The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

  When I got to Danny’s house that Shabbat afternoon, I found him in an ugly mood. He was waiting for me outside. He greeted me with a curt nod of his head and muttered something about not really being in the mood for Talmud now but we had to go up anyway. He was very quiet during the first few minutes of the Talmud battle, and though I tried to make up for his silence by increasing the volume of my own enthusiasm, I could see that Reb Saunders was becoming more and more annoyed by his son’s lack of participation. Danny was tense and edgy, his face still masked by frustration, his mind obviously not on what we were discussing. He’s probably eating himself up alive over Freud, I thought, hoping his father wouldn’t lose his temper. But Reb Saunders remained patient and left his son alone.

  In the middle of a heated debate over an impossible passage in Kiddushin I heard Danny take a sudden loud breath, as if he had been punched in the stomach. Reb Saunders and I broke off our discussion and looked at him. He was staring down at the Talmud, and smiling. His face had come to life, and there was a light in his eyes. He jumped up from his chair, circled the room, then sat down again, and Reb Saunders and I just sat there, staring at him. Something is the matter? Reb Saunders wanted to know. There is a joke in the Talmud we did not see? What was so funny? Danny shook his head, still smiling, bent over the Talmud, and began to give his version of the passage. His voice trembled a little. There was a pause when he finished, and I thought for a moment that Reb Saunders would again ask his son what had been so funny. Instead, I heard him sigh a little, then offer a passage from the Baba Bathra that contradicted Danny’s explanation. We returned to the battle, and Danny more than made up for his previous silence.

  He was quiet as he walked me part of the way home that night, and when we got to the synagogue where my father and I prayed he muttered something about seeing me in the library the next day, then turned and went quickly back.

  When I got to the library the next afternoon, I found him seated at his table. There were three books open in front of him. He smiled broadly and waved me to a chair. He had worked out a method of doing Freud, he said, and it seemed to be going all right, so far. He pointed to the three books. One was a volume of Freud’s early papers, he told me. Some of them Freud had written together with Josef Breuer, a Viennese physician; others he had written alone. Another was the Cassell’s German-English Dictionary. The third was a dictionary of psychological terms edited by someone called Warren. The Freud volume was open to a paper entitled “Ein Fall Von Hypnotischer Heilung.” “Fall” meant “case,” he said. The rest of the title I could figure out for myself from my Yiddish, he told me.

  “I forgot what it was like to study Talmud,” he said excitedly. “Talmud is so easy for me now, I didn’t remember what I used to go through when I first started it as a kid. Can you study Talmud without the commentaries? Imagine Talmud without Rashi. How far would you get?”

  I agreed with him that I wouldn’t get very far at all.

  He had been going at it all wrong, he said, his eyes bright with excitement. He had wanted to read Freud. That had been his mistake. Freud had to be studied, not read. He had to be studied like a page of Talmud. And he had to be studied with a commentary.

  But Danny didn’t know of any commentaries on Freud, so he had settled for the next best thing. He had needed something that would explain Freud’s technical terminology, that would clarify the various shades of meaning the German words had—and he had found this dictionary of psychological terms. He was reading Freud now sentence by sentence. He didn’t go on to the next sentence until the prior sentence was perfectly clear in his mind. If he came across a German word he did not know, he looked up its English meaning in the Cassell’s. If the Cassell’s gave him a translation he didn’t understand, one that wouldn’t fit the meaning of the sentence, he looked the English word up in the psychology dictionary. That psychological dictionary was his commentary. It had, for example, already explained to him the technical difference between “fear” and “fright.” It had also explained the term “cathexis.” It was working. He had already studied two and a half pages that afternoon.

  Was Freud worth all that effort? I wanted to know.

  Freud was a genius, Danny told me. Of course he was worth all that effort. Was symbolic logic worth all my effort?

  I had nothing to say to that, except admit that he was probably right.

  So I continued reading the Langer book, while Danny bent over the table studying Freud. He shuffled pages impatiently whenever he had to look something up in one of his dictionaries. The sounds of the shuffling pages were loud in the silence of the library.

  On Thursday, I told him that my father and I would be leaving next Tuesday morning for the cottage near Peekskill where we always stayed in August, and I gave him two books I thought he might like to read. One was The Making of the Modern Jew by Milton Steinberg, the other was The Thirteen Letters of Ben Uzziel by Samson Raphael Hirsch. He thanked me and said he would read them. When my father and I left for Peekskill on Tuesday morning, Danny had completed the first paper and was started on the second, entitled “Die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen” We had agreed not to write to each other—probably out of an unspoken feeling that two boys our age writing one another when we were only going to be separated for a month was a little childish—and I didn’t see him again until after Labor Day.

