Traditional Jewish Jokes and Anecdotes, No. 17

The Secret of Good Deportment

Little Shermie was a pain in the you know where.  Especially at school, there didn’t seem to be a teacher in a public school. who could control him.  Maybe some big shot doctor today would talk of attention deficit disorder or asparagus syndrome or some other fancy shmancy term.  The problem was he never shut up, stopped moving, or arguing with everybody who tried to teach him something. 

His poor father went from one school to another, moved house often, and spent up such a storm he thought he would end up in the poor house before too long.  Every principal at first promised that his school and teachers could handle a boy like Shlermie.  But within a week, or at most two, there came the same phone call: We are sorry but we must ask you to withdraw your son, Mr. Ginsburg.

After six public schools, Shlermie’s father started with private schools, sometimes with and sometimes without special tutors—and you know what they cost!  Nothing worked.  The kid was incorrigible.

Desperate, Mr. Ginsberg swallowed his pride, and started to try parochial schools.  First he went to the Friends, but not even the Quakers could handle such a bondit. Then he went to a Presbyterian School, a Lutheran School, a Baptist School, a Salivation Army School —and from all of them, nothing at all.  A few days, maybe a week, but never more than ten teaching days before a principal asked Shlermie’s father to come take him away before everyone, other students, teachers, guidance counsellor, supervisors of all sorts and even janitors, would go out of their minds.

Then Mr Ginsberg tried sending the boy to live-away military schools, out-in-the-wilderness tough-love schools, in fact, any kind of educational institution that he could think of.  No luck at all.  The kid was impossible.

At last, at the end of his tether, not knowing where to turn next, he went to the one place he would never have gone if everything were not so helpless.  He drove the boy to a convent school in a country town where he heard they were both pious and disciplined. 

When he got there, the two of them, Shlermie and his father, were ushered into a small dark office by a nun in an old-fashioned wimple and long black dress.  There was a priest sitting at the desk.  A tall, middle-aged man who looked like he stepped out of a lithograph of the Spanish Inquisition.  Next to him, a woman, also dressed like a nun, but with a different style of costume and peering out of thick glasses with a stare that could knock over a plow-horse.  Everyone looked at each other expectantly.  He didn’t have to explain to these mamzerim that he was a Jew, and likewise his son.

You should keep in mind, by the way, that throughout this preliminary discussion, Shlermie was wriggling about, pulling chochkas off the priest’s desk and dropping them on the floor, and making quite a racket, saying things like “Help, get me out of this crazy place” and “What kind of people are these, wizards and witches?” and “If you don’t get me out of here, I will shit all over the floor.”

Then the priest, Father Dominic O’Leary, he said he was, announced “Sister Anastasia, please take this child around and show him the school, while I discuss certain pertinent details with his father.

As the nun took Shlirmie around the establishment—and she was a strong woman, who also carried a little whip tucked into her belt—Mr Ginsburg and Father Dominic began to discuss costs, restrictions on visits from parents, and special food preferences they could possibly respect.  Mr. Ginsburg, as a businessman, was quite impressed and felt his fingers itching to sign the contract and get the kid off his hands for a whole school term, whether everything worked out or not.

About an hour later, when Sister Anastasia brought Shlirmie back into the office, he was quite subdued.  He sat up, kept silent, and behaved with polite gestures.    Mr. Ginsberg was so impressed he signed the contract on the spot.

“Good,” said the priest, “he can start at once.  Please, come back tomorrow morning to drop off his things.  Here is a list of what he is allowed to bring with him in the way of clothes and accessories.  No contact allowed, except in the case of a dire emergency”

“Come with me, child,” said Sister Anastasia.  “You may say good-bye to your father.  You will not see him for three months, you understand?”

When they were alone for the permitted five minutes, Mr. Ginsberg looked at Shlirmie, and said:

“You like this place?  You will be maybe now a good boy?”

Shlirmie wiggled and whimpered a little, but said, “Yes, tattale.”

So tell me, please, what did this Mother Shapiro or whatever, show you that makes you now suddenly behave like a mensch?”

“Oy, tattele, she took me to one classroom after another, into a library room, into a dining hall, into a chapel where they pray their goyisha prayers, and everywhere, tattele, they have on the wall a kind of cross thing and on it some little man is hanging, you can see plainly the pain on his face, and also by him the blood coming out of wounds.  So I figure, if they do that their own people what are naughty, I better be a good boychik here or else they are going to hang me up on the wall too.”

Mr. Ginsburg gave the boy a smoochy kiss and a tight hug, and shoved him back in the room with the nun and the priest.  He then himself turned away and walked back to his car, and as he did so, he let his eyes turn upwards a little and whispered, “Denken Gotts.  I think this time it’s going to work.”