Angela Gluck: Not Whether But How
This is an article first published in 1992. It’s about education and refugees and antiracism and interfaith dialogue and a lot of things… but it’s also about Ester as a child.
April 1986
We stay with a friend for Pesah (Passover). On the wall hangs a striking poster, advertising an event in aid of Soviet Jews. It features a shadowy landscape, with a lone figure apparently being buffeted by the wind. My daughter Ester, then almost four, is absolutely captivated by it. As well as going to sleep each night and waking up each morning to look at it, as it were, she stares long and hard at it at any available moment during the day. About half-way through the week—presumably after struggling in vain to understand what it was about—she asks for an interpretation. Well, there is place far away where Jews like us have a very hard life. People call them horrible names and sometimes hit them. Children are afraid to say they are Jewish in case they get teased or bullied, or the teachers pick on them. There are hardly any synagogues or prayer books. It’s very difficult to get matzah (unleavened bread) for Pesah and the Jews have to hold their seders (Passover ritual meals) in secret, in case they get into trouble… “Oh,” she remarks, conclusively, “you mean it’s like Pharaoh’s place!” Out of the mouth of babes...
In the months that follow, ‘Pharaoh’s place’ becomes—and remains to this day—our code word for the predicament of Jews in the USSR and, indeed, for the condition of oppressed minorities in general. Her questioning about their situation becomes more persistent and her determination to alleviate it grows.
September 1986
Ester starts school, the only Jewish girl in her class. She has a conscientious and ‘stretching’ teacher who is full of flair and fun.
October 1986
We yield to Ester’s consistent pressure to visit refusenik families in the Soviet Union and complicated preparations begin: briefings with support groups; choosing Soviet Jewish families with young children; memorising their ‘details’; collecting money; buying Jewish materials and other necessities of life, as gifts; internalising procedures and precautions…
November 1986
Ester’s class learns about the Jewish festival of Hanukah and there is a small display of artefacts. It includes a tallit (prayer shawl), which—the teacher apparently points out—is worn only by Jewish men.
“Is that true?” I ask Ester.
Long pause.
“Do you know any Jewish women who wear a tallit?”
“Yes, I do—and you wear one.”
“Did you think of telling your teacher?”
“Yes, but I didn’t want to get you into trouble!”
An interesting and important statement about the authority and power of a strong and attractive teacher. A teacher affects eternity, I learned when I was at college, for she never knows where her influence stops…
December 1986
Ester is given the part of the Angel Gabriel in the school Nativity play. Is this a job for a Jewish girl? Rightly or wrongly, she participates and, ad nauseam, practises proclaiming, “Behold!” with outstretched arms in her loudest voice. The play is performed to critical acclaim and transfers to the ‘Old People’s Home’ for their Christmas party.
December 1986/January 1987
We spend an exhausting—but invigorating and satisfying—week visiting refusenik families, sharing what we can of Jewish life and learning, laughing and crying together. Ester plays with girls and boys of her age, and they manage to communicate—as children often do—without a common language. We conclude that we gained far more than we gave and we muse that Ester got more Jewish education that week than she could possibly be expected to get in a lifetime.
January 1987
Ester recounts her Soviet experience at news time in class and also writes about it in her news book.
March 1987
Ester pens a letter (in non-joined-up writing):
“Dear President Gorbachev,
Please let Simha come to my birthday party. All my other friends will be there and I am sad. She is a very nice girl and it is not fair. Please let her come, and her Mummy and Daddy and baby sister, too.
Love from Ester XXX.”
She draws him a picture of Simha and herself playing in the snow, with some incongruous flowers growing nearby and a big bright sun in the sky.
Ester is deeply disappointed that she does not get a reply and that Simha’s family remain in refusal, after 17 years.
