The Chosen (25 page)

I didn’t say anything.

‘Did God answer him, Reuven?’ my father asked again, that same bitterness in his voice.

‘Reb Saunders said it was God’s will. We have to accept God’s will, he said.’

My father blinked his eyes. ‘Reb Saunders said it was God’s will: he echoed softly.

I nodded.

‘You are satisfied with that answer, Reuven?’

‘No.’

He blinked his eyes again, and when he spoke his voice was soft, the bitterness gone. ‘I am not satisfied with it, either, Reuven. We cannot wait for God. If there is an answer, we must make it ourselves.’

I was quiet.

‘Six million of our people ‘have been slaughtered,’ he went on quietly. ‘It is inconceivable. It will have meaning only if we give it meaning. We cannot wait for God.’ He lay back on the pillows. ‘There is only one Jewry left now in the world,’ he said softly, staring up at the ceiling. ‘It is here, in America. We have a terrible responsibility. We must replace the treasures we have lost.’ His voice was hoarse, and he coughed. Then he was quiet for a long time. I saw him close his eyes, and I heard him say, ‘Now we will need teachers and rabbis to lead our people.’ He opened his eyes and looked at me. ‘The Jewish world is changed,’ he said, almost in a whisper. ‘A madman has destroyed our treasures. If we do not rebuild Jewry in America, we will die as a people.’ Then he closed his eyes again and was silent.

My father recovered slowly, and it was only at the end of May that he was able to return to his teaching.

Two days after I took my final examination, he suffered a heart attack. He was rushed by ambulance to the Brooklyn Memorial Hospital and put into a semi-private room one floor below the eye ward. Manya took care of me during the first nightmarish days of blind panic when my mind collapsed and would not function. Then Reb Saunders called me one night and invited me to live in his house while my father recovered. How could I live alone with only a housekeeper to care for me? he wanted to know. Why should I stay alone in the apartment at night? Who knew, God forbid, what could happen? It was terrible for a boy my age to be left alone. They could put another bed in Danny’s room, and I could sleep there. When I told my father, he said it would be wise for me to accept the offer. And he told me to tell Reb Saunders how grateful he was to him for his kindness.

On the first day of July, I packed a bag and took a cab to Reb Saunders’ house. I moved into Danny’s room.

From the day I entered Reb Saunders’ house to the day I left to go with my father to our cottage near Peekskill where he was to convalesce, I was a warmly accepted member of Danny’s family. Danny’s mother, who had some kind of heart condition and needed to rest frequently, was forever adding food to my plate. Danny’s sister, I noticed for the first time, was a very pretty girl, with dark eyes and long dark hair combed back into a single braid, and vivacious hands that seemed always in motion when she spoke. She was forever teasing Danny and me and referring to us as David and Jonathan. Danny’s brother, Levi, was forever poking at his food when he sat at the kitchen table, or walking ghostlike around the house, picking his nose. And Danny’s father was forever silent, withdrawn, his dark eyes turned inward, brooding, as if witnessing a sea of suffering he alone could see. He walked bent forward, as though there were some kind of enormous burden on his shoulders. Dark circles had formed around his eyes, and sometimes at the kitchen table I would see him begin to cry suddenly, and he would get up and walk out of the room, then return a few minutes later and resume eating. No one in the family talked about these sudden moments of weeping. And I didn’t either, though they frightened and bewildered me.

Danny and I did everything together that month. We would rise a little before seven, go down to the synagogue to pray the Morning Service with the congregation, have breakfast with the family, then go out onto his porch if the day was nice, or stay in his room if it wasn’t, and spend the morning studying Talmud. After lunch, we would go together to the library, where we would spend the early hours of the afternoon. Danny was reading Freud, and I was doing symbolic logic. It was in the library that we did all the talking we had been unable to do during the year. Then, at about four o’clock, we would take the trolley together to the Brooklyn Memorial Hospital and visit my father. We would have supper together with Danny’s family, then spend the evening either chatting with his sister and mother in the living room or reading quietly—Danny used the evenings to read the books on Jewish subjects I kept giving him—or, if his father was free, we would go up to the study and do battle over the Talmud. But Reb Saunders was rarely free. There seemed to be an endless number of people coming into the house and walking up the three flights of stairs to see him, and by the time we were ready for supper he was always visibly fatigued, and he would sit lost in thought, his eyes dark and brooding. And once, during a supper meal, I saw tears come slowly from his eyes and disappear into the tangle of his dark beard. He did not leave the table this time. He sat there weeping in silence, and no one said anything. And then he dried his eyes with a handkerchief, took a deep, trembling breath, and went back to his food.

