this brought back memories of Hebrew school. Mr. Dvorsky taught it in his
house and after school we boys would get there either by family, cab or bus.
When we got there, upstairs to the classroom, There he would sit and we
would begin the lessons. About an hour into the lesson, he would get up
( we often felt he was after one of us, so you had to daven with one eye out
for him or who he was going after), go to the stairs and yell "Rachel, Bring
me the tea." Mrs. Dvorsky would bring him up the stairs a glass of hot
tea with a glob of some sort of jelly in the bottom and a chunk of cube
sugar.

Now the fun began, he would bite off a chunk of the sugar ( a loud crunch..
some laughter) and the slurp of tea from the top of the glass as he drew
it between his teeth and sugar, then another and so forth. That happened
to be some 40 years ago and seems like just yesterday.

of course the other part was that if we happened to read poorly we would
get " You daven like a goy," and at 13 years of age, you didn't know whether
that was a compliment or an insult. then a slap on the shoulder and he
threw you out of class. That wasn't bad.. Mrs. Dvorsky would console us
with a piece of fresh homemade honey cake and a glass of milk, talk with
us, help us with what we were thrown out with. Their son Bernard would come
in from work and tell us that "pops doesn't mean anything by it." and
eventually both would get us back into class. Until the next time...

Thanks for the memory. May they rest in peace and happiness..
"Michael Plant" > wrote in message
...
Rick /29/05


> First, let me expound upon the extreme privelege I have of making the
> first relevant cross-post between rec.humor.jewish and
> rec.food.drink.tea (if I'm wrong please don't tell me - I wouldn't
> admit it anyway, as my wife and students could tell you).
>
> "Sucked through a sugar cube"? Have you ever tried it? I did, once.
> I obtained my Russian tea. I heated up my samovar. I got my zavarka
> and boiling water in proper combination poured into a finjan, not a
> yahrtzeit glass since we very fortunately have not been in need of the
> latter. I delicately rested the sugar cube between upper and lower
> incisors (facilitated by my slight, though not unsightly, prognathism
> - surely produced, as my mother warned me, by indiligence in wearing
> my retainer as a teen) and then:
>
> Disaster. The cube crumbled faster than a Republican congressional
> caucus after an indictment. I was left with a mouthful of granulated
> sugar in tea, unable to spit it out because a child was attentively
> staring at me across the table; the very child whom I had previously
> sternly lectured about keeping his food in his mouth and that, even
> though the poodle would appreciatively lick premasticated pizza off
> his fingers, this is still considered bad manners.
>
> I have heard that hard candies are permissible. Also, I'm sure that
> if I stroll the back alleys of certain Slavic neighborhoods in Chicago
> I can find a fellow with a Rasputin beard and shiny dark eyes who'd
> sell me a bag of crystal suc. In the interim, I'm doing quite nicely
> with a spoonful of cherry jam admixed (and a "bissel schnapps" when
> the wind blows fiercely off the lake).

[Michael]
Ditto on the sugar: Poland 1966.