The Chosen (15 page)

‘No.’

‘Because I really think we are,’ Danny said.

I didn’t say anything. We walked to the comer, then turned right on Lee A venue. The street was busy with traffic and crowded with people. I wondered what any of my classmates would think if they saw me walking with Danny. It would become quite a topic of conversation in the neighborhood. Well, they would see me with him sooner or later.

Danny was looking at me, his sculptured face wearing a serious expression. ‘Don’t you have any brothers, or sisters?’ he asked. ‘No. My mother died soon after I was born.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘How about you?’

‘I have a brother and a sister. My sister’s fourteen and my brother is eight. I’m going on sixteen.’

‘So am I,’ I said.

We discovered that we had been born in the same year, two days apart.

‘You’ve been living five blocks away from me all these years, and I never knew who you were,’ I said.

‘We stick pretty close together. My father doesn’t like us to mix with outsiders.’

‘I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but your father sounds like a tyrant.’

Danny didn’t disagree. ‘He’s a very strong-willed person. When he makes up his mind about something, that’s it, finished.’

‘Doesn’t he object to your going around with an apikoros like me?’

‘That’s why he wants to meet you.’

‘I thought you said your father never talks to you.’

‘He doesn’t. Except when we study Talmud. But he did this time. I got up enough courage to tell him about you, and he said to bring you over today. That’s the longest sentence he’s said to me in years. Except for the time I had to convince him to let us have a ball team.’

‘I’d hate to have my father not talk to me.’

‘It isn’t pleasant,’ Danny said very quietly. ‘But he’s a great man. You’ll see when you meet him.’

‘Is your brother going to be a rabbi, too?’

Danny gave me a queer look. ‘Why do you ask that?’

‘No special reason. Is he?’

‘I don’t know. Probably he will.’ His voice had a strange, almost wistful quality to it. I decided not to press the point. He went back to talking about his father.

‘He’s really a great man, my father. He saved his community. He brought them all over to America after the First World War.’

‘I never heard about that,’ I told him.

‘That’s right,’ he said, and told me about his father’s early years in Russia. I listened in growing astonishment.

Danny’s grandfather had been a well-known Hasidic rabbi in a small town in southern Russia, and his father had been the second of two sons. The firstborn son had been in line to inherit his father’s rabbinic position, but during a period of study in Odessa he suddenly vanished. Some said he had been murdered by Cossacks; for a time there was even a rumor that he had been converted to Christianity and had gone to live in France. The second son was ordained at the age of seventeen, and by the time he was twenty had achieved an awesome reputation as a Talmudist.

When his father died, he automatically inherited the position of rabbinic leadership. He was twenty-one years old at the time.

He remained the rabbi of his community throughout the years of Russia’s participation in the First World War. One week before the Bolshevist Revolution, in the autumn of 1917, his young wife bore him a second child, a son. Two months later, his wife, his son, and his eighteen-month-old daughter were shot to death by a band of marauding Cossacks, one of the many bandit gangs that roamed through Russia during the period of chaos that followed the revolution. He himself was left for dead, with a pistol bullet in his chest and a saber wound in his pelvis. He lay unconscious for half a day near the bodies of his wife and children, and then the Russian peasant who tended the stove in the synagogue and swept its floor found him and carried him to his hut, where he extracted the bullet, bathed the wounds, and tied him to the bed so he would not fall out during the days and nights he shivered and screamed with the fever and delirium that followed.

The synagogue had been burned to the ground. Its Ark was a gutted mass of charred wood, its four Torah scrolls were seared black, its holy books were piles of gray ash blown about by the wind. Of the one hundred eighteen Jewish families in the community only forty-three survived.

When it was discovered that the rabbi was not dead but was being cared for by the Russian peasant, he was brought into the still intact home of a Jewish family and nursed back to health. He spent the winter recovering from his wounds. During that winter the Bolshevists signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, and Russia withdrew from the War. The chaos inside the country intensified, and the village was raided four times by Cossacks. But each of those times the Jews were warned by friendly peasants and were concealed in the woods or in huts. In the spring, the rabbi announced to his people that they were done with Russia, Russia was Esav and Edam, the land of Satan and the Angel of Death. They would travel together to America and rebuild their community.