During the entire month I spent in Reb Saunders’ house, the only time I ever saw him talk to Danny was when we argued over the Talmud. There was never any simple, intimate, human kind of conversation between him and his son. I almost had the impression that they were physically incapable of communicating with each other about ordinary things. It troubled me, but I said nothing about it. Danny and I talked often about his reading of Freud. We sat at our table in the third floor of the library, surrounded by the mazelike stacks, and he told me what he had read during the past year and what he was reading now. Freud had clearly upset him in a fundamental kind of way—had thrown him off balance, as he once put it. But he couldn’t stop reading him, he said, because it had become increasingly obvious to him that Freud had possessed an almost uncanny insight into the nature of man. And that was what Danny found upsetting. Freud’s picture of man’s nature was anything but complimentary, it was anything but religious. It tore man from God, as Danny put it, and married him off to Satan.

Danny knew enough about Freud now—his method of study had been so thoroughly successful—that he was able to use Freud’s technical terminology with the same kind of natural ease that characterized our use of the technical terminology of the Talmud. For the first two weeks of July, Danny spent part of our reading time in the library patiently explaining to me some of Freud’s basic concepts. We sat at our table, Danny in his dark suit—he wore a dark suit no matter how hot it was—his tieless shirt, his fringes, his skullcap, his long earlocks, and his beard, which was thick and full now, almost an adult beard, and me in my sport shirt, summer trousers, and skullcap, and we talked about Sigmund Freud. What I heard was new, so new that I couldn’t grasp it at first. But Danny was patient, as patient as my father, and slowly I began to understand the system of psychological thought Freud had constructed. And I, too, became upset. Freud contradicted everything I had ever learned. What I found particularly upsetting was the fact that Danny didn’t seem to have rejected what Freud taught. I began to wonder how it was possible for the ideas of the Talmud and the thinking of Freud to live side by side within one person. It seemed to me that one or the other would have to give way. When I told this to Danny, he shrugged, said nothing, and went back to his reading.

Had my father been well at that time, I would have talked to him about it, but he was in the hospital, recuperating slowly, and I didn’t want to upset him with an account of Danny’s reading. He was upset enough as it was with his own reading. Whenever Danny and I came to visit him, we found newspapers strewn all over his bed. He was reading everything he could find that told of the destruction of European Jewry. He talked of nothing else but European Jewry and the responsibility American Jews now carried. Occasionally he spoke of the importance of Palestine as a Jewish homeland, but mostly he was concerned about American Jewry and the need for teachers and rabbis. Once he asked Danny and me what we were reading these days, and Danny answered honestly that he was going through Freud. My father sat in his hospital bed, propped up on pillows, looked at him and blinked. He had grown very thin—I hadn’t thought he could ever get any thinner than he had been before his heart attack, but it seemed to me he had lost at least ten pounds—and he seemed to become easily upset by little things. I was frightened for a moment, because I didn’t want him to get involved in an argument with Danny about Freud. But he only shook his head and sighed. He was very tired, he said; he would talk to Danny about Freud another time. Danny shouldn’t think that Freud was the final word in psychoanalysis; many great thinkers disagreed with him. He let it go at that, and went back to talking about the destruction of European Jewry. Did we know, he asked us, that on December 17, 1942, Mr Eden got up in the House of Commons and gave the complete details of the Nazi plan, already in full operation, to massacre the entire Jewish population of Europe? Did we know that Mr Eden, though he had threatened the Nazis with retribution, hadn’t said a word about practical measures to save as many Jews as possible from what he knew would be their inevitable fate? There had been public meetings in England, protests, petitions, letters—the whole machinery of democratic expression had been set in motion to impress upon the British Government the need for action—and not a thing was done. Everyone was sympathetic, but no one was sympathetic enough. The British let some few Jews in, and then closed their doors. America hadn’t cared enough, either. No one had cared enough. The world closed its doors, and six million Jews were slaughtered. What a world I What an insane world! ‘What do we have left to us now, if not American Jewry?’ he said. ‘Some Jews say we should wait for God to send the Messiah. We cannot wait for God! We must make our own Messiah! We must rebuild American Jewry! And Palestine must become a Jewish homeland! We have suffered enough! How long must we wait for the Messiah?’

