Narration of Audiobook - English - Male - Young Adult
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
For the 1st 17 years of my life, I lived in Brooklyn From nursery through the 11th grade blurred prehistoric years. I attended a small yeshiva called Tora to Mima, the translation of which the Torah is perfect was our credo school was single sexed with a black and white dress code, 30 boys per grade and a reputation for functioning as an academic travesty, Yiddish speaking rabbis refused to teach anything vaguely related to evolution. Former hippies plucked from the street incapable of landing a job in the regular school system ranted incoherently about civics. Freshman year, math was canceled abruptly after Mr Alvarez, our loan competent teacher decided he'd seen enough of our wondrous country and returned to Argentina. The Torah was perfect. Our education was not none of this mattered much to our community. Never was there any pretense that this was anything but a yeshiva first and a school second dedicated to the uncompromising development of students into the leaders of modern day Tora and then with whatever time was left in the day to a secular education. Most graduates spent years floating aimlessly around the country studying in a basement address here. A basement address there where their fathers had once studied, where a second cousin once removed was a notable donor wherever really they were offered a bed. No one had college on his mind. It took me all this time to realize that this amounted to a beautiful life. My family wasn't too different at least back then. My father was an accountant for a small local firm, which I suppose made us something of a minority in a community in which many fathers spent their days learning or teaching Torah. Still, my father fancied himself a learned man. His grandfather, he enjoyed reminding me, had been a fairly prominent rabbi in Williamsburg and descended from a line of middling talmudic scholars and spent his free time engrossed in study. His profession was infinitely boring, but he was satisfied with his lot and prone to pious over generalizations. God fearing specks in a vast universe do not require fancy careers. He was in short, eminently suited for our community, graying hair, worn smile, the simplest man I've ever known. My mother thin, elegant in the way receding youth clings to certain women was more unusual. Her parents, third generation chicagoans maintained a semi traditional household, occasional friday night gatherings, synagogue on the high holidays, no pork, some lobster. As a freshman at Barnard, she partook in a Hillel sponsored trip to Israel and nearly overnight became infatuated with the spiritual fulfillment, moral discipline and communal structure offered by Orthodox Judaism, she returned reborn studying with a local rabbit, seen adopting increasingly complex meets vote and by the end of her fall semester transferring to Stern college. Soon after Ashida was arranged with my father. I was deeply curious about my mother's early life, but she said little on the subject. She insisted, in fact, that she hardly remembered her childhood in Chicago. I used to ask questions. What was it like eating non kosher, having saturday's free attending public school. But instead of substantive answers, received instructions mostly from my father. To keep private. My mother's status as a ballot to suva, a newly religious jew. Her real life, she claimed began with my father After marrying. She earned her master's at Teachers College, a rarity for the other mothers. I knew She taught 4th grade at Tora to Mima, which meant she witnessed firsthand it's academic horrors. Aria, she announced after it become apparent my 5th grade teacher took personal offense to the concept of required reading. Enrichment is in order.