April 1987
Ester is in floods of tears. Why didn’t anyone ever tell her before, she demands to know, why we killed Jesus and why we are such nasty people? He was a very nice man and he never hurt anyone in his whole life. It is Easter, of course, and it transpires that her very imaginative teacher, who is firmly committed to ‘active learning’, arranged class drama to enact the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ. She has presumably wanted the experience to have impact, to be taken to heart; and she has clearly been successful. But is Ester’s distress the effect she intended? I very much doubt it. Still, what to do? I am then a religious education adviser in another local education authority, which encourages all professionals to provide positive self-images of all learners and, at the very least, not present negative self-images. I know exactly what I would do if one of ‘our’ teachers wittingly or unwittingly alienated their pupils. But this is more complicated because I and my child—and my people—are involved. And because this is a Christian-Jewish issue in a Christian-Jewish context. The school is not neutral; society is not neutral; and my studies of the Gospel—while an undergraduate and later as a secondary teacher of religious education—show that the accounts of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ are not neutral, either. I also recall how many teachers feel about parents who are themselves teachers and reflect that I am trying to be an ‘ordinary’ parent at Ester’s school but I have to acknowledge the painful conflict between my professional and personal responses.
I remember a rabbi once saying that a Jewish home is a place where joys are celebrated and sorrows are mourned. I’m sure it’s true of many homes and Jewish homes are the same as other homes, perhaps just more so. We cuddle and talk for ages—and say that some of our best friends are Christian! Ester names them: Ken and Marguerita and Pat and Andrew and Peter and Julie…
“Do they think we killed Jesus and that we’re nasty?”
“No, they don’t think we’re nasty and they like us as much as we like them.” We recall the happy times we had with Christian friends and all the love they show us.
“But my teacher read from their book and it says we did kill Jesus. And we acted it in class!” She breaks down.
Momentarily I rue my understanding of Christian theology and Church history; momentarily I rue the interfaith dialogue to which I have committed my professional and personal life. I so wish I could say that Christians have cooked the books; I so wish I could say it’s a fairy tale. I don’t want my five-year-old to learn about Christianity like this; I don’t want to have this conversation with her now. Part of me admires the dedicated teacher and her stimulating approaches; part of me could kill her.
“Jesus was also a Jew. Yes, he was nice but there are some people who don’t like good people. Maybe they are jealous of them or maybe they are bad themselves and don’t want the good people to stop them being bad. They call them names like ‘goody-goody’ and sometimes they bully them. That’s what happened to Jesus. Most of his friends were Jewish and they liked him but some people hated him, too, and they tried to make him shut up. But they couldn’t and in the end they killed him. It’s the worst thing to kill someone—whether they’re good or bad.” Pathetic and cowardly over-simplification, perhaps even distortion. I wonder what the Evangelists would say—probably, “That’s not what we wrote!” Perhaps they, like Jewish parents in our society, were in a bind: I like to think so and that they wrote what they could.
“But did we kill Jesus?” she presses. There’s no point saying, “Don’t be silly: we weren’t even born then!” to a child who has come to identify with her people’s history—not to mention their destiny—and whose tradition encourages all its ‘children’ to do just that. That’s precisely why she’s asking, “Did we kill Jesus?”
There are so many levels of truth and it’s hard to cope with any one of them, let alone all of them together…
Historical: did the Jews, or did they not, kill Jesus?
Cultural (Jewish): are ‘we’ the Jews of Jesus’ time?
Cultural (Christian): are our Christian friends like the Evangelists? If they think we killed Jesus, how come they like us? If they don’t, are they really Christian?
Theological (Christian): is it necessary to believe that the Jews killed Jesus in order to believe in him as the Son of God?
Theological (Jewish): is God replacing us, or allowing us to be replaced, by Christianity? If not, why is there all this suffering?
Theological (Christian and Jewish): does God believe that the Jews killed Jesus and what does God want of us anyway?
Social (Christian and Jewish): what sense can we make of our tragic history? How can we live together and love each other, and be beautifully ourselves?
Moral (Christian): is there any connection between Christian teaching and the Jewish condition?
Moral (Jewish): what does it mean when we are referred to as a ‘minority par excellence’?—that we are excellent at being a minority?
Educational: is this the best way to approach the Easter story with an Infant class? Is it helping them to see what it’s really about?
Psychological (mine): Ester needs to feel good about Christians and Christianity; she also needs to feel good about herself. Is it too much to ask to have both?
“No, we didn’t kill Jesus. Some bossy people had Jesus killed but we got blamed for it. The people who wrote the story down were scared to say who really killed him. But you’re right to think that it’s not fair. It’s lucky that they wrote down lots of lovely, true things, as well.”
