The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

  I nodded.

  “Now I have work I must do.” And he went from the room, leaving me as bewildered as I had been before.

  I had planned to talk to Danny the next day, but when I saw him he was in such a state of panic over his brother that I didn’t dare mention what my father had said. The doctors had diagnosed his brother’s illness as some kind of imbalance in the blood chemistry caused by something he had eaten, Danny told me over lunch, looking pale and grim, and blinking his eyes repeatedly. They were trying out some new pills, and his brother would remain in the hospital until they were certain the pills worked. And he would have to be very careful from now on with his diet. Danny was tense and miserable all that day and throughout the week.

  • • •

  Levi Saunders was discharged from the Brooklyn Memorial Hospital the following Wednesday afternoon. I saw Danny in school the next day. We sat in the lunchroom and ate for a while in silence. His brother was fine, he said finally, and everything seemed to have settled down. His mother was in bed with high blood pressure, though. But the doctor said it was caused by her excitement over Levi’s illness and all she needed now was to rest. She would be better soon.

  He told me quietly that he was planning to write to three universities that day—Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia—and apply for a fellowship in psychology. I asked him how long he thought he would be able to keep his applications a secret.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his voice a little tight.

  “Why don’t you tell your father now and get it over with?”

  He looked at me, his face grim. “I don’t want explosions with every * meal,” he said tightly. “All I get are either explosions or silence. I’ve had enough of his explosions.”

  Then I told him what my father had said. As I spoke, I could see him become more and more uncomfortable.

  “I didn’t want you to tell your father,” he muttered angrily.

  “My father kept your library visits a secret from me,” I reminded him. “Don’t worry about my father.”

  “I don’t want you to tell anyone else.”

  “I won’t. What about what my father said? Are you going to remain an Orthodox Jew?”

  “Whatever gave you the notion that I had any intention of not remaining an Orthodox Jew?”

  “What if your father asks about the beard, the caftan, the—”

  “He won’t ask me”

  “What if he does?”

  He pulled nervously at an earlock. “Can you see me practicing psychology and looking like a Hasid?” he asked tightly.

  I hadn’t really expected any other answer. Then something occurred to me. “Won’t your father see the mail you get from the graduate schools you’ve applied to?”

  He stared at me. “I never thought of that,” he said slowly. “I’ll have to intercept the mail.” He hesitated, his face rigid. “I can’t. It comes after I leave for school.” And his eyes filled with fear.

  “I think you ought to have a talk with my father,” I said.

  • • •

  Danny came over to our apartment that night, and I took him into my father’s study. My father came quickly around from behind his desk and shook Danny’s hand.

  “I have not seen you in such a long time,” he said, smiling warmly. “It is good to see you again, Danny. Please sit down.”

  My father did not sit behind his desk. He sat next to us on the kitchen chair he had asked me earlier to bring into the study.

  “Do not be angry at Reuven for telling me,” he said quietly to Danny. “I have had practice with keeping secrets.”

  Danny smiled nervously.

  “You will tell your father on the day of your ordination?”

  Danny nodded.

  “There is a girl involved?”

  Danny nodded again, giving me a momentary glance.

  “You will refuse to marry this girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your father will have to explain to her parents and to his followers.”

  Danny was silent, his face tight.

  My father sighed softly. “It will be a very uncomfortable situation. For you and for your father. You are determined not to take your father’s place?”

  “Yes,” Danny said.

  “Then you must know exactly what you will tell him. Think carefully of what you will say. Think what your father’s questions will be. Think what he will be most concerned about after he hears of your decision. Do you understand me, Danny?”

  Danny nodded slowly.

  There was a long silence.

  Then my father leaned forward in his chair. “Danny,” he said softly, “you can hear silence?”

  Danny looked at him, startled. His blue eyes were wide, frightened. He glanced at me. Then he looked again at my father. And, slowly, he nodded his head.

  “You are not angry at your father?”

  Danny shook his head.

  “Do you understand what he is doing?”

  Danny hesitated. Then he shook his head again. His eyes were wide and moist.

  My father sighed again. “It will be explained to you,” he said softly. “Your father will explain it to you. Because he will want you to carry it on with your own children one day.”

  Danny blinked his eyes nervously.

