The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

  I nodded slowly, afraid now to speak.

  “You will not make a goy out of my son?”

  I shook my head, feeling numb at what I was hearing. His voice was an ache, a plea. I saw him stare up at the ceiling.

  “Master of the Universe,” he almost chanted. “You gave me a brilliant son, and I have thanked you for him a million times. But you had to make him so brilliant?”

  I listened to his voice and felt myself go cold. There was so much pain in it, so much bewildered pain.

  The apartment door opened and closed. Reb Saunders sat up in his chair, his face quickly regaining its composure. Clearly, almost like an echo in a cave, I heard the tap-tap-tap of Danny’s metal-capped shoes against the linoleum hallway floor. Then he was in the study, carrying a tray with three glasses of tea, sugar, spoons, and some of his mother’s cookies. I pushed some books aside on the desk, and he put the tray down.

  From the moment he entered the room and saw my face, I knew he was aware that something had happened during his absence. We sipped our tea in silence, and I saw him glance at me from over the rim of his glass. He knew, all right. He knew something had happened between his father and me. What was I supposed to tell him? That his father now knew he was reading forbidden books and was not going to try to stop him? Reb Saunders hadn’t said anything about not telling Danny what had gone on between us. I looked at him for a clue, but he was sipping his tea calmly. I hoped Danny wouldn’t ask me today. I wanted to talk to my father first.

  Reb Saunders put his glass down and folded his arms across his chest. He was acting as though nothing at all had happened.

  “Tell me more about grammar in the Talmud, Reuven,” he said to me, with a gentle hint of mockery in his voice. “All my life I have studied Talmud and paid no attention to grammar. Now you tell me a person must know grammar to know Talmud. You see what happens when you have a father who is a Misnaged? Grammar yet. Mathematics—nu, all right. Mathematics I can understand. But grammar!”

  The three of us sat there and talked until it was time for the Afternoon Service. Danny found his father’s deliberate mistake easily, and I was able to follow the ensuing Talmudic discussion without too much difficulty, though I did not join in.

  After the Evening Service, Danny said he would walk me part of the way home, and as we turned into Lee Avenue he asked me what had happened between me and his father that afternoon.

  I told him everything. He listened in silence, not seeming at all surprised that his father somehow had learned of his secret visits to the library.

  “I knew he would find out about it sooner or later,” he said softly, looking very sad.

  “I hope you don’t mind my telling him, Danny. I had to.”

  He shrugged. His eyes were moist and gloomy. “I almost wish he had asked me instead,” he said quietly. “But we don’t talk anymore, except when we study Talmud.”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “It’s what I told you in the hospital. My father believes in silence. When I was ten or eleven years old, I complained to him about something, and he told me to close my mouth and look into my soul. He told me to stop running to him every time I had a problem. I should look into my own soul for the answer, he said. We just don’t talk, Reuven.”

  “I don’t understand that at all.”

  “I’m not so sure I understand it myself,” he said gloomily. “But that’s the way he is. I don’t know how he found out I was reading behind his back, but I’m glad he knows about it. At least I won’t have to walk around in that library scared to death. I just feel bad having had to fool my father like that. But what else could I have done?”

  I agreed with him that he couldn’t have done anything else, but I told him I wished he could somehow get around to talking about it with his father.

  “I can’t,” he said, shaking his head. “I just can’t. You don’t know what torture it was talking to him about organizing a ball team. We just don’t talk, Reuven. Maybe it sounds a little crazy to you. But it’s true.”

  “I think you ought to at least try.”

  “I can’t!” he said, a little angry now. “Don’t you listen to what I’m saying? I just can’t!”

  “I don’t understand it,” I told him.

  “Well, I can’t explain it to you any better than I have,” he said angrily.

  When we stopped in front of the synagogue where my father and I prayed, he muttered his “Good night,” turned, and walked slowly away.

  My father seemed astonished when I told him what Danny had said to me.

  “Silence? What do you mean, Danny is being brought up in silence?” His eyes were wide.

  “They never talk, abba. Except when they study Talmud. That’s what Danny told me.”

