ANOTHER TACK: Mottel vs. Mahmoud By Sarah Honig (March 17) Each night, when I was very young, my father read to me several pages from Shalom Aleichem's last (and, alas, unfinished) epic, Mottel, Son of Peissi the Cantor. It became a regular bedtime ritual. I loved the adventures of the mischievous lad from the mythical shtetl of Kasrilovka, who some 90 years ago made it to Columbus's Land after wandering across Europe. It was an inimitable introduction to the Jewish psyche and our shared background. My father and I even acted out portions of the plot and liberally elaborated on them. Later he took me to the Lower East Side, where we trod Mottel's old turf with the text in hand to look for his East Broadway, Rivington, Essex, Canal and Grand streets. On my first visit to London, we didn't go to the usual tourist traps but took our battered old copy of Mottel and went to the Whitechapel he described so colorfully. Mottel would surely ask why I am telling you all this. Well, last week my daughter came home from school and reported that none of her 10th-grade classmates had ever heard of Shalom Aleichem. Even her avowedly left-wing history teacher was horrified by the ignorance, and astonished to discover that she was actually familiar with Mottel. That made my kid a rarity in the secular school system of the Jewish state. Long ago I read to her two Shalom Aleichem short stories, also set in Kasrilovka. In one, the whole town, with messianic fervor, bands together to make its minuscule contribution to the budding Zionist enterprise. In the other, Kasrilovka's Jews empathize with beleaguered Alfred Dreyfus in far-away France and lovingly picture him in their own image as a warm, committed Jew, which he wasn't. What shines through is the innocent identification with the lot of any Jew anywhere. Presumably this should be precisely what the Jewish state's school system should seek to inculcate. Instead, it fosters identification with those who seek to annihilate it. Shalom Aleichem is out and Mahmoud Darwish is in. No real surprise here. Can anything saner be expected of a country whose authorities obsequiously acquiesce to removing the red Magen David from the ambulance put on call for the upcoming papal visit? It's bad enough that the International Red Cross, which recognizes all sorts of crescents and lions, refuses the same respect to the Jewish symbol. It's bad enough that the Vatican asked for an ambulance cleansed of embarrassing Jewish insignia. But that the Jews willingly collaborate in their own debasement is quite something else. THIS self-battery is not really that different from school texts which depict Israel's War of Independence as an imperialistic onslaught against peaceful natives like Darwish. Post-Zionist "New Literature" is now joining forces with "New History" to enlighten our youngsters on what led Darwish to advise the Jewish interlopers to: "Take your names and get out/...It's your time to get out/Reside where you will, but not amongst us/...Ours is the past here/and the present and the future/ Ours is the world here.../...So get out of our soil/Our earth, our sea/Our wheat, our salt/...Our everything. Get out/ of all memory." Another line from this poem says: "Die where you wish, but don't die amongst us." Darwish hotly opposes the Oslo Accords, and rejects anything which could be even remotely construed as peace with the Zionists. By legitimizing Darwish to captive classroom audiences (as distinct from offering his works to elective Arabic majors), Education Minister Yossi Sarid continues blazing his own trail, unique not only by local criteria. Darwish's poetry isn't matriculation exam material in any Arab country - not even in Arafat's fiefdom. The lack of precedent, however, is hardly what would put an innovator like Sarid off. He insists that tampering with curriculum content is the prerogative of any new education minister, which is why he decreed that a special mea culpa day be set aside in schools for the 1956 Kafr Kassem massacre (but not for the Altalena massacre eight years earlier). To his mind, democracy means that anyone who takes over the education portfolio may determine what our kids will learn. Theoretically, different material will be imbibed during different ministers' tenures. There are those who might call this dangerous indoctrination, and an attempt to impose the prevailing political platforms on impressionable juveniles. None of Sarid's predecessors dared venture this close to brainwashing, though Shulamit Aloni, Amnon Rubinstein, Zevulun Hammer and Yitzhak Levy were all political creatures, with distinct agendas. In fact, the literature curriculum was untouched for 21 years. A professional committee was revising it, but Sarid stole its thunder. Ten days before it completed its task, he held a press conference to announce that it decided to introduce Darwish into Israeli high schools. That was news to the committee members, and they instantly recognized Sarid's false claim as an imperious fait accompli. So will inspectors and teachers, who reserve the formal right not to teach Darwish, but who are likely to want to please their minister. Unfortunately, the controversy is only about whom Sarid would usher into the state syllabus, and not about who is already excluded - like Shalom Aleichem. Which only goes to show, yet again, that the best lessons are never learned in school. No teacher had ever inspired me to love a book as much as I loved Mottel. Painlessly I gained a sense of Jewish continuity. I learned that our heritage is one, and that our common denominators are greater than all which divides us. Or, as Mottel put it upon his first glimpse of New York: "If I didn't know for sure that we were in America, I might have thought we were in Brod or Lemberg. The same Jews, the same women, the same noise, the same dirt." Probably even the same Yossi Sarid types.