The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

WHEN I GOT BACK to school the next morning, I found I had become a hero, and during the fifteen-minute morning recess my friends, and even some boys I did not know, all crowded around me, wanting to know how I was and telling me what a great game I had played. Near the end of the recess, I went over to the pitcher’s position and stood on the exact spot where I had been hit by the ball. I looked-—tried to look; the yard was crowded with students—at home plate and imagined Danny standing there, grinning at me. I remembered his grinning that way again yesterday, and I closed my eyes for a moment, then went over and stood near the wire fence behind the plate. The bench on which the young rabbi had sat was still there, and I stared at it for a moment. It seemed impossible to me that the ball game had taken place only a week ago. So many things had happened, and everything looked so different.

  Sidney Goldberg came over to me and started talking about the game, and then Davey Cantor joined us and added his opinion about “those murderers.” I nodded at what they were saying without really listening. It seemed silly to me, the way they kept talking about the game, they both sounded so childish, and I got a little angry when Davey Cantor started talking about “that snooty Danny Saunders,” but I didn’t say anything.

  I got out of school at two o’clock and took a trolley car over to the public library where I was supposed to meet Danny. The library was a huge, three-story, graystone building, with thick Ionic columns, and with the words BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY, THAT IS ALL

  YE KNOW ON EARTH, AND ALL YE NEED TO KNOW—JOHN KEATS engraved in the stone over its four glass entrance doors. It stood on a wide boulevard and there were tall trees in front of it and a grassy lawn bordered by flowers. On the right-hand wall of the vestibule, just inside the doors, there was a mural of the history of great ideas, beginning with a drawing of Moses holding the Ten Commandments, going on to Jesus, Mohammed, Galileo, Luther, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and ending with Einstein gazing at the formula E = MC2. On the other wall there was a mural showing Homer, Dante, Tolstoi, Balzac, and Shakespeare engaged in conversation. They were beautiful murals, done in bright colors, and the great men in them looked alive. Probably because I had become so sensitive about eyes the past week, I noticed for the first time that Homer’s eyes seemed glazed, almost without pupils, as if the artist had been trying to show that he had been blind. I had never noticed that before, and it frightened me a little to see it now.

  I went quickly through the first floor, with its marble floors, its marble pillars, its tall bookcases, its long reference tables, its huge windows through which the sun streamed, and its glass-stopped desks at which the librarians sat. I found Danny on the third floor against the far wall, partly hidden by a bookcase, wearing a black suit, a tieless shirt, and a skullcap. He was sitting at a small table, bent over a book, his long earlocks dangling down the sides of his face and almost reaching to the top of the table.

  There were not many people on this floor; its stacks were filled mostly with bound volumes of scholarly journals and pamphlets. It was a large floor, and the closely set stacks gave it a mazelike appearance. They went from floor to ceiling, and they seemed to me to contain everything of importance that had ever been written on any subject in the world. There were journals in English, French, German, Russian, Italian, and even one collection in Chinese. Some of the English journals had names I couldn’t pronounce. This was the one floor of the three-floored library I did not know well. I had been up here once to find an article in the Journal of Symbolic Logic which had been recommended to me by my mathematics teacher, an article which I had only dimly understood, and once to meet my father. Now was the third time in all the years I had belonged to this library that I was on its third floor.