  He stared at me for a long time. Then he seemed to remember something, and his eyes narrowed suddenly.

  “Once in Russia I heard something,” he murmured softly, speaking to himself. “But I did not believe it.”

  “Heard what, abba?”

  He looked at me, his eyes somber, and shook his head. “I am happy Reb Saunders knows now about his son’s reading,” he said quietly, evading my question. “I was concerned about all this subterfuge.”

  “But why can’t he talk to Danny about it?”

  “Reuven, he has already talked to Danny about it. He has talked to Danny through you.”

  I stared at him.

  He sighed softly.

  “It is never pleasant to be a buffer, Reuven,” he told me quietly. And he would say nothing more about the strange silence between Reb Saunders and his son.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I WENT STRAIGHT HOME from school the next day and spent the afternoon and evening listening to my father read to me from my textbooks. At nine o’clock on Monday morning, my father took me to Dr. Snydman’s office on Eastern Parkway. We were both nervous and silent on the way over. I had taken my school books with me, because we planned to go straight from Dr. Snydman’s office to the school. Dr. Snydman looked at my eye and told me I was fine, it had healed perfectly, I could read now, play ball, swim, do whatever I wanted, just so long as I didn’t try to stop a fast ball anymore with my head. My father’s eyes were misty when we left the office, and I cried a little during the trolley ride to school. We stood outside the school, my father kissed my forehead and said thank God that it had all ended well, and now he had to go to his class, he had already missed one class today because of the doctor’s appointment and the students were probably making the substitute teacher’s life miserable. I grinned, then nodded when he told me to go to my class. He went off. As I climbed the stairs to the second floor, I realized I had forgotten to ask Dr. Snydman about Billy. I decided I would call Billy later in the week after my exams, and go over to see him.

  That was a busy week. The final exams began that Monday afternoon. It was wonderful to be able to read and write again, and I didn’t mind it at all that my first reading and writing in fifteen days was being done over final examinations. It was a kind of wild, soaring experience to be able to hold a pen again and look into a book or at a piece of paper with writing on it. I took my exams and enjoyed them immensely.

  I didn’t see Danny that entire week. He called me on Wednesday night, sounding sad, and we talked for a while. I asked him what he would be doing that summer, and he told me he always stayed home in the summer, studying Talmud. He added that he would probably also be reading Freud this summer. I said I would come over to his house that Shabbat and we could talk some more then, I was busy now studying for finals, and I hung up. His voice had been quiet, subdued, and I wondered if he had been reading any more books on Hasidism.

  I took the last exam on Friday morning, and then the year was over; I was free until September. I wasn’t worried about my grades. I knew I had done well.

  When I came home from school early Friday afternoon, Manya asked me if I was hungry, and I said yes, I could eat a horse, a kosher horse, of course, and she quickly put a l
unch on the table. My father came in a few minutes later and joined me. There had been a terrible storm in Europe that entire week, he told me, and it had hurt the invasion, but it was over now, thank God. I hadn’t heard anything about it, I had been so busy with my exams.

  My father left right after lunch, and I went over to the telephone to call Billy. I found his father’s name in the phone book and dialed the number.

  “Hello,” a man’s voice said.

  “Mr.Merrit?”

  “That’s right.”

  “This is Reuven Malter, sir.”

  “Who?”

  “Reuv— Bobby Malter. I had the bed next to Billy in the hospital.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes. Bobby Malter.”

  “Do you remember me, sir?”

  “Of course. Of course I remember you.”

  “How is Billy, sir?”

  There was a pause.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is Billy all right?”

  “I’m afraid not. The surgery was not successful.”

  I felt myself break out into a cold sweat. The hand holding the phone began to tremble and I had to push the phone against my face to keep it steady.

  “Hello?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How is your eye, Bobby?”

  “It’s fine, sir. It’s all healed.”

  “I’m happy to hear that. No, Billy’s surgery was not successful.”

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

  There was another pause. I thought I could hear Mr. Merrit breathing into the phone.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “May I come over to visit Billy?”

  “Billy is in Albany with friends of mine. My company has transferred me to Albany. We’re being moved out today.” I didn’t say anything.

