The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

  Dr. Snydman was in the room, waiting for me. He looked tired. He smiled but didn’t say anything. Mrs. Carpenter motioned me onto the examination table. Dr. Snydman came over and began to take the bandage off. I looked up at him out of my right eye. His hands worked very fast, and I could see the hairs on his fingers.

  “Now, son, listen to me,” Dr. Snydman said. “Your eye has been closed inside the bandage all the time. When the last bandage comes off, you may open it. We’ll dim the light in here, so it won’t hurt you.”

  I was nervous, and I could feel myself sweating. “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Mrs. Carpenter turned off some of the lights, and I felt the bandage come off the eye. I felt it before I knew it, because suddenly the eye was cold from the air.

  “Now, open your eye slowly until you become accustomed to the light,” Dr. Snydman said.

  I did as he told me, and in a little while I was able to keep it open without difficulty. I could see now through both my eyes.

  “We can have the lights now, nurse,” Dr. Snydman said.

  I blinked as the new lights came on.

  “Now we’ll have a look,” Dr. Snydman said, and bent down and peered at the eye through an instrument. After a while, he told me to close the eye, and he pressed down on the lid with one of his fingers.

  “Does that hurt?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Let’s have you on that chair now,” he said.

  I sat on the chair, and he looked at the eye through the instrument attached to the metal rod. Finally, he straightened, swung the instrument back, and gave me a tired smile.

  “Nurse, this young man can go home. I want to see him in my office in ten days.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Mrs. Carpenter said.

  Dr. Snydman looked at me. “Your father tells me you know about the scar tissue.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, I think you’re going to be all right. I’m not absolutely certain, you understand, so I want to see you again in my office. But I think you’ll be fine.”

  I was so happy I felt myself begin to cry.

  “You’re a very lucky young man. Go homeland for heaven’s sake keep your head away from baseballs.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you very much.”

  “You’re quite welcome.”

  Outside in the hall, Mrs. Carpenter said, “We’ll call your father right away. Isn’t that wonderful news?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re lucky, you know. Dr. Snydman is a great surgeon.”

  “I’m very grateful to him,” I said. “Ma’am?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is Billy’s operation over yet?”

  Mrs. Carpenter looked at me. “Why, yes, of course. It was Dr. Snydman who operated.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “We hope for the best, young man. We always hope for the best. Come. We must call your father and get you ready to leave.”

  Mr. Savo was waiting for me. “How’d it go, boy?” he asked.

  “Dr. Snydman says he thinks I’ll be fine. I’m going home.”

  Mr. Savo grinned. “That’s the way to do it, boy! Can’t make a career out of lying around in hospitals.”

  “Are you going home soon, Mr. Savo?”

  “Sure, kid. Maybe in a couple of days or so. If I don’t go catching any more balls from little Mickey.”

  “Dr. Snydman operated on Billy,” I said.

  “Figured as much. Good man, the Doc. Got a big heart.”

  “I hope Billy’s all right.”

  “He’ll be okay, kid. Important thing is you’re getting out.”

  An orderly came over with my clothes, and I began to dress. I was very nervous, and my knees felt weak. After a while, I stood there, wearing the same clothes I had worn on Sunday for the ball game. It’s been some week, I thought.

  I sat on my bed, talking with Mr. Savo, and couldn’t eat any of my lunch. I was nervous and impatient for my father to come. Mr. Savo told me to relax, I was spoiling his lunch. I sat there and waited. Finally, I saw my father coming quickly up the aisle, and I jumped to my feet. His face was beaming, and his eyes were misty. He kissed me on the forehead.

  “So,” he said. “The baseball player is ready to come home.”

  “Did you hear what Dr. Snydman said, abba?”

  “The nurse told me on the telephone. Thank God!”

  “Can we go home now, abba?”

  “Of course. We will go home and have a wonderful Shabbat. I will take your things from the table.”

  I looked at Mr. Savo, who was sitting up on his bed, grinning at us. “It was wonderful meeting you, Mr. Savo.”

  “Likewise, kid. Keep the old beanbag away from those baseballs.”

  “I hope your eye gets better soon.”

  “The eye’s out, kid. They had to take it out. It was some clop. Didn’t want the little blind kid to know, so kept it quiet.”

  “I’m awfully sorry to hear that, Mr. Savo.”

  “Sure, kid. Sure. That’s the breaks. Should’ve been a priest. Lousy racket, boxing. Glad to be out of it. Would’ve been in the war if that guy hadn’t clopped me in the head like that years back. Busted up something inside. That’s the breaks.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Savo.”

  “Goodbye, kid. Good luck.”

  I went out of the ward with my father, and out of the hospital.

  Book Two

  Silence is good everywhere, except in connection with Torah.

  —The Zohar

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WE TOOK A CAB and on the way home my father handed me my other pair of glasses with a warning not to read until Dr. Snydman told me I could, and I put them on. The world jumped into focus and everything looked suddenly bright and fresh and clean, as it does on an early morning with the sun on the trees, and there was newness everywhere, a feeling that I had been away a long time in a dark place and was now returning home to sunlight.

