Fisher’s Horrible Hundred

Before I ever learned that politicians parse the truth most of the time and all of us parse the truth some of the time I had an eye opening life primer in the truth courtesy of a man named Lester Fisher.

My family belonged to a reform synagogue and I attended weekly religious school from the first through ninth grades. I think I was in the sixth grade when our text book for the year was “When the Jewish People Was Young.” A lot of us couldn’t accept the title as grammatically correct but it was– a “people” is singular although I don’t recall to this day hearing anybody ever say, “The American people is…”

Anyway, “When the Jewish People Was Young” was first published in the 1930s. When we were given our copies in the late 1950s its style was as parched as Moses must have been wandering about in the Sinai all those decades. The book was a snooze. It could have been printed on stone tablets.

Lester Fisher was our teacher challenged with trying to resuscitate this lifeless version of Jewish biblical history. I don’t recall that he succeeded. I only remember “The Test.”

Now, up to this point in my education a true or false exam was preferable to multiple choice or to being asked to provide an actual name or date and certainly it was a much better alternative to any questions that required a written sentence or God forbid, a paragraph.

But Mr. Fisher was about to change the entire calculus of what I had conceived as my testing pecking order. He was my father’s age and in retrospect maybe didn’t want to be teaching our weekly class about as much as we didn’t want to be attending it. But although he seemed serious, actually stern, he enjoyed being a bit theatrical at times and this day he was in total performance mode.

“Close your books and get out a pencil and paper. This will be a True-False test.”

I’d done the reading and felt prepared to achieve a passing grade which was all I wanted to accomplish. But then Mr. Fisher mischievously upped the ante.

“Get ready for ‘Fisher’s Horrible Hundred!'”

The questions began and they were tough– really tough. After the first half dozen I realized I had marked them all as true. I was fairly confident they were but then after a few more that I marked as true as well I began to wonder why I felt uneasy. How could there be this many true answers in a row?

I opened my mouth. “These questions are all true,” I said and it probably sounded more like a question than a declaration.

Mr. Fisher did not look at me and did not pause. His face did not change expression. The questions kept coming and they still continued to seem to me to be all true even when I wasn’t sure. My instincts were telling me they were. My logic was telling me that it wasn’t possible.

I had to make a choice, guess or go with my gut feeling that “Fisher’s Horrible Hundred” was turning out to be the easiest hardest exam I’d ever taken if I would simply mark all one hundred questions true. But who would ever give such a test?

In a split second I lost my nerve and began to write as many Fs as Ts the rest of the way. As I look back today I guess this was an indication that I wasn’t a gambler and I think it’s true that I rarely have been. But as I recall I still got the highest mark in our class on the test that day and it was a totally pyrrhic achievement. “Fisher’s Horrible Hundred” were indeed all true and our entire class failed!

Author: Peter Imber

Happy to still be around. View all posts by Peter Imber