  I stood near a bookcase a few feet away from the table at which Danny was sitting, and I watched him read. His elbows were on the table, and he held his head in the palms of his hands, the fingers covering his ears completely, his eyes staring down at the book. Occasionally, the fingers of his right hand would play with his ear-lock, and once they stroked the tufts of sand-colored hair on his chin for a few seconds, then went back to the side of his face. His mouth was slightly open, and I could not see his eyes; they were hidden by the lids. He seemed impatient each time he came to the foot of a page, and he flipped the page with a quick gesture of his right hand, wetting the forefinger with his tongue and turning the page by pushing upward with the finger against the lower right-hand corner, the way one does a page of Talmud—except that with a Talmud the left forefinger usually pushes against the lower left-hand corner because it is read from right to left. He was reading with phenomenal speed. I could almost see him read. He would start at the head of a page, his head tilted slightly upward, and then his head would move downward in a straight line until he got to the foot of the page. Then it would tilt upward again and either move sideways to the right page or remain fixed in its upward position until the page was turned, and then start downward again. He did not seem to be reading from side to side but up and down, and, watching him, I had the distinct impression that he was reading the middle of the page only and was somehow able to ignore, or absorb without actually reading, what was written on the sides.

  I decided not to disturb him, and I sat down at another table a few feet away and continued to watch him read. It was frustrating to be sitting there surrounded by all those journals and not be able to read a thing myself, and I decided after a while” to review by heart some of the symbolic logic I had been studying. I closed my eyes and went over the propositional calculus, trying to visualize the truth tables for conjunction, disjunction, equivalence, and material implication. They were fairly simple, and I had no difficulty. I tried to do some problems, but after a while it became complicated, I couldn’t remember all the deductive steps, and I stopped. I was about to begin going over the steps of indirect proof when I heard Danny say, “You’re always sleeping! What a sleepyhead you are!” and I opened my eyes. Danny was sitting up in his chair and looking at me.

  “I was reviewing my logic,” I told him. “I wasn’t sleeping.”

  “Of course,” he said, smiling. But his voice sounded sad.

  “I was just going into the indirect proof. Do you want to hear it?”

  “No. I can’t stand that stuff. Why didn’t you tell me you were here?”

  “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “You’re nice. For a Misnaged.” He gave the Hebrew letter “tof” its Ashkenazic pronunciation. “Come over here. I want you to see something.”

  I went over to his table and sat down next to him. “I’m not allowed to read, you know.”

  “I want you to hear this. I’ll read it to you.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s from Graetz’s History of the Jews.” He sounded unhappy, and there was a somber look on his face. “It’s about Hasidim. Listen; Graetz is talking about Dov Baer, who was the follower of the Besht. He just finished saying that Dov Baer invented the idea, of the tzaddik.” He looked down at the book on the table and began to read aloud. “ ‘Baer’s idea, however, was not meant to remain idle and unfruitful, but to bring him honor and revenue. While the tzaddik cared for the conduct of the world, for the obtaining of heavenly grace, and especially for Israel’s preservation and glorification, his adherents had to cultivate three kinds of virtues. It was their duty to draw nigh to him, to enjoy the sight of him, and from time to time to make pilgrimages to him. Further, they were to confess their sins to him. By these means alone could they hope for pardon from their iniquities.’ That means sins,” he told me.

  “I know what it means,” I said.

  He went on. “ ‘Finally, they had to bring him presents, rich gifts, which he knew how to employ to the best advantage. It was also incumbent upon them to attend to his personal wants. It seems like a return to the days of the priests of Baal, so vulgar and disgusting do these perversities appear.’ ”

  He looked up from the book. “That’s pretty strong language, ‘vulgar and d
isgusting.’ ” His eyes were dark and brooding. “It feels terrible to have a great scholar like Graetz call Hasidism vulgar and disgusting. I never thought of my father as a priest of Baal.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Listen to what else he says about Dov Baer.” He turned a page. “He says here that Dov Baer used to crack vulgar jokes to make his people happy, and that he used to encourage his followers to drink alcohol, so they would pray fervently. He says that Rabbi Elijah of Vilna was a great opponent of the Hasidim, and that when he died —let me read it to you.” He shuffled pages. “Here it is. Listen. ‘After his death, the Hasidim took vengeance upon him by dancing upon his grave, and celebrating the day of his decease as a holiday, with shouting and drunkenness.’ ” He looked at me. “I never knew about any of these things. You were in our shul yesterday. Did anyone look drunk to you during the service?”