  We lived on the first floor of a three-story brownstone house that stood on a quiet street just off busy Lee Avenue. The brownstone row houses lined both sides of the street, and long, wide, stone stairways led from the sidewalks to the frosted-glass double doors of the entrances. Tall sycamores stood in front of the houses and their leaves threw cool shadows onto the paved ground. There was a gentle breeze and I could hear the leaves moving over my head.

  In front of each house was a tiny lawn planted with either morning glories or a hydrangea bush. The hydrangea bush—or snowball bush, as we called it—on our lawn glowed in the sunlight, and I stared at it. I had never really paid any attention to it before. Now it seemed suddenly luminous and alive.

  We climbed up the wide stone staircase and came through the vestibule into the long hallway where it was dark and cool, and narrow like the corridor of a railroad car. The door to our apartment was at the end of the hallway, below and to the right of the staircase that led to the two stories above us. My father put his key into the lock, and we stepped inside.

  I could smell the chicken soup immediately, and I had only taken two or three steps when Many a, our Russian housekeeper, came running out of the kitchen in her long apron, her man-sized shoes, and with strands of dark hair falling across her forehead from the braided bun on the top of her head, scooped me into her huge arms as though I were a leaf, and smothered me with a hug that pushed the air from my lungs and left me breathless. She planted a wet kiss on my forehead, then held me at arm’s length and began to babble in Ukrainian. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but I could see her eyes were moist and she was biting her lips to keep from crying. She released me, and I stood there, smiling and catching my breath, while my father talked to her.

  “Are you hungry, Reuven?” my father asked me.

  “I’m starved,” I said.

  “There is lunch on the table. We will eat together. Then you can lie on the porch and rest while I finish typing my article.”

  Lunch turned out to be a massive affa
ir, with a thick soup, fresh rye bread, onion rolls, bagels, cream cheese, scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, and chocolate pudding. My father and I ate without talking, while Manya hovered over us like a protective bear, and afterwards my father went into his study and I walked slowly through the apartment, I had lived in it all my life, but I never really saw it until I went through it that Friday afternoon.

  I came out of the kitchen and stood for a moment staring down at the strip of gray carpet that ran the length of the hall. I turned left and walked slowly along the hall, past the bathroom and the dumbwaiter to my left, past the telephone stand and the pictures of Herzl, Bialik, and Chaim Weizmann that hung from the wall on my right, and into my bedroom. It was a long, somewhat narrow room, with a bed against its right wall, a bookcase along its left wall, two closets near the door, and a desk and chair set a bit away from the wall facing the door. To the left of the desk, along the bookcase wall, was a window that looked out onto the alleyway and back yard beyond. The room had been cleaned, the bed carefully made and covered with its green-and-brown spread, and on the desk were my school books arranged in a neat pile. Someone had brought them home for me after the ball game, and there they were, on the desk, as though I had never been away. I went over to the window and stared out at the alleyway. I Could see a cat lying in the shade of our wall, and beyond was the grass of our back lawn and the ailanthus tree with the sun on its leaves. I turned, sat down on the window seat, and stared at the New York Times war maps I had put on the wall over my bed. There were maps of the North African, Sicilian, and Italian campaigns, and now I would have to add a map of Europe, too. Over the maps was the large picture of Franklin Delano Roosevelt I had cut out of a New York Times Sunday magazine section, and next to it was the picture of Albert Einstein I had taken years ago from an issue of Junior Scholastic. I looked at my desk. My pens and pencils were neatly tucked into the holder alongside my lamp, and on top of a pile of papers was the recent issue of the WQXR Bulletin. I remembered I had wanted to listen to a Tchaikovsky symphony on Sunday night, the night of the ball game which I had been so certain we would win.

  At the head of the bed was the door that led to my father’s study. The door was closed, and I could hear my father working at his typewriter inside. There was no way to get to the living room except through the study, and I walked around behind my desk opened, the door, stepped inside, and closed it quietly behind me.

  My father’s study was the same size as my room, but it had no windows. The wall alongside the door was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Along the opposite wall were curtained French doors bounded by two large Ionic columns. What was left of that wall was also covered with bookcases, as was the wall adjoining it to the right. My father’s desk stood near the outside wall of the house, in almost the exact position where I had asked to have my own desk placed. But it was a good deal larger than mine, with dark, polished wood, deep drawers, and a large, green, leather-bordered blotter that covered almost its entire top. It was strewn with papers now, and my father was working intently over his old Underwood typewriter. The study was the darkest room in the apartment because it had no windows, and my father always worked with the desk lamp on, the yellow light bathing the desk and the floor around it. He sat there now, wearing his small, black skullcap and pecking at the typewriter with his index fingers, a thin, frail man in his fifties, with gray hair, gaunt cheeks, and spectacles. I looked at him and suddenly realized that he hadn’t coughed once since he had come to take me from the hospital. He glanced up at me for a moment, frowned, then went back to his work. He didn’t like me to disturb him while he was at his desk, and I went quietly through the study, walking on the gray rug that covered the floor, then through the French doors into the living room.