Eight days later, they left. They bribed and bargained their way through Russia, Austria, France, Belgium, and England.

Five months later, they arrived in New York City. At Ellis Island the rabbi was asked his name, and he gave it as Senders. On the official forms, Senders became Saunders. After the customary period of quarantine, they were permitted to leave the island, and Jewish welfare workers helped them settle in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Three years later the rabbi-married once again, and in 1929, two days before the stock market crash, Danny was born in the Brooklyn Memorial Hospital. Eighteen months later his sister was born, and five and a half years after the birth of his sister, his brother was born by Caesarean section, both in that same hospital.

‘They all followed him?’ I asked. ‘Just like that?’

‘Of course. They would have followed him anywhere.’

‘I don’t understand that. I didn’t know a rabbi had that kind of power.’

‘He’s more than a rabbi,’ Danny said. ‘He’s a tzaddik.’

‘My father told me about Hasidism last night. He said it was a fine idea until some of the tzaddikim began to take advantage of their followers. He wasn’t very complimentary.’

‘It depends upon your point of view,’ Danny said quietly.

‘I can’t understand how Jews can follow another human being so blindly.’

‘He’s not just another human being.’

‘Is he like God?’

‘Something like that. He’s a kind of messenger of God, a bridge between his followers and God.’

‘I don’t understand it. It almost sounds like Catholicism.’

‘That’s the way it is,’ Danny said, ‘whether you understand it or not.’

‘I’m not offending you or anything. I just want to be honest.’

‘I want you to be honest,’ Danny said.

We walked on in silence.

A block beyond the synagogue where my father and I prayed, we made a right turn into a narrow street crowded with brownstones and sycamores. It was a duplicate of the street on which I lived; but a good deal older and less neatly kept. Many of the houses were unkempt, and there were very few hydrangea bushes or morning glories on the front lawns. The sycamores formed a solid, tangled bower that kept out the sunlight. The stone banisters on the outside stairways were chipped, their surfaces blotched with dirt, and the edges of the stone steps were round and smooth from years of use. Cats scrambled through the garbage cans that stood in front of some of the houses, and the sidewalks were strewn with’ old newspapers, ice cream and candy wrappers, worn cardboard cartons, and torn paper bags. Women in longsleeved dresses, with kerchiefs covering their heads, many with infants in their arms, others heavily pregnant, sat on the stone steps of the stairways, talking loudly in Yiddish. The street throbbed with the noise of playing children who seemed in constant motion, dodging around cars, racing up and down steps, chasing after cats, climbing trees, balancing themselves as they tried walking on top of the banisters, pursuing one another in furious games of tag—all with their fringes and earlocks dancing wildly in the air and trailing out behind them. We were walking quickly now under the dark ceiling of sycamores, and a tall, heavily built man in a black beard and black caftan came alongside me, bumped me roughly to avoid running into a woman, and passed me without a word. The liquid streams of racing children, the noisy chatter of longsleeved women, the worn buildings and blotched banisters, the garbage cans and the scrambling cars all gave me the feeling of having slid silently across a strange threshold, and for a long moment I regretted having let Danny take me into his world.

