Don't Tell Me I Can't Do It! Read Online Free PDF

to a real school with children my age in an environment that wasn’t impossibly cramped and unsanitary, where I didn’t have to worry about whether my teachers and fellow students had managed to survive the night before. My family had just moved to Sibiu, in Transylvania, where I was admitted to the fifth grade class of a local Catholic school. Romanian was now the country’s native language—not the German I grew up speaking in Romania before the war. Though I was ever so eager to participate, something was wrong. Between Hail Maryprayers, I furtively looked around in hopes of finding someone else like me, someone not wearing a cross. Alas, I was the only one—a Jewish outsider in a room full of Christians.
    It was a subtle twist of irony. Though I wasn’t ashamed of my family’s ancestral heritage, in that tender moment I would have very much liked to have a cross of my own to wear, just so that I wouldn’t stick out. There was a time not long before, though, when I would have given anything not to wear a religious symbol, for the same reason. When the Germans came to Romania, the yellow Star of David we were required to wear marked us as refuse to be gotten rid of. Today I was free of that cursed emblem, yet I still felt like a marked person.
    Something else made me stand out, too. I was smart.
    Our teacher was a heavyset, matronly woman who looked just like an “old maid” schoolteacher was supposed to, complete with a severe gray bun and wire glasses perched on a beaklike nose. She could be stern, but I knew she was working hard and challenging us to learn difficult concepts. One day she asked the class a physics question, something about Newton’s theory ofgravity. In the silence that followed, I hesitated. No one knew the answer. Dare I raise my hand and call attention to myself? I wondered. My heart pounding, vulnerable yet excited, I decided that for once, I would be acknowledged. I raised my hand.
    When the teacher summoned me to the blackboard, I grabbed the piece of chalk and had soon written out the correct formula for all to see. The teacher became noticeably animated, waving her pointer at me while addressing the whole class. “Look at this little Jewish girl,” she exclaimed. “She can’t even speak our language, and yet she knows the answer! What’s wrong with the rest of you?”
    I don’t have many vivid memories of my time in that school, but this is one of them. It was a peak experience, forever imprinted on my self-image. Yes, I was different. I was the only non-Christian in the class. I was an outsider with a different language who had not even had the privilege of a regular grammar school education prior to that point. I wasn’t pretty, and I wasn’t popular. I had no advantages whatsoever. Yet I was smart, and I was special.
    I owned it.
    By the time I left school, I had reversed my fortune. I emerged as a natural leader among my peers, because organizing events and being in charge came easily for me. It still does. I became involved in a drama group and discovered the thrill of acting, singing, and dancing before a live audience. In spite of my differences, I made people watch me, and they applauded and threw flowers on the stage before me. I translated “being different” into “being unique,” and I built on that. I became a ham—a “kosher ham,” as it were—and I came to be quite popular after all. People predicted that I would grow up to be a performer.
    Their prediction came true. Today I’m producing, directing, and acting on the stage of my life with great vigor.

    It was no secret that when my mother was pregnant with me, my father wanted a boy for his second child. When I came along, I later learned, he was so disappointed that for days he didn’t even want to look at me. I was far too young to appreciate such a thing, of course,but somehow it must have affected me subconsciously. I became the son my father never had.
    Even from a young age I liked to play with