Lucky, too, that Ester doesn’t ask how you could tell which things are lovely and true and which are nasty and false. Our family lost a lot of innocence that day: Ester grew up—and the adults grew old—far too quickly. Overnight, she could easily become a school-refuser but is dragged, ‘kicking and screaming’… I take a deep breath and ask to speak to the teacher, not to complain formally, I decide, but to explain Ester’s distress—the way you would if someone had died, for example. In a way, someone has.
The teacher is visibly shocked. “I didn’t mean to upset anyone. The children enjoy acting a lot and their little play yesterday was very good. I think the Easter story is really important—much more important than Christmas—but no one ever does it properly. I said to the class, ‘It’s then as now.’ I mean there were problems then and there are problems now. I think that acting out the story helped them see that for themselves.” She produces the Good News Bible and shows me the passages she had marked to read to the class: I can hardly bear to look. “It’s much better for them to have the real thing, I think. I can’t help what’s written there but I’m terribly sorry if it made Ester unhappy. I’ve been teaching for eight years and I don’t think I’ve ever hurt a child’s feelings before.”
I feel the personal-professional conflict welling up again. “Then you’ve done very well,” I try to say kindly, “because I’ve been in education even longer and not a day has passed that I didn’t hurt someone!”
The classroom is, as always, inviting and engaging: the bulbs, planted in the autumn, are now in full bloom and the walls are clad with the work of the children’s hands and minds. There is also a stunning display of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, evidently a collective production based on Eric Carle’s The Hungry Caterpillar. This much-loved book tells of a caterpillar that eats more and more every day of the week until it finally gets a tummy-ache, bursts and is transformed into a glorious butterfly. I know primary teachers who convey Easter themes through that book: the gradual growth, the pain of death, the bursting into life, the vibrant transformation. They say that’s what the Easter experience—for Christ and for Christians—is all about. And they can do it with a bowl of daffodils or day-old chicks, as well. I resist the temptation to tell her how to suck eggs, Easter or otherwise. I’m not her religious education adviser: I’m one of ‘her’ parents. But I leave her with the thought, I hope, that what really counts is not whether but how…
January 1989
Ester is punched in the stomach at lunchtime. A Kurdish girl has come to the school and knows not a word of English. Ester tries her best ‘Asalamu aleikum’ and it works! The girl replies, ‘Wa aleikum salam’, with a broad grin! They exchange these Islamic greetings several times a day, to all accounts. Then in the playground several boys tease the girl about her name. Aided and abetted by her best friend, Kalechi, Ester tells them not to. They don’t take very kindly to that suggestion. “You tell ‘em, Ester!” Kalechi urges. And she does: she tells them it’s not nice to pick on people and how would they like it if it happened to them? They protest that the Kurdish girl can’t understand them, anyway, so what difference does it make? It matters, they are told, because she can see what they’re doing and she can feel what they mean. “Yeah!” Kalechi joins in. (Ester and Kalechi later admit that, for emphasis, they made flapping motions with bent arms, which signalled ‘chicken’!) Then the boys sock it to Ester. The Kurdish girl leaves school that day and never returns.
The class teacher doesn’t seem to consider the matter worth mentioning at the parents’ consultation meeting, which happens to take place that evening—but it is raised all the same! They will look into it. Ester nurses her bruised belly, and she and Kalechi nurse their wounded pride. Nothing is said in assembly; nothing is said in class news time; nothing is said in private. There are no investigations, no challenges, no apologies. When approached, the headteacher is sorry to have been rather busy lately and not to have done anything about it but the girls acted wrongly: they should either have ignored the boys or told a teacher.
You can’t help wondering if the implementation of the school’s antiracist policy is solely dependent on the sensitivity and courage of two small children… On the other hand, if Ester (Jewish) and Kalechi (Black)—at the ripe old age of six-and-three-quarters—can see through their own pain to the pain of others, if they can break out of the cycle of misunderstanding, oppression and suffering, if they know what that costs and are willing to pay the price, there may yet be hope for us all.
April 1990
I take up post as a religious education inspector in London. For inspiration and delight, I lighten my notice board with pictures, clippings and extracts from a range of religious writings, including the following quotations from rabbinic sources:
“You are not free to complete the task but neither are you free to refrain from it.”
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
“From my teachers I have learned; from my colleagues even more; from my pupils most of all.”