  “Goodbye, Bobby. I’m glad your eye is all right. Be careful with your eyes.”

  “Yes, sir. Goodbye.”

  I hung up the phone and stood still for a minute, trying to calm myself. It didn’t do any good. I went into my room and sat by the window for a while. I opened a book, stared at it blankly, then closed it. I kept hearing Mr. Savo saying, “Crazy world. Cockeyed.” I began to wander aimlessly through the rooms of the apartment. My hands were freezing. I went out onto the porch, sat in the lounge chair, and stared across the yard at the ailanthus. Its leaves were bathed in sunlight, and its musky odor reached me faintly in the breeze that blew against the back of the house. Something moved faintly across the edge of the field of vision of my left eye, but I ignored it and kept staring at the sunlight on the ailanthus leaves. It moved again, and I heard a faint buzzing sound. I turned my head and looked at the wooden rail of the porch. A spider had spun a web across the corner of the upper rail, and there was a housefly trapped in it now, its wings spread-eagled, glued to the strands of the web, its legs flaying the air frantically. I saw its black body arching wildly, and then it managed to get its wings free, and there was the buzzing sound again as the wings struggled to free the body to which they were attached. Then the wings were trapped again by the filmy, almost invisible strands of the web, and the black legs kicked at the air. I saw the spider, a small, gray, furry-looking spider, with long, wispy legs and black eyes, move across the web toward the fly. I rose from the chair and went over to the web. The fly’s tiny black legs flayed the air fiercely, then its wings were free again, buzzing noisily, but its body remained glued fast. I bent and blew hard against the web. It swayed, but remained intact. I blew again, harder now, and the strands seemed suddenly to melt. The fly fell on its back to the wooden floor of the porch, righted itself, then flew off, buzzing loudly. The spider tumbled from the broken web, hung by a single strand a few inches above the floor, then swiftly climbed the strand, scrambled across the top front rail of the porch, and disappeared. I went back to the lounge chair, sat down, and continued to stare at the sunlight on the ailanthus.

  CHAPTER TEN

  DANNY AND I were together almost every day during the first month of that summer. It was a hot, humid month, with a fierce summer sun that left a heat shimmer over the streets and softened the asphalt. Many a was forever muttering about the streaks of black tar that clung to my shoes and sneakers and rubbed off on the floor of the apartment.

  Danny spent his mornings studying Talmud, either alone or with his father, while I spent Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings playing ball with my yeshiva friends, none of whom seemed to be bothered by my friendship with Danny—they accepted it and just didn’t talk about it—and Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday mornings studying Talmud with my father, either on our back porch when it was a nice day or in his study when it was not. My father and I were studying Sanhedrin—slowly, patiently, intensively, not leaving a passage until my father was satisfied that, at least for the present, we understood it fully. Often, we were only able to do about ten lines at a time. Danny, on the other hand, had his daily Talmud goal increased to three blatt by his father. It didn’t seem to affect him very much; he was still able to spend all his afternoons on the third floor of the library, reading. I joined him there every afternoon, and frequently my father came with me. He was writing another article, on a passage in Avodah Zarah, which, he said, he was only now beginning to understand, and he needed one of the journal collections. So the three of us sat there in the afternoons, reading or talking quietly, until it was time for supper. Once I invited Danny to come home and eat with us, but he refused the invitation with a lame excuse, looking a little embarrassed. On our way home, my father told me that Danny probably didn’t eat anywhere except in his own home, or in the home of one of his father’s followers, because of kashruth, and that it would be wise for me not to embarrass him again with another invitation.

  On Shabbat afternoons I would walk to Danny’s house. Danny would take me up to his father’s study, and we would all do battle again over the Talmud. Then would come the glass of tea, the Afternoon Service, the ritual of the contest—Danny didn’t once miss finding his father’s deliberate errors—the Evening Service, and the Havdalah. Reb Saunders didn’t talk to me again about Danny’s reading, but I knew he was bothered by it terribly. I could tell from the occasional silence that filled the study while Danny would be downstairs getting the tea. And Danny didn’t talk about it, either. He just went on reading.

