The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

  “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 now 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.

  “How was I supposed to know that Zionism is a contaminated idea?” I said. “My God, I feel as if I’ve just been through the seven gates of Hell.”

  “Herzl didn’t wear a caftan and side curls,” Danny said. “Neither does Ben Gurion.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about my father. Just don’t talk about a Jewish state anymore. My father takes God and Torah very seriously, Reuven. He would die for them both quite gladly. A secular Jewish state in my father’s eyes is a sacrilege, a violation of the Torah. You touched a raw nerve. Please don’t do it again.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t mention it was my father who said it. He might have thrown me out of the house.”

  “He would have thrown you out of the house,” Danny said grimly.

  “Is he—is he feeling all right?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The way he cries all the time like that. Is he—is something wrong?”

  Danny’s hand went slowly to an earlock, and I watched him tug at it nervously. “Six million Jews have died,” he said. “He’s—I think he’s thinking of them. He’s suffering for them.”

  I looked at him. “I thought he might be sick. I thought your sister said—”

  “He’s not sick,” Danny broke in. He lowered his hand. “I—I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  “All right,” I said quietly. “But I don’t think I want to study any Talmud this morning. I’m going to take a long walk.”

  He didn’t say anything. But his face was sad and brooding as I went out of his room.

  When I saw Reb Saunders again at lunch, he seemed to have forgotten the incident completely. But I found myself thinking carefully now before I said anything to him. And I was constantly on my guard with him from that time on.

  • • •

  During an afternoon in the last week of July, Danny began talking about his brother. We were sitting in the library, reading, when he suddenly looked up, rested his head in the palm of his right hand, the elbow on the table, and said his eyes were bothering him again and that he wouldn’t be at all surprised if he ended up wearing glasses soon, his brother was having glasses made and he was only nine. I told him his brother didn’t seem to be doing much reading, what did he need glasses for.

  “It has nothing to do with reading,” Danny said. “His eyes are just plain bad, that’s all.”

  “Your eyes look bloodshot,” I told him.

  “They are bloodshot,” he said.

  “Your eyes look as if you’ve been reading Freud.”

  “Ha-ha,” Danny said.

  “What does Freud say about an ordinary thing like bloodshot eyes?”

  “He says to rest them.”

  “A genius,” I said.

  “You know, my brother’s a good kid,” Danny said. “His sickness is quite a handicap, but everything considered he’s a good kid.”

  “He’s quiet, I’ll say that for him. Does he study at all?”

  “Oh, sure. He’s bright, too. But he has to be careful. My father can’t pressure him.”

  “Lucky boy.”

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to be sick all my life. I’d much rather be pressured. He’s a nice kid, though.”

  “Your sister’s pretty nice, too,” I said.

  Danny didn’t seem to have heard me—or if he had, he chose to ignore my words completely. He went on talking about his brother. “It must really be hell to walk around sick all the time and have to depend upon pills. He’s really a sweet kid. And bright, too.” He seemed to be rambling, and I wasn’t quite sure I knew what he was trying to say. His next words jarred me. “He’d probably make a fine tzaddik,” he said.

  I looked at him. “How’s that again?”

  “I said my brother would probably make a fine tzaddik,” Danny said quietly. “It occurred to me recently that if I didn’t take my father’s place I wouldn’t be breaking the dynasty after all. My brother could take over. I had talked myself into believing that if I didn’t take his place I would break the dynasty. I think I had to justify to myself having to become a tzaddik.”

  I was frightened and said tightly* “Your home hasn’t blown up recently, so I take it you haven’t told your father.”

  “No, I haven’t. And I’m not going to, either. Not yet.”

  “When will you tell him? Because I’m going to be out of town that day.”

  “No,” he said quietly. “I’m going to need you around that day.”

  “I was only kidding,” I told him, feeling sick with dread.

  “It also occurred to me recently that all my concern about my brother’s health was a fake. I don’t have much of a relationship with him at all. He’s such a kid. I pity him a little, that’s all. I was really concerned about his health because all along I’ve wanted him to be able to take my father’s place. That was something, all right, when I realized that. How am I doing? Are you bored yet?”

  “I’m bored stiff,” I said. “I can’t wait until the day you tell your father.”