December 1991
Ester reads the above and passes it for publication as an accurate historical record and a true reflection of her sentiments.
April 1986
We stay with a friend for Pesah (Passover). On the wall hangs a striking poster, advertising an event in aid of Soviet Jews. It features a shadowy landscape, with a lone figure apparently being buffeted by the wind. My daughter Ester, then almost four, is absolutely captivated by it. As well as going to sleep each night and waking up each morning to look at it, as it were, she stares long and hard at it at any available moment during the day. About half-way through the week—presumably after struggling in vain to understand what it was about—she asks for an interpretation. Well, there is place far away where Jews like us have a very hard life. People call them horrible names and sometimes hit them. Children are afraid to say they are Jewish in case they get teased or bullied, or the teachers pick on them. There are hardly any synagogues or prayer books. It’s very difficult to get matzah (unleavened bread) for Pesah and the Jews have to hold their seders (Passover ritual meals) in secret, in case they get into trouble… “Oh,” she remarks, conclusively, “you mean it’s like Pharaoh’s place!” Out of the mouth of babes...
In the months that follow, ‘Pharaoh’s place’ becomes—and remains to this day—our code word for the predicament of Jews in the USSR and, indeed, for the condition of oppressed minorities in general. Her questioning about their situation becomes more persistent and her determination to alleviate it grows.
September 1986
Ester starts school, the only Jewish girl in her class. She has a conscientious and ‘stretching’ teacher who is full of flair and fun.
October 1986
We yield to Ester’s consistent pressure to visit refusenik families in the Soviet Union and complicated preparations begin: briefings with support groups; choosing Soviet Jewish families with young children; memorising their ‘details’; collecting money; buying Jewish materials and other necessities of life, as gifts; internalising procedures and precautions…
November 1986
Ester’s class learns about the Jewish festival of Hanukah and there is a small display of artefacts. It includes a tallit (prayer shawl), which—the teacher apparently points out—is worn only by Jewish men.
“Is that true?” I ask Ester.
Long pause.
“Do you know any Jewish women who wear a tallit?”
“Yes, I do—and you wear one.”
“Did you think of telling your teacher?”
“Yes, but I didn’t want to get you into trouble!”
An interesting and important statement about the authority and power of a strong and attractive teacher. A teacher affects eternity, I learned when I was at college, for she never knows where her influence stops…
December 1986
Ester is given the part of the Angel Gabriel in the school Nativity play. Is this a job for a Jewish girl? Rightly or wrongly, she participates and, ad nauseam, practises proclaiming, “Behold!” with outstretched arms in her loudest voice. The play is performed to critical acclaim and transfers to the ‘Old People’s Home’ for their Christmas party.
December 1986/January 1987
We spend an exhausting—but invigorating and satisfying—week visiting refusenik families, sharing what we can of Jewish life and learning, laughing and crying together. Ester plays with girls and boys of her age, and they manage to communicate—as children often do—without a common language. We conclude that we gained far more than we gave and we muse that Ester got more Jewish education that week than she could possibly be expected to get in a lifetime.
January 1987
Ester recounts her Soviet experience at news time in class and also writes about it in her news book.
March 1987
Ester pens a letter (in non-joined-up writing):
“Dear President Gorbachev,
Please let Simha come to my birthday party. All my other friends will be there and I am sad. She is a very nice girl and it is not fair. Please let her come, and her Mummy and Daddy and baby sister, too.
Love from Ester XXX.”
She draws him a picture of Simha and herself playing in the snow, with some incongruous flowers growing nearby and a big bright sun in the sky.
Ester is deeply disappointed that she does not get a reply and that Simha’s family remain in refusal, after 17 years.
April 1987
Ester is in floods of tears. Why didn’t anyone ever tell her before, she demands to know, why we killed Jesus and why we are such nasty people? He was a very nice man and he never hurt anyone in his whole life. It is Easter, of course, and it transpires that her very imaginative teacher, who is firmly committed to ‘active learning’, arranged class drama to enact the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ. She has presumably wanted the experience to have impact, to be taken to heart; and she has clearly been successful. But is Ester’s distress the effect she intended? I very much doubt it. Still, what to do? I am then a religious education adviser in another local education authority, which encourages all professionals to provide positive self-images of all learners and, at the very least, not present negative self-images. I know exactly what I would do if one of ‘our’ teachers wittingly or unwittingly alienated their pupils. But this is more complicated because I and my child—and my people—are involved. And because this is a Christian-Jewish issue in a Christian-Jewish context. The school is not neutral; society is not neutral; and my studies of the Gospel—while an undergraduate and later as a secondary teacher of religious education—show that the accounts of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ are not neutral, either. I also recall how many teachers feel about parents who are themselves teachers and reflect that I am trying to be an ‘ordinary’ parent at Ester’s school but I have to acknowledge the painful conflict between my professional and personal responses.