We were approaching a group of about thirty black-caftaned men who were standing in front of the three-story brownstone at the end of the street. They formed a solid wall, and I did not want to push through them so I slowed my steps, but Danny took my arm with one hand and tapped his other hand upon the shoulder of a man on the outer rim of the crowd. The man turned, pivoting the upper portion of his body—a middle-aged man, his dark beard streaked with gray, his thick brows edging into a frown of annoyance—and I saw his eyes go wide. He bowed slightly and pushed back, and a whisper went through the crowd like a wind, and it parted, and Danny and I walked through, Danny holding me by the arm and nodding his head at the greetings in Yiddish that came in quiet murmurs from the people he passed. It was as if a black waved, frozen sea had been sliced by a scythe, forming black, solid walls along a jelled path. I saw black and graybearded heads bow toward Danny and dark brows arch sharply over eyes that stared questions at me and at the way Danny was holding me by the arm. We were almost halfway through the crowd now, walking slowly together, Danny’s fingers on the part of my arm just over the elbow. I felt myself naked and fragile, an intruder, and my eyes, searching for anything but the bearded faces to look at, settled, finally, upon the sidewalk at my feet. Then, because I wanted something other than the murmured greetings in Yiddish to listen to, l began to hear, distinctly, the tapping sounds of Danny’s metal-capped shoes against the cement pavement. It seemed a sharp, unnaturally loud sound, and my ears fixed on it, and I could hear it clearly as we went along. I listened to it intently—the soft scrape of the shoe and the sharp tap-tap of the metal caps—as we went up the stone steps of the stairway that led into the brownstone in front of which the crowd stood. The caps tapped against the stone of the steps, then against the stone of the top landing in front of the double door -and I remembered the old man I often saw walking along Lee Avenue, moving carefully through the busy street and tapping, tapping, his. metal-capped cane, which served him for the eyes he had lost in a First World War trench during a German gas attack.

The hallway of the brownstone was crowded with black-caftaned men, and there was suddenly a path there, too, and more murmured greetings and questioning eyes, and then Danny and I went through a door that stood open to our right, and we were in the synagogue.

It was a large room and looked to be the exact size of the apartment in which my father and I lived. What was my father’s bedroom was here the section of the synagogue that contained the Ark, the Eternal Light, an eight-branched candelabrum, a small podium to the right of the Ark, and a large podium about ten feet in front of the Ark. The two podiums and the Ark were covered with red velvet. What was our kitchen, hallway, bathroom, my bedroom, my father’s study and. our front room, was here the portion of the synagogue where the worshipers sat.

Each seat consisted of a chair set before a stand with a sloping top, the bottom edge of which was braced with a jutting strip of wood to prevent what was on the stand from sliding to the floor. The seats extended back to about twenty feet from the rear wall of the synagogue, the wall opposite the Ark. A small portion of the synagogue near the upper door of the hallway had been curtained off with white cheesecloth. This was the women’s section. It contained a few rows of wooden chairs. The remaining section of the synagogue, the section without chairs, was crowded with long tables and benches. Through the middle of the synagogue ran a narrow aisle that ended at the large podium. The walls were painted white. The wooden floor was a dark brown. The three rear windows were curtained in black velvet. The ceiling was white, and naked bulbs hung from it on dark wires, flooding the room with harsh light.

We stood for a moment just inside of the door near one of the tables. Men passed constantly in and out of the room. Some remained in the hallway to chat, others took seats. Some of the seats were occupied by men studying Talmud, reading from the Book of Psalms, or talking among themselves in Yiddish. The benches at the tables stood empty, and on the white cloths that covered the tables were paper cups, wooden forks and spoons, and paper plates filled with pickled herring and onion, lettuce, tomatoes, gefiilte fish, Shabbat loaves—the braided bread called chalah—tuna fish, salmon, and hard-boiled eggs. At the edge of the table near the window was a brown leather chair. On the table in front of the chair was a pitcher, a towel, a saucer, and a large plate covered with a Shabbat cloth—a white satin cloth, with the Hebrew word for the Shabbat embroidered upon it in gold. A long serrated silver knife lay alongside the plate.

A tall, heavyset boy came in the door, nodded at Danny, then noticed me, and stared. I recognized him immediately as Dov Shlomowitz, the player on Danny’s team who had run into me at second base and knocked me down. He seemed about to say something to Danny, then changed his mind, turned stiffly, went up the narrow aisle, and found a seat. Sitting in the seat, he glanced at us once over his shoulder, then opened a book on his stand, and began to sway back and forth. I looked at Danny and managed what must have been a sick smile. ‘I feel like a cowboy surrounded by Indians,’ I told him in a whisper.

Danny grinned at me reassuringly and let go of my arm. ‘You’re in the holy halls,’ he said. ‘It takes getting used to.’

‘That was like the parting of the Red Sea out there,’ I said. ‘How did you do it?’