It was bad for my father to get excited that way, but there was nothing I could do to stop him. He could talk of nothing else but the destruction of European Jewry.

One morning at breakfast Reb Saunders came out of a brooding silence, sighed, and for no apparent reason began telling us, in a soft, singsong chant, the story of an old, pious Hasid who had set out on a journey to Palestine—Eretz Yisroel, Reb Saunders called it, giving the land its traditional name and accenting the ‘E’ and the ‘ro’—so as to be able to spend the last years of his life in the Holy Land. Finally, he reached the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and three days later he died while praying at the Wall for the Messiah to come and redeem his people. Reb Saunders swayed slowly back and forth as he told the story, and when he was done I said quietly, not mentioning my father’s name, that a lot of people were now saying that it was time for Palestine to become a Jewish homeland and not only a place where pious Jews went to die. The reaction on the part of the entire family was instantaneous; it was as though someone had thrown a match onto a pile of straw. I could almost feel the heat that replaced the family warmth around the table. Danny went rigid and stared down at the plate in front of him. His brother let out a little whimper, and his sister and mother seemed frozen to their chairs. Reb Saunders stared at me, his eyes suddenly wild with rage, his beard trembling. And he pointed a finger at me that looked like a weapon.

‘Who are these people? Who are these people?’ he shouted in Yiddish, and the words went through me like knives. ‘Apikorsim! Goyim! Ben Gurion and his goyim will build Eretz Yisroel? They will build for us a Jewish land? They will bring Torah into this land? Goyishkeit they will bring into the land, not Torah! God will build the land, not Ben Gurion and his goyim! When the Messiah comes, we will have Eretz Yisroel, a Holy Land, not a land contaminated by Jewish goyim!’

I sat there stunned and terrified, engulfed by his rage. His reaction had caught me so completely by surprise that I had quite literally stopped breathing, and new I found myself gasping for breath. I felt as if I were being consumed by flames. The silence that followed his outburst had a fungus quality to it, as though it were breeding malignancies, and I had the uncanny feeling that I had somehow been stripped naked and violated. I didn’t know what to do or say. I just sat there and gaped at him.

‘The land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob should be built by Jewish goyim, by contaminated men?’ Reb Saunders shouted, again. ‘Never! Not while I live! Who says these things? Who says we should now build Eretz Yisroel? And where is the Messiah? Tell me, we should forget completely about the Messiah? For this six million of our people were slaughtered? That we should forget completely about the Messiah, that we should forget completely about the Master of the Universe? Why do you think I brought my people from Russia to America and not to Eretz Yisroel? Because it is better to live in a land of true goyim than to live in a land of Jewish goyim! Who says we should build Eretz Yisroel, ah? I’ll tell you who says it! Apikorsim say it! Jewish goyim say it! True Jews do not say such a thing!’

There was a long silence. Reb Saunders sat in his chair, breathing hard and trembling with rage.

‘Please, you should not get so angry,’ Danny’s sister pleaded softly. ‘It is bad for you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said lamely, not knowing what else to say.

‘Reuven was not talking for himself,’ Danny’s sister said quietly to her father. ‘He was only-‘

But Reb Saunders cut her off with an angry wave of his hand.

He went rigidly through the Grace, then left the kitchen, wearing his rage visibly.

Danny’s sister stared down at the table, her eyes dark and sad. Later, when Danny and I were alone in his room, Danny told me to think ten thousand times the next time I wanted to mention anything like that again to his father. His father was fine, he said, until he was confronted by any idea that he felt came from the contaminated world.