I remember a rabbi once saying that a Jewish home is a place where joys are celebrated and sorrows are mourned. I’m sure it’s true of many homes and Jewish homes are the same as other homes, perhaps just more so. We cuddle and talk for ages—and say that some of our best friends are Christian! Ester names them: Ken and Marguerita and Pat and Andrew and Peter and Julie…
“Do they think we killed Jesus and that we’re nasty?”
“No, they don’t think we’re nasty and they like us as much as we like them.” We recall the happy times we had with Christian friends and all the love they show us.
“But my teacher read from their book and it says we did kill Jesus. And we acted it in class!” She breaks down.
Momentarily I rue my understanding of Christian theology and Church history; momentarily I rue the interfaith dialogue to which I have committed my professional and personal life. I so wish I could say that Christians have cooked the books; I so wish I could say it’s a fairy tale. I don’t want my five-year-old to learn about Christianity like this; I don’t want to have this conversation with her now. Part of me admires the dedicated teacher and her stimulating approaches; part of me could kill her.
“Jesus was also a Jew. Yes, he was nice but there are some people who don’t like good people. Maybe they are jealous of them or maybe they are bad themselves and don’t want the good people to stop them being bad. They call them names like ‘goody-goody’ and sometimes they bully them. That’s what happened to Jesus. Most of his friends were Jewish and they liked him but some people hated him, too, and they tried to make him shut up. But they couldn’t and in the end they killed him. It’s the worst thing to kill someone—whether they’re good or bad.” Pathetic and cowardly over-simplification, perhaps even distortion. I wonder what the Evangelists would say—probably, “That’s not what we wrote!” Perhaps they, like Jewish parents in our society, were in a bind: I like to think so and that they wrote what they could.
“But did we kill Jesus?” she presses. There’s no point saying, “Don’t be silly: we weren’t even born then!” to a child who has come to identify with her people’s history—not to mention their destiny—and whose tradition encourages all its ‘children’ to do just that. That’s precisely why she’s asking, “Did we kill Jesus?”
There are so many levels of truth and it’s hard to cope with any one of them, let alone all of them together…
Historical: did the Jews, or did they not, kill Jesus?
Cultural (Jewish): are ‘we’ the Jews of Jesus’ time?
Cultural (Christian): are our Christian friends like the Evangelists? If they think we killed Jesus, how come they like us? If they don’t, are they really Christian?
Theological (Christian): is it necessary to believe that the Jews killed Jesus in order to believe in him as the Son of God?
Theological (Jewish): is God replacing us, or allowing us to be replaced, by Christianity? If not, why is there all this suffering?
Theological (Christian and Jewish): does God believe that the Jews killed Jesus and what does God want of us anyway?
Social (Christian and Jewish): what sense can we make of our tragic history? How can we live together and love each other, and be beautifully ourselves?
Moral (Christian): is there any connection between Christian teaching and the Jewish condition?
Moral (Jewish): what does it mean when we are referred to as a ‘minority par excellence’?—that we are excellent at being a minority?
Educational: is this the best way to approach the Easter story with an Infant class? Is it helping them to see what it’s really about?
Psychological (mine): Ester needs to feel good about Christians and Christianity; she also needs to feel good about herself. Is it too much to ask to have both?
“No, we didn’t kill Jesus. Some bossy people had Jesus killed but we got blamed for it. The people who wrote the story down were scared to say who really killed him. But you’re right to think that it’s not fair. It’s lucky that they wrote down lots of lovely, true things, as well.”