  Sunlight poured through the three wide windows that faced the street and spread gold across the gray rug, the French-style sofa, chairs and end tables, the polished, glass-topped coffee table, and along the white walls. I stood near the sofa for a moment, blinking my eyes which always hurt a little whenever I came from the darkness of my father’s study into the brightness of our living room.

  The windows were open, and I could hear children playing in the street. A warm breeze came into the room and lifted the lace curtains that fronted the windows.

  I stood in that room for a long time, watching the sunlight and listening to the sounds on the street outside. I stood there, tasting the room and the sunlight and the sounds, and thinking of the long hospital ward with its wide aisle and its two rows of beds and little Mickey bouncing a ball and trying to find someone who would play catch with him. I wondered if little Mickey had ever seen sunlight come through the windows of a front room apartment.

  I turned, finally, and went back through the apartment and through the door that led from my father’s bedroom onto our wooden back porch. I sat on the lounge chair in the shade that covered the porch and looked out at the back lawn. Somehow everything had changed. I had spent five days in a hospital and the world around seemed sharpened now and pulsing with life. I lay back and put the palms of my hands under my head. I thought of the baseball game, and I asked myself, Was it only last Sunday that it happened, only five days ago? I felt I had crossed into another world, that little pieces of my old self had been left behind on the black asphalt floor of the school yard alongside the shattered lens of my glasses. I could hear the shouts of children on the street and the sounds of my father’s typewriter. I remembered that tomorrow Danny would be over to see me. I lay very still on the lounge chair and thought a long time about Danny.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THAT NIGHT as we sat at the kitchen table, with the Shabbat meal over and Many a gone until the morning, my father answered some of my questions about Danny Saunders.

  It was a warm night, and the window between the stove and the sink was open. A breeze blew into the kitchen, stirring the ruffled curtains and carrying with it the odors of grass and flowers and orange blossoms. We sat at the table dressed in our Shabbat clothes, my father sipping his second glass of tea, both of us a little tired and sleepy from the heavy meal. There was color now in my father’s face, and his cough had disappeared. I watched him sip his tea and listened to the soft rustling of the curtains as they moved in the breeze. Manya had done the dishes quickly after we had chanted the Grace After Meals, and now we sat alone, embraced by the warm June night, the memories of the past week, and the gentle silences of the Shabbat.

  It was then that I asked my father about Danny. He was holding his glass of tea in his hands, the bottom of the glass resting upon his left palm, the body of the glass encircled by his right hand, and he put the glass on the white cloth that covered the table, looked at me, and smiled. He sat silent for a while, and I knew his answer would take a long time. Whenever he did not respond immediately to one of my questions, the answer was always a lengthy one. I could see he was arranging it in his mind, so that it would be carefully organized. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft, and the words came out slowly.

  He told me he would have to go back a long time into the history of our people in order for me to understand his answer. He asked me if I had the patience to sit and listen quietly, and I nodded. He sat back in his chair and began to speak.

  I knew enough Jewish history, he said, not to make him have to start at the beginning. He would start, instead, with the history I had not yet learned in school, with the centuries of horror our people had experienced in Poland. Because it was really in Poland, or, more accurately, in the Slavic countries of eastern Europe, that Danny’s soul had been born.

  “Poland was different from the other countries of Europe, Reuven. Poland actually encouraged the Jews to come and live and be part of her people. This was in the thirteenth century, during a time when the Jews of western Europe, especially in Germany, were going through terrible persecutions. Jews had been living in Poland before this century, but they were not a very large community. Why did Poland want Jews when almost every other country was perse
cuting them? Because Poland was a very poor country, with a bankrupt aristocracy and a crushed peasantry. Her upper-class nobles would not engage in work and instead managed to survive by what they could squeeze out of the labor of the serfs. Poland wanted people who would build her economy, organize her affairs, and bring her to life. Jews had a reputation for possessing these abilities, and so the Polish nobles were eager to have Jews settle in their country. They came by the thousands from western Europe, especially from Germany. They ran the nobles’ estates, collected the taxes, developed Polish industry, and stimulated her trade. Poland became a kind of Jewish Utopia.

  “But the Jews did not only prosper economically. They also built many great academies of learning throughout the country. Every community had its Talmudic scholars, and by the end of the sixteenth century the Jewish academies in Poland had become centers of learning for all of European Jewry.

  “And then, Reuven, a great tragedy occurred. It is a tragedy that happens often to anyone who acts as a buffer. The Jews were helping the nobility, but in doing so, in collecting taxes from the serfs and peasants, for example, they were building up against themselves the hatred of these oppressed classes. And the hatred finally exploded into violence. In the borderland east of Ukrainia in Russia, there was a community of Cossacks who were members of the Greek Orthodox Church. This community belonged to Poland, and the Polish nobles, who were Catholics, treated the Cossacks who lived there with cruelty and contempt. They not only taxed the lands and the cattle of the Cossacks but also their churches and religious customs. And who collected these taxes? The Jews. Who had possession of the keys to the Cossack churches? The Jews. Who did the Cossacks need to go to if they wanted to open their churches for a christening service or for a marriage or a funeral? The Jews. All of whom were acting in behalf of the Polish lords.