  Only the evenings were unscheduled. We sort of played them by ear, as Mr. Galanter might have said, deciding during the afternoon whether we would spend the evening walking, or in my house or his, or alone. Often, I went to the movies either with my father or with some of my school friends. Danny never went to the movies. They were forbidden by his father, he said.

  My father and I followed the war news very carefully, and there were now many more New York Times maps on the wall of my room. From the fourth to the tenth of July there was a violent battle in the La-Haye-du-Puits area. A panzer counterattack west of the Vire was smashed on the eleventh of July, but the American drive toward St.-Lô was stopped by a German parachute corps. Caen was finally captured, and then on the eighteenth of July St.-Lo fell. A war correspondent triumphantly announced that the lodgment area from which the Allied Armies would soon launch their major offensive into the heart of occupied France was now adequate and secure.

  My father and I listened to the news broadcasts, read the Times, and studied the maps. It seemed to us that, despite the many an-, nouncements of victories, the war was going very slowly. My father looked grim as he studied the war maps that showed the Allied advance between D day and the third week of July. Then the weather in France changed, and the war seemed to have come to a complete halt, swallowed by endless rain.

  In the beginning of the third week of July, my father’s research for the article he was writing made it necessary for him to travel to the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan. There were manuscripts there which he needed for the purpose of checking variant readings of the Talmudic passage on which he was working. So
every day that week right after lunch he took the subway to Manhattan, and I went alone to the library to be with Danny. That was the week Danny began to read Freud in German.

  It was difficult for him at first, and he admitted it openly. Not only was the language still a problem but also the terminology and ideas he encountered were strange and bewildering to him. This wasn’t Graetz on Jewish history, he told me, or Minkin on Hasidism, or Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and Dickens. It wasn’t even the Ogden and Flügel psychology books he had been reading. This was primary source material, research papers based on direct experimental data, involved theoretical constructions utilizing a complex vocabulary and containing a wealth of original ideas—and he was breaking his head on it.

  I listened to him talk and felt a little awed by it all. Five or so weeks ago, he had talked of the unconscious and of dreams almost as a child talks about his first tricycle. Now he was talking about direct experimental data and involved theoretical constructions.

  He spent the first part of that third week in July leafing through a collection of Freud’s writings—to get a taste of the material, he said —while I sat opposite him, trying to make my way through the first volume of Principia Mathematica and finally giving it up as too difficult and settling for a rereading of the article my math teacher had recommended in the Journal of Symbolic Logic—it was called “Conditions Affecting the Application of Symbolic Logic,” and I understood it a lot better this time—and for a book on logic by Susanne K. Langer. The first sections of the book were a little too easy for me, but the final chapter on logistics, in which she showed how Principia Mathematica provides a basis from which the concepts, operations, and relations of arithmetic and other branches of mathematics may be derived, I found to be very exciting.

  By Thursday, Danny’s side of the table was piled high with books, and he was looking thoroughly unhappy. He was sitting there, twisting an earlock and biting his lower lip, his face a mask of frustration. It was impossible, he said finally. The whole thing was ridiculous and impossible; he wasn’t getting anywhere. It wasn’t so much the German itself anymore as the technical terminology. He wasn’t making any headway at all. Not only that, but he had begun to use English translations of the German works he had been reading, and they did nothing but confuse him even more. He showed me where in one translation the German word “Unlust” had been translated as “pain,” in quotation marks, and the word “Schmerz” had been translated as “pain,” without quotation marks. How was he supposed to know what the translator had had in mind when he had used “pain” with and “pain” without quotation marks? And look at the word “Besetzung” he said angrily. What did it mean to translate it as “investment” or “charge”? And what good did it do to translate it as “cathexis”? What did “cathexis” mean? “Angst” was “anxiety,” “Furcht” was “fear,” “Schreck” was “fright.” How was he supposed to know what the difference between “fear” and “fright” was? He wasn’t getting anywhere, he would probably have to drop the whole thing; who did he think he was anyway trying to read Freud at the age of fifteen? He went home angry and disgusted, his face a picture of bewildered frustration.