  “You’ll wait,” Danny said tightly, blinking his eyes. “You’ll wait, and you’ll be around, too, because I’m going to need you.”

  “Let’s talk about your sister for a change,” I said.

  “I heard you the first time. Let’s not talk about my sister, if you don’t mind. Let’s talk about my father. You want to know how I feel about my father? I admire him. I don’t
know what he’s trying to do to me with this weird silence that he’s established between us, but I admire him. I think he’s a great man. I respect him and trust him completely, which is why I think I can live with his silence. I don’t know why I trust him, but I do. And I pity him, too. Intellectually, he’s trapped. He was born trapped. I don’t ever want to be trapped the way he’s trapped. I want to be able to breathe, to think what I want to think, to say the things I want to say. I’m trapped now, too. Do you know what it’s like to be trapped?”

  I shook my head slowly.

  “How could you possibly know?” Danny said. “It’s the most hellish, choking, constricting feeling in the world. I scream with every bone in my body to get out of it. My mind cries to get out of it. But I can’t. Not now. One day I will, though. I’ll want you around on that day, friend. I’ll need you around on that day.”

  I didn’t say anything. We sat in silence a long time. Then Danny slowly closed the Freud book he had been reading.

  “My sister’s been promised,” he told me quietly.

  “What?”

  “My father promised my sister to the son of one of his followers when she was two years old. It’s an old Hasidic custom to promise children away. She’ll be married when she reaches eighteen. I think we ought to go over and visit your father now.”

  That was the only time Danny and I ever talked about his sister.

  A week later. I went up with my father to our cottage near Peek-skill. While we were there, America destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, and the war with Japan came to an end.

  • • •

  I didn’t tell my father about that last conversation I had with Danny, and I had many nightmares that year in which Reb Saunders screamed at me that I had poisoned his son’s mind.

  That September Danny and I entered Hirsch College. I had grown to five feet nine inches, an inch shorter than Danny, and I was shaving. Danny hadn’t changed much physically during his last year in high school. The only thing different about him was that he was now wearing glasses.

  Book Three

  A word is worth one coin; silence is worth two.

  —The Talmud

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BY THE END of our first week in college, Danny was feeling thoroughly miserable. He had discovered that psychology in the Samson Raphael Hirsch Seminary and College meant experimental psychology only, and that the chairman of the department, Professor Nathan Appleman, had an intense distaste for psychoanalysis in general and for Freud in particular.

  Danny was quite vocal about his feelings toward Professor Apple-man and experimental psychology. We would meet in the mornings in front of my synagogue and walk from there to the trolley, and for two months he did nothing during those morning trolley rides except talk about the psychology textbook he was reading—he didn’t say “studying,” he said “reading”—and the rats and mazes in the psychology laboratory. “The next thing you know they’ll stick me with a behaviorist,” he lamented. “What do rats and mazes have to do with the mind?”

  I wasn’t sure I knew what a behaviorist was, and I didn’t want to make him more miserable by asking him. I felt a little sorry for him, mostly because I had found college to be exciting and was thoroughly enjoying my books and my teachers, while he seemed to be going deeper and deeper into misery.

  The building that housed the college stood on Bedford Avenue. It was a six-story whitestone building, and it occupied half a block of a busy store-filled street. The noise of the traffic on the street came clearly through the windows and into our classrooms. Behind the college was a massive brownstone armory, and a block away, across the street, was a Catholic church with a huge cross on its lawn upon which was the crucified figure of Jesus. In the evenings, a green spotlight shone upon the cross, and we could see it clearly from the stone stairs in front of the college.

  The street floor of the building consisted of administrative offices, an auditorium, and a large synagogue, a section of which contained chairs and long tables. The entire second floor was a library, a beautiful library, with mazelike stacks that reminded me of the third floor of the library in which Danny and I had spent so much time together. It had bright fluorescent lights—that didn’t flicker or change color, I noticed immediately the first time I walked in—and a trained, professional library staff. It also contained a large reading room, with long tables, chairs, a superb collection of reference books, and an oil painting of Samson Raphael Hirsch which was prominently displayed on a white wall—Hirsch had been a well-known Orthodox rabbi in Germany during the last century and had fought intelligently through his writings and preachings against the Jewish Reform movement of his day. The third and fourth floors had white-painted, modern classrooms and large, well-equipped chemistry, physics and biology laboratories. There were also classrooms on the fifth floor, as well as a psychology laboratory, which contained rats, mazes, screens, and a variety of instruments for the measuring of auditory and visual responses. The sixth floor consisted of dormitory rooms for the out-of-town students.

