STORY, WHAT STORY? OY, DO I HAVE STORIES!

Here are a few of my favourites:

1. One afternoon in the fall of 1960, when transistor radios were new and exciting, Perry (Paysie) Roitman snuck a transistor into Chaver Lapin's Yiddish class to listen to the World Series (or the World Serious, as my
wife's grandmother called it). Paysie kept the volume down but not low enough so that Chaver Lapin couldn't hear it. Lapin screamed out (as only he could), "Vear Redt?" ( my terrible transliteration for "Who's talking?)"

Paysie replied calmly, to the loud laughter of all the boys in the class and the dumb incomprehension of the girls and Chaver Lapin, " Mel Allen" (the legendary play-by-play broadcaster of the Yankees.

2. Sydney Karlinsky was asked to read out loud to the class a passage from an English-language book. In the passage was a phrase that went something like, "she was so hungry she was famished", and Sydney pronounced "famished" in the way he had heard it around the house, with the emphasis on the final sylable, i.e., famished).

Many years later, the laugh was on me when I was made senior partner in the prestigious Bay Street law firm in Toronto named "Famisht and Tsedrayt", where, if you are at all interested in knowing, I'm doing extremely well. I owe my success to my background at Peretz Shul (which I usually refer to as My Peretz School Daze).

John (Yankel Avrum) Feld - class of '61