  “No one can help you with this, Danny. It is between you* and your father. But think carefully of what you will say to him and of what his questions will be.”

  My father came with us to the door of our apartment. I could hear Danny’s capped shoes tapping against the outside hallway floor. Then he was gone.

  “What is this again about hearing silence, abba?” I asked.

  But my father would say nothing. He went into his study and closed the door.

  • • •

  Danny received letters of acceptance from each of the three universities to which he had applied. The letters came in the mail to his home and lay untouched on the vestibule table until he returned from school. He told me about it in early January, a day after the third letter had come. I asked him who usually picked up the mail.

  “My father,” he said, looking tense and bewildered. “Levi’s in school when it comes, and my mother doesn’t like climbing stairs.”

  “Were there return addresses on the envelopes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then how can’t he know?” I asked him.

  “I don’t understand it,” he said, his voice edged with panic. “What is he waiting for? Why doesn’t he say something?” I felt sick with his fear and said nothing.

  • • •

  Danny told me a few days later that his sister was pregnant. She and her husband had been over to the house and had informed his parents. His father had smiled for the first time since Levi’s bar mitzvah, Danny said, and his mother had wept with joy. I asked him if his father gave any indication at all of knowing what his plans were.

  “No,” he said.

  “No indication at all?”

  “No, I get nothing from him but silence.”

  “Is he silent with Levi, too?”

  “No.”

  “Was he silent with your sister?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t like your father,” I told him. “I don’t like him at all.” Danny said nothing. But his eyes blinked his fear. A few days later, he told me, “My father asked me why you’re not coming over anymore on Shabbat.”

  “He talked to you?”

  “He didn’t talk. That isn’t talking.”

  “I study Talmud on Shabbat.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not too eager to see him.” He nodded unhappily.

  “Have you decided which university you’re going to?”

  “Columbia.”

  “Why don’t you tell him and get it over with?”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “What difference does it make? If he’s going to throw you out of the house, he’ll do it no matter when you tell him.”
r />   “I’ll have my degree in June. I’ll be ordained.”

  “You can live with us. No, you can’t. You won’t eat at our house.”

  “I could live with my sister.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid. I’m afraid of the explosion. I’m afraid of anytime I’ll have to tell him. God, I’m afraid.”

  My father would say nothing when I talked to him about it. “It is for Reb Saunders to explain,” he told me quietly. “I cannot explain what I do not completely understand. I cannot do it with my students, and I cannot do it with my son.”

  A few days later, Danny told me that his father had asked again why I wasn’t coming over to their house anymore.

  “I’ll try to get over,” I said.

  But I didn’t try very hard. I didn’t want to see Reb Saunders. I hated him as much now as I had when he had forced his silence between me and Danny.

  • • •

  The weeks passed and winter melted slowly into spring. Danny was working on an experimental psychology project that had to do with the relationship between reinforcement and rapidity of learning, and I was doing a long paper on the logic of ought statements. Danny pushed himself relentlessly in his work. He grew thin and gaunt, and the angles and bones of his face and hands jutted like sharp peaks from beneath his skin. He stopped talking about the silence between him and his father. He seemed to be shouting down the silence with his work. Only his constantly blinking eyes gave any indication of his mounting terror.

  The day before the start of the Passover school vacation period, he told me that his father had asked him once again why I wasn’t coming over to their house anymore. Gould I possibly come over on Pass-over? he had wanted to know. He especially wanted to see me the first or second day of Passover.

  “I’ll try,” I said halfheartedly, without the slightest intention of trying at all.

  But when I talked to my father that night, he said, with a strange sharpness in his voice, “You did not tell me Reb Saunders has been asking to see you.”

  “He’s been asking all along.”

  “Reuven, when someone asks to speak to you, you must let him speak to you. You still have not learned that? You did not learn that from what happened between you and Danny?”

  “He wants to study Talmud, abba.”

  “You are sure?”

  “That’s all we’ve ever done when I go over there.”

  “You only study Talmud? You have forgotten so quickly?” I stared at him. “He wants to talk to me about Danny,” I said, and felt myself turn cold.

  “You will go over the first day of the holiday. On Sunday.”

  “Why didn’t he tell me?”

  “Reuven, he did tell you. You have not been listening.”