  It was a rigidly Orthodox school, with services three times a day and with European-trained rabbis, many of them in long, dark coats, all of them bearded. For the first part of the day, from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon, we studied only Talmud. From three-fifteen to six-fifteen or seven-fifteen, depending on the schedule of. classes we had chosen for ourselves, we went through a normal college curriculum. On Fridays from nine to one, we attended the college; on Sundays, during that same time span, we studied Talmud.

  I found that I liked this class arrangement very much; it divided my work neatly and made it easy for me to concentrate separately upon Talmud and college subjects. The length of the school day, though, was something else; I was frequently awake until one in the morning, doing homework. Once my father came into my room at ten minutes to one, found me memorizing the section on river flukes from my biology textbook, asked me if I was trying to do four years of college all at once, and told me to go to bed right away. I went to bed—half an hour later, when I had finished the memorizing.

  Danny’s gloom and frustration grew worse day by day, despite the fact that the students in his Talmud class looked upon him with open-mouthed awe. He had been placed in Rav Gershenson’s class, the highest ill the school, and I had been placed one class below. He was the talk of the Talmud Department by the end of two weeks and the accepted referee of all Talmudic arguments among the students. He was also learning a great deal from Rav Gershenson, who, as Danny put it, loved to spend at least three days on every two lines he taught. He had quickly become the leader of the few Hasidic students in the school, the ones who walked around wearing dark suits, tieless shirts, beards, fringes, and earlocks. About half of my high school class had entered the college, and I became friendly enough with many of the other non-Hasidic students. I didn’t mix much with the Hasidim, but the extent to which they revered Danny was obvious to everyone. They clung to him as though he were the reincarnation of the Besht, as though he were their student tzaddik, so to speak. But none of this made him too happy; none of it was able to offset his frustration over Professor Appleman, who, by the time the first semester ended, had him so thoroughly upset that he began to talk about majoring in some other subject. He just couldn’t see himself spending four years running rats through mazes and checking human responses to blinking lights and buzzing sounds, he told me. He had received a B for his semester’s work in psychology because he had messed up some math equations on the final examination. He was disgusted. What did experimental psychology have to do with the human mind? he wanted to know.

  We were in the week between semesters at the time. Danny was sitting on my bed and I was at my desk, wishing I could help him, he looked so thoroughly sad. But I didn’t know a thing about experimental psychology, so there was little I could offer by way of help, except to urge him to stick out the year, something might come of it, he might even get to like the subject.

  “Di
d you ever get to like my father and his planned mistakes?” he asked testily.

  I shook my head slowly. Reb Saunders had stopped inserting deliberate errors into his Shabbat evening talks the week we had entered college, but the memory of it still rankled. I told Danny that I had disliked the mistake business and had never really gotten used to it, despite my having witnessed it many times.

  “So what makes you think sitting long enough through something you hate will get you to like it?”

  I had nothing to say to that, except to urge him again to stick out the year with Professor Appleman. “Why don’t you talk to him about it?” I asked.

  “About what? About Freud? The one time I mentioned a Freudian theory in class, all I got out of Appleman was that dogmatic psychoanalysis was related to psychology as magic was related to science. ‘Dogmatic Freudians,’ ” Danny was imitating Professor Appleman —or so I assumed; I didn’t know Professor Appleman, but Danny’s voice had taken on a somewhat professorial quality—” ‘Dogmatic Freudians are generally to be regarded as akin to the medieval physicists who preceded the era of Galileo. They are interested solely in confirming highly dubious theoretical hypotheses by the logic of analogy and induction, and make no attempt at refutation or inter-subjective testing.’ That was my introduction to experimental psych. I’ve been running rats through mazes ever since.”

  “Was he right?” I asked.

  “Was who right?”

  “Professor Appleman.”

  “Was he right about what?”

  “About Freudians being dogmatic?”

  “What followers of a genius aren’t dogmatic, for heaven’s sake? The Freudians have plenty to be dogmatic about. Freud was a genius.”

  “What do they do, make a tzaddik out of him?”