  “No,” I said.

  “My father isn’t like that at all.” His voice was sad, and it trembled a little. “He really worries about his people. He worries about them so much he doesn’t even have time to talk to me.”

  “Maybe Graetz is only talking about the Hasidim of his own day,” I offered.

  “Maybe,” he said, not convinced. “It’s awful to have someone give you an image like that of yourself. He says that Dov Baer had expert spies worthy of serving in the secret service. Those are his words, ‘worthy of serving in the secret service.’ He says they would go around discovering people’s secrets and tell them to Dov Baer. People who came to see him about their personal problems would have to wait around until the Saturday after they came, and in the meantime these spies would investigate them and report back to him, so that when the person finally got to see him, Dov Baer would know everything, and the person would be impressed and think that Dov Baer had some sort of magical ability to look into his heart.” He shuffled some more pages. “Listen to this. ‘In the first interview Baer, in a seemingly casual manner, was able, in a skillfully arranged discourse, to bring in allusions to these strangers, whereby they would be convinced that he had looked into their hearts and knew their past.’ ” He shook his head sadly. “I never knew about anything like that. When my father talks about Dov Baer, he almost makes him out to be a saint.”

  “Did my father give you that book to read?”

  “Your father said I should read Jewish history. He said the first important step in anyone’s education is to know your own people. So I found this work by Graetz. It’s a lot of volumes. I’m almost done with it. This is the last volume.” He shook his head again, and the earlocks danced and brushed against the ridge of his jaw and the hollow of his cheeks. “What an image it gives me of myself.”

  “You ought to discuss it with my father first,” I told him, “before you go believing any of that. He told me a lot about Hasidism on Friday night. He wasn’t very complimentary, but he didn’t say anything about drunkenness.”

  Danny nodded slowly. “I’ll talk to him,” he said. “But Graetz was a great scholar. I read up on him before I started reading his history. He was one of the greatest Jewish scholars of the last century.”

  “You ought to discuss it with my father,” I repeated.

  Danny nodded again, then slowly closed the book. His fingers played idly with the spine of the binding.

  “You know,” he brooded, “I read a psychology book last week in which the author said that the most mysterious thing in the universe to man is man himself. We’re blind about the most important thing in our lives, our own selves. How could a man like Dov Baer have the gall to fool other people into thinking that he could look into their hearts and tell them what they were really like inside?”

  “You don’t know that he did. You only know Graetz’s version of it.”

  He ignored me. I had the feeling he was talking more to himself than to me.

  “We’re so complicated inside,” he went on quietly. “There’s something in us called the unconscious that we’re completely unaware of. It practically dominates our lives, and we don’t even know it.” He paused, hesitating, his hand moving from the book and playing now with an earlock. I was reminded of the evening in the hospital when he had stared out the window at the people on the street below and had talked of God and ants and the reading he did in this library. “There’s so much to read,” he said. “I’ve only really been reading for a few months. Did you know about the subconscious?” he asked me, and when I somewhat hesitantly nodded, he said, “You see? You’re not even interested in psychology, and you know about it. I have so much catching up to do.” He was suddenly conscious of the way his fingers were playing with the earlock, and he let his hand drop to the table. “Did you know that very often the subconscious expresses itself in dreams? ‘The dream is the product of a transaction between conscious and unconscious wishes,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘and the results during sleep are naturally very different from those during waking hours.’ ”

  “What’s this about dreams?” I asked.

  “It’s true,” he said. “Dreams are full of unexpressed fears and hopes, things that we never even think of consciously. We think of them unconsciously deep down inside ourselves, and they come out in dreams. They don’t always come out straight, though. Sometimes they come out in symbols. You have to learn to interpret the symbols.”

  “Where did you find out about that?”

  “In my reading. There’s a lot of work been done on dreams. It’s one of the ways they have of getting to a person’s unconscious.”

  I must have had a strange expression on my face, because he asked me what was the matter.