  • • •

  My father and I returned home the day after Labor Day, and I called Danny immediately. His mother answered and told me she was delighted I had had a good vacation but she was sorry, Danny wasn’t home, he had gone with his father to visit a family friend in Lakewood. Danny called me later that evening, happy to hear I was back. He had missed me, he said. How was the trip to Lakewood? I wanted to know. Miserable, he said. Had I ever sat in a bus with my father for hours and not exchanged a single word of conversation, except for a short discussion about a passage of Talmud? No, I told him quietly, I had never had that kind of experience. I always talked to my father. I was lucky, he said. I didn’t know how really lucky I was, he added, a little bitterly.

  We chatted for a while, and agreed to meet in the library the following afternoon. I found him at his table, looking a little pale, but happy. His tufts of beard had grown a bit thicker, he blinked his eyes a little too often, as if weary from all his reading, but otherwise he was the same, everything was the same, and it was as though we had not seen each other for, at most, a single night of dream-filled sleep. Yes, he had read the two books I had given him. They had been very good, and he had learned a lot from them about the problems of contemporary Judaism. His father had thrown some poisonous looks at him when he had taken them into the house, but the looks had disappeared when Danny had somehow gotten up the courage to tell him that the books had come from Reuven Malter. He would give them back to me tomorrow. He had also read a great deal of Freud, he said. He had finished almost all of the first volume, and he wanted to talk to me about a paper of Freud’s called “Die Sexualität in der Ätiologie der Neurosen” It had been something of a shock to him to read that, he said, and he had no one else to talk to about it except me, he didn’t want to discuss it with my father. I said fine, we could talk about it on Shabbat when I came over to his house.

  But somehow we never got around to talking about it that Shabbat, and on Sunday morning we were both back in school again. The year—the real year of a person going to school—began, and for a long while I had no time at all to think about, let alone discuss, the writings of Sigmund Freud.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FOR THE FIRST TWO MONTHS of that school year, Danny and I were able to get together regularly only on Shabbat afternoons. Only once did we manage to see each other during the week. I had been elected president of my class, and I found myself suddenly involved in student politics. The evenings that I might have spent with Danny I spent instead at student council or committee meetings. We talked frequently by phone, though, and neither of us felt our friendship was suffering any. But we never got
around to discussing what he was reading in Freud.

  During November, I managed to go over to his house one evening in the middle of the week. I brought him half a dozen books on Jewish subjects that my father had suggested he read, and he thanked me for them gratefully. He looked a little weary, but otherwise he was fine—except for his eyes, which tired easily, he said. He had been to a doctor, but he didn’t need glasses, so everything was really all right. I asked him how he was coming along with Freud, and he said, looking uncomfortable, that he was rarely in the library these days, there was too much schoolwork, but he did manage to read a little of Freud now and then, and it had become very upsetting.

  “One of these days I want to have a long talk with you about it,” he told me, blinking his eyes.

  But we had no real opportunity for any long talk. The Shabbat day grew shorter and shorter, my schoolwork seemed endless, and student politics took up every moment of my spare time.

  And then, in the middle of December, just when it seemed that the war would be over very soon, the Germans launched a major offensive in the Ardennes region, and the Battle of the Bulge began. There were reports of frightful American casualties—some newspaper said that two thousand American soldiers were being killed and wounded every day.

  It was a cold, bitter winter in New York, bleak with the news of the fighting in the Ardennes, and at night, as I sat working at my desk, I could hear the radio in the kitchen where my father would be sitting with his war maps, following the news.

  The Battle of the Bulge ended about the middle of January, with the newspapers reporting seventy-seven thousand Allied casualties and one hundred twenty thousand German casualties.

  Throughout the entire month of that battle—from the middle of December to the middle of January—I did not see Danny once. We spoke on the phone a few times; he told me his brother was sick again and might have to spend some time in a hospital. But the next time I called him his brother was all right—the doctor had changed his pills, Danny said, and that seemed to work. He sounded tired and sad, and once or twice I could barely hear his voice over the phone. The Battle of the Bulge? Yes, he said vaguely, a terrible business. When was I coming over to see him? As soon as I could breathe a little, I said. He said not to wait too long, he needed to talk to me. Was it very important? I wanted to know. No, it could wait, it wasn’t very important, he said, sounding sad.

  So it waited. It waited through my midyear exams and through the first two weeks of February, when I managed to get to Danny’s house twice and we fought our customary Talmud battles together with his father but didn’t get a chance to be alone long enough for us to talk. And then the news of the war in Europe suddenly reached a peak of feverish excitement. The Russians captured Königsberg and Breslau and came within thirty miles of Berlin, and at the end of the first week in March American troops reached the Rhine River at Remagen and discovered, to their astonishment, that the Ludendorff Bridge had, for some reason, not been destroyed by the Germans. My father almost wept with joy when we heard the news. There had been talk of bloody battles and high casualties in crossing the Rhine. Instead, American troops poured across the bridge, the Remagen beachhead was quickly enlarged and held against German counter attacks—and everyone began to talk of the war ending in two months.

