So as I said, we returned from Nahalal
and after a while the money began to run out.
Then my father decided to move to Tel Aviv.
Haifa was a city of the future but not of the present.
So we moved to Tel Aviv, we took an apartment
near Allenby Street on Balfour St, near Allenby.
They registered me in a school for boys, Ahad Haam
on Ahad Haam St at the corner of Bezalel Yaffe.
Then we moved to the Florentine neighborhood
because of the shop
Then to Dizengoff Street with the laundry.
I studied at Lebanim.
I cycled from home to the boys' school.
I helped as much as I could at home,
delivering laundry to all kinds of people in the afternoon.
I saw my parents work like… I really do not know what to say.
I studied at Lebanim in the sixth, seventh, eighth grade.
Sorry, no, half of the fifth grade that I studied in Germany
was lost and I started fifth grade over again,
so instead of being the youngest and smallest boy in the classroom
I suddenly became almost
the biggest and oldest child in the class.
I thought I had grown because of the air
of the Land of Israel and a new homeland and so forth,
until I returned to Germany for the first time
in many years and I saw that in Germany I was still short.
In Israel I was always medium student, average.
when I finished 7th grade, I was a good student in Hebrew too
I learned Hebrew fairly quickly and got a distinction in Hebrew essays.
I remember writing an essay about Moses in Egypt etc
I was always among the best in the class.
I had all kinds of ideas,
even starting a revolution in the classroom.
There was one thing in the class that made me very angry:
the class had both clever and less clever pupils;
those who learned faster and those who learned more slowly
as well as those who did not learn at all.
Those at the bottom dragged down those at the top
and held back the progress of the entire class.
My teacher, Thomas Szpileczki was his name...
one of those teachers who knew everything,
who taught everything.
He was secular, but put on a kippah to teach the Bible,
and loved the Bible and taught the Bible,
taught us to love the Bible.
To this day, I really love the Bible.
I came to him once, and he lived not far from here,
I went to his house and told him: 'I have an idea...
let's divide the class into groups,
groups of four, five, six.
We'll put a good student in each of these groups
with the average ones and the weak ones,
and in the afternoon the good students will help the others
progress and that way we will all be able to move forward much faster'.
So he sent me to the English teacher
and they talked and talked.
Nothing came of it, of course,
but already in the seventh grade
I began to feel that I was not really learning anything.
I was well ahead of the class.
On Allenby St opposite Balfour St there was a kind of hut,
booth that had old books in German.
It was filled with treasures
and there I bought a physics textbook in German.
I saw that the class was going exactly...
according to this book...
apparently it had been translated.
I read it and I was always three, four or five lessons ahead of the class,
then I found it boring.
In short, at the end of seventh grade
my older sister said:
'You're wasting your time at school.
Why don't you go to night school
and during the day you can help our parents with the work'.
So that's what I did.