  “I dream all the time,” I told him.

  “Everyone does,” he said. “We just don’t remember a lot of them. We repress them. We sort of push them away and forget them, because sometimes they’re too painful.”

  “I’m trying to remember mine,” I said. “Some of them weren’t very pleasant.”

  “A lot of times they’re not pleasant. Our unconscious isn’t a nice place—I call it a place; it isn’t a place, really; the book I read says it’s more like a process—it isn’t a nice place at all. It’s full of repressed fears and hatreds, things that we’re afraid to bring out into the open.”

  “And these things rule our lives?”

  “According to some psychologists they do.”

  “You mean these things go on and we don’t know anything about them?”

  “That’s right. That’s what I said before. What’s inside us is the greatest mystery of all.”

  “That’s a pretty sad thing to think about. To be doing things without really knowing why you’re doing them.”

  Danny nodded. “You can find out about it, though. About your unconscious, I mean. That’s what psychoanalysis is all about. I haven’t read too much about it yet, but it’s a long process. Freud started it. You’ve heard about Freud. He started psychoanalysis. I’m teaching myself German, so I can read him in the original. He discovered the unconscious, too.”

  I stared at him and felt a shock of coldness move inside me. “You’re studying German?”

  He seemed surprised at my reaction. “What’s wrong with studying German? Freud wrote in German. What are you looking at me like that for?”

  “Aren’t his writings translated into English?”

  “Not all of them. Besides, I want to read a lot of other things in German that haven’t been translated yet. What’s the matter with you? You’ve got the funniest look on your face.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Just because Hitler speaks German doesn’t mean that the language is corrupt. It’s the most important scientific language in the world. What are you looking at me like that for?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It just seems strange to me, your studying German.”

  “What’s so strange about it?”

  “Nothing. How are you teaching it to yourself?”

  “There’s a grammar book in the reference library. I’m a
lmost done memorizing it. It’s an interesting language. Very technical and precise. It’s amazing the way they put nouns together. Do you know what the word for ‘mysterious’ is in German?”

  “I don’t know any German.”

  “It’s ‘geheimnisvoll,’ It means ‘full of secret.’ That’s what the sub-conscious is, ‘geheimnisvoll’ The word for ‘sympathetic’ is ‘teilnahmsvoll’—literally ‘full of part-taking.’ The word for charity is ‘Nächstenliebe’—literally, it means—”

  “All right,” I said. “I’m impressed.”

  “It’s quite a language. Yiddish is a lot like it. Yiddish was originally Middle German. When the German Jews came into Poland, they brought it with them.”

  “You mean in the thirteenth century, when Poland encouraged the Jews to come in?”

  “That’s right. You know about that.”

  “I didn’t know about Yiddish being German.”

  “My father doesn’t, either. At least, I don’t think he does. He thinks Yiddish is almost holy. But it’s really from Middle German.”

  I was going to ask him what the Middle meant in Middle German, but I decided not to push the conversation any further. I was upset enough as it was about his learning German. And it had nothing to do with Hitler, either. I kept remembering what my father had told me about Solomon Maimon. It all sounded so weird. I almost had the feeling I was talking to Maimon’s ghost.

  We talked some more about Graetz’s version of Hasidism, and then somehow we got onto the subject of Danny’s brother. He had been examined by a big doctor that morning, and the doctor had said he would be all right, but that he would have to be careful, no strenuous studying or exercising. He had gone with his father, and Danny said his father was now very upset. But at least his brother would be all right. It had something to do with his blood chemistry, Danny said, and the doctor had prescribed three different pills for him to take. He hadn’t been very optimistic about the condition clearing up, either. He said he would have to take the pills as long as it persisted. “It might persist his whole life,” Danny said sadly. Again, I got the impression that he loved his brother very much, and I wondered why he hadn’t said a word to him during all the time I had seen them together yesterday in the synagogue.