  My father and I were overjoyed, and even Danny, whom I saw again in the middle of March and who generally took little interest in the details of the war, began to sound excited.

  “It is the end of Hitler, may his name and memory be erased,” Reb Saunders said to me that Shabbat afternoon. “Master of the Universe, it has taken so long, but now the end is here.”

  And he trembled as he said it and was almost in tears.

  Danny caught the flu in the last week of March and was in bed for more than a week. During that time, the Saar and Silesia were taken, the Ruhr was encircled by American troops, and another bridgehead was formed across the Rhine by soldiers of General Patton’s army. Almost every day now there were rumors that the war had ended. But each rumor proved to be false and did nothing but add to the already intolerable anxiety and suspense my father and I were feeling as we read the papers and listened to the radio.

  Danny returned to school at the end of the first week in April, apparently too soon, for he was back in bed two days later with bronchitis. I called his mother to ask if I could visit him, but she said no, he was too sick, and besides what he had was contagious, even his brother and sister weren’t permitted into his room. I asked if I could speak to him, but she told me he was running a high fever and could not leave his bed to come to the phone. She sounded worried. He was coughing a great deal, she told me, and was exhausted from the sulfa he was taking. Yes, she would give him my wishes for his speedy recovery.

  On the Thursday afternoon of the second week in April, I was sitting at a meeting of the student council. The meeting had started pleasantly enough with the usual reading of the minutes and committee reports, when Davey Cantor burst into the room, looking as though he was crying, and shouted breathlessly that someone had just told him President Roosevelt was dead.

  He was standing by the open door of the classroom, and there was a sudden movement of heads as everyone turned and gaped at him in total astonishment. I had been in the middle of a sentence, and I turned, too, remaining on my feet next to my desk, and I heard myself saying angrily that he had a hell of a nerve barging in here like that, he wasn’t being one bit funny.

  “It’s true!” he shouted, crying. “Mr. Weinberg just told me! He heard it on the radio in the faculty room!”

  I stared at him and felt myself slide slowly back onto my desk. Mr. Weinberg taught English. He was a short, bald man, with no sense of humor, and his motto was “Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see.” If Mr. Weinberg had told Davey Cantor that President Roosevelt was dead . . .

  I found myself in a sudden cold sweat. Someone in the room giggled, someone else moaned, “Oh, no!” and our faculty advisor stood up and suggested that the meeting be adjourned.

  We left the building and came out onto the street. All the way down the three flights of stairs I wouldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. It was like God dying. Davey Cantor had said something about a cerebral hemorrhage. I didn’t believe it. Until I got to the street.

  It was a little after five o’clock, and there was still sunlight. The late afternoon traffic was heavy. Trucks, cars and a trolley choked the street, waiting for the corner light to change. I crossed quickly, ran for the trolley, and made it just as the light changed. I found a seat next to a middle-aged lady who sat staring straight ahead, weeping silently. I looked around. No one in the trolley was talking. It was crowded, and it became more crowded as it went along, but there was only the silence inside. I saw one man put his hands over his eyes and just sit there like that for a while. I stared out the window. People stood around in small groups on the sidewalks. They didn’t seem to be talking. They just stood there, together, like an animal herd bunching up for protection. An old gray-haired woman, walking with a child, held a handkerchief to her mouth. I saw the child look up at her and say something, but I couldn’t hear it. I found myself crying too, and felt a gnawing emptiness, as though I had been scraped clean inside and there was nothing in me now but a terrible darkness. I was feeling as though it had been my father who had died.

  The whole ride home was like that: silence in the trolley car, weeping men and women, groups of people standing about dazedly in the streets, little children looking bewildered and wondering what had happened.

  Manya and my father were home. I heard the radio in the kitchen as I opened the door, quickly put my books in my room, and joined them. Manya was cooking supper, and sobbing. My father was sitting at the table, his face ashen, his cheeks hollow, his eyes red, looking as he had when he had visited me in the hospital I sat at the table and listened to the news announcer. He was talking in a hushed voice and giving details of President Roosevelt’s death. Harr
y S Truman was now President of the United States. I sat there and listened and couldn’t believe it. How could President Roosevelt die? I had never even thought of him as being mortal. And to die now, especially now, when the war was almost over, when there was to be a meeting soon of the new United Nations. How could a man like that die?

  We ate our supper listening to the radio—something we had never done before; my father never liked to have the radio on during a meal. But it was on during that meal and every other meal we ate that entire weekend—except for the Shabbat—and it stayed on every moment either my father or Manya or I was home.