared to pull down her pink panites, but knowing when to stop and apologizing afterward for the offense.

mister berger and i had a history of sorts. in his class if you misbehaved you were told in hebrew "take a sheet of paper!" which meant taking the sheet home and filling it both sides with the hebrew for "it is forbidden to disturb during the class" on each and every line, a punishment that i hid from my parents. this was the first time that any teacher had ever punished me for misbehavior and there was a type of combat that existed between the male students and our first male teacher (since the first grade, when norman stern wished to keep me in the first grade for an additional year because i still spoke like a little kid, with r's confused with w's and y's confused with l's.)

berger had chosen me to play the part of the mordecai in the school play. there were three main male parts: mordecai, haman and Ahasuerus and norman isenstein and joey greenholtz divvied up the two "villain" roles and i got to play the hero. one day berger told me to prepare my lines at home and since they were the avinu malkeinu, i assumed they were to be sung, whereas in fact they were meant to be pleaded (before a merciful god), so when he called on me to read my lines in class the next day he thought me poorly prepared when i read the lines as if reading a conversation between friends. norman isenstein burst into laughter and i was infected by his laughter and laughed as well and berger kicked us into the hall and we were both terrified that mrs. wiseman would see us and give us the strap and though we saw her in the hall, she must have noticed it was two goody-goodies in the hallway for whom mere hall banishment and fear were sufficient punishment and she did not gather us into her wicked witch grasp and punish us.

the avinu malkeinu act was in fact something of a problem for mister berger, because after i walked forward toward the audience pleading each avinu malkeinu, the about face and exit were awkward. he tried to do it with me walking across stage, but that lacked the dramatic wallop that walking forward towards the audience contained, so he eventually returned to the walk toward the audience and the awkward walk off stage allowed the audience a moment of introspection. (in fact this was 1965 just a hop, skip and jump after the war and who knows what the fear of extermination meant to middle class parents of winnipeg in those years..)