Lucky, too, that Ester doesn’t ask how you could tell which things are lovely and true and which are nasty and false. Our family lost a lot of innocence that day: Ester grew up—and the adults grew old—far too quickly. Overnight, she could easily become a school-refuser but is dragged, ‘kicking and screaming’… I take a deep breath and ask to speak to the teacher, not to complain formally, I decide, but to explain Ester’s distress—the way you would if someone had died, for example. In a way, someone has.
The teacher is visibly shocked. “I didn’t mean to upset anyone. The children enjoy acting a lot and their little play yesterday was very good. I think the Easter story is really important—much more important than Christmas—but no one ever does it properly. I said to the class, ‘It’s then as now.’ I mean there were problems then and there are problems now. I think that acting out the story helped them see that for themselves.” She produces the Good News Bible and shows me the passages she had marked to read to the class: I can hardly bear to look. “It’s much better for them to have the real thing, I think. I can’t help what’s written there but I’m terribly sorry if it made Ester unhappy. I’ve been teaching for eight years and I don’t think I’ve ever hurt a child’s feelings before.”
I feel the personal-professional conflict welling up again. “Then you’ve done very well,” I try to say kindly, “because I’ve been in education even longer and not a day has passed that I didn’t hurt someone!”
The classroom is, as always, inviting and engaging: the bulbs, planted in the autumn, are now in full bloom and the walls are clad with the work of the children’s hands and minds. There is also a stunning display of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, evidently a collective production based on Eric Carle’s The Hungry Caterpillar. This much-loved book tells of a caterpillar that eats more and more every day of the week until it finally gets a tummy-ache, bursts and is transformed into a glorious butterfly. I know primary teachers who convey Easter themes through that book: the gradual growth, the pain of death, the bursting into life, the vibrant transformation. They say that’s what the Easter experience—for Christ and for Christians—is all about. And they can do it with a bowl of daffodils or day-old chicks, as well. I resist the temptation to tell her how to suck eggs, Easter or otherwise. I’m not her religious education adviser: I’m one of ‘her’ parents. But I leave her with the thought, I hope, that what really counts is not whether but how…
January 1989
Ester is punched in the stomach at lunchtime. A Kurdish girl has come to the school and knows not a word of English. Ester tries her best ‘Asalamu aleikum’ and it works! The girl replies, ‘Wa aleikum salam’, with a broad grin! They exchange these Islamic greetings several times a day, to all accounts. Then in the playground several boys tease the girl about her name. Aided and abetted by her best friend, Kalechi, Ester tells them not to. They don’t take very kindly to that suggestion. “You tell ‘em, Ester!” Kalechi urges. And she does: she tells them it’s not nice to pick on people and how would they like it if it happened to them? They protest that the Kurdish girl can’t understand them, anyway, so what difference does it make? It matters, they are told, because she can see what they’re doing and she can feel what they mean. “Yeah!” Kalechi joins in. (Ester and Kalechi later admit that, for emphasis, they made flapping motions with bent arms, which signalled ‘chicken’!) Then the boys sock it to Ester. The Kurdish girl leaves school that day and never returns.
The class teacher doesn’t seem to consider the matter worth mentioning at the parents’ consultation meeting, which happens to take place that evening—but it is raised all the same! They will look into it. Ester nurses her bruised belly, and she and Kalechi nurse their wounded pride. Nothing is said in assembly; nothing is said in class news time; nothing is said in private. There are no investigations, no challenges, no apologies. When approached, the headteacher is sorry to have been rather busy lately and not to have done anything about it but the girls acted wrongly: they should either have ignored the boys or told a teacher.
You can’t help wondering if the implementation of the school’s antiracist policy is solely dependent on the sensitivity and courage of two small children… On the other hand, if Ester (Jewish) and Kalechi (Black)—at the ripe old age of six-and-three-quarters—can see through their own pain to the pain of others, if they can break out of the cycle of misunderstanding, oppression and suffering, if they know what that costs and are willing to pay the price, there may yet be hope for us all.
April 1990
I take up post as a religious education inspector in London. For inspiration and delight, I lighten my notice board with pictures, clippings and extracts from a range of religious writings, including the following quotations from rabbinic sources:
“You are not free to complete the task but neither are you free to refrain from it.”
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
“From my teachers I have learned; from my colleagues even more; from my pupils most of all.”
December 1991
Ester reads the above and passes it for publication as an accurate historical record and a true reflection of her sentiments.
posted by Ester memories at 10:24 am