  “All these weeks—”

  “Listen next time. Listen when someone speaks to you.”

  “Maybe I should go over tonight.”

  “No. They will be busy preparing for the holiday.”

  “I’ll go over on Shabbat.”

  “Reb Saunders asked you to come on Passover.”

  “I told him we study Talmud on Shabbat.”

  “You will go on Passover. He has a reason if he asked you to come especially on Passover. And listen next time when someone speaks to you, Reuven.”

  He was angry, as angry as he had been in the hospital years ago when I had refused to talk to Danny.

  I called Danny and told him I would be over on Sunday.

  He sensed something in my voice. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I’ll see you on Sunday.”

  “Nothing’s wrong?” His voice was tight, apprehensive.

  “No.”

  “Come over around four,” he said. “My father needs to rest in the early afternoons.”

  “Four.”

  “Nothing’s wrong?”

  “I’ll see you on Sunday,” I told him.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ON THE AFTERNOON of the first day of Passover, I walked beneath the early spring sycamores on my street, then turned into Lee Avenue. The sun was warm and bright, and I went along slowly, past the houses and the shops and the synagogue where my father and I prayed. I met one of my classmates and we stopped to talk for a few minutes; then I went on alone, turning finally into Danny’s street. The sycamores formed a tangled bower through which the sun shone brightly, speckling the ground. There were tiny buds on these sycamores now and on some I could see the green shoots of infant leaves. In a month, those leaves would shut out the sky, but now the sun came through and brushed streaks of gold across the sidewalks, the street, the talking women, and the playing children. I walked along slowly, remembering the first time I had gone up this street years ago. Those years were coming to an end now. In three months, in a time when the leaves would be fat and full, our lives would separate like the branches overhead that made their own way into the sunlight.

  I went slowly up the wide stone staircase of Danny’s house and through the wooden double door of the entrance. The hallway was dim and cold. The synagogue door stood open. I peered inside. Its emptiness whispered echoes at me: mistakes, gematriya, Talmud quizzes, and Reb Saunders staring at my left eye. You do not know yet what it is to be a friend. Scientific criticism, ah! Your father is an observer of the Commandments. It is not easy to be a true friend. Soft, silent echoes. It seemed tiny to me now, the synagogue, so much less neat than when I had seen it for the first time. The stands were scarred, the walls needed paint, the naked light bulbs seemed ugly, their bare, black wires like the dead branches of a stunted tree. What echoes will Reb Saunders’ study have? I thought. And I felt myself go tight with apprehension.

  I stood at the foot of the inner stairway and called Danny’s name. My voice moved heavily through the silent house. I waited a moment, then called his name again. I heard the tapping of metal-capped shoes upon the third-floor stairway, then in the hallway over my head; and then Danny was standing at the head of the stairs, tall, gaunt, an almost spectral figure with his beard and earlocks and black satin caftan.

  I climbed the stairs slowly, and he greeted me. He looked tired. His mother was resting, he said, and his brother was out somewhere. He and his father were studying Talmud. His voice was dull, flat, only faintly edged with fear. But his eyes mirrored clearly what his voice concealed.

  We went up to the third floor. Danny seemed to hesitate before the door to his father’s study, almost as if he was wishing not to have to go back in there again. Then he opened the door, and we stepped inside.

  It had been almost a year since I had last been inside Reb Saunders’ study, but nothing about it had changed. There was the same massive, black wood, glass-topped desk, the same red carpet, the same glass-enclosed wooden bookcases jammed tight with books, the same musty old-book odor in the air, the same single light bulb glowing white behind its ceiling fixture. Nothing had really changed— nothing, except Reb Saunders himself.

  He sat in his straight-backed, red leather chair and looked at me from behind the desk. His beard had gone almost completely gray, and he sat stooped forward, bent, as though he were carrying something on his shoulders. His brow was crisscrossed with wrinkles, his dark eyes brooded and burned with some kind of invisible suffering, and the fingers of his right hand played aimlessly with a long, gray earlock.

  He greeted me quietly, but did not offer me his hand. I had the feeling that a handshake was a physical effort he wanted to avoid.

  Danny and I sat in the chairs by his desk, Danny to his right, I to his left. Danny’s face was expressionless, closed. He tugged nervously at an earlock.

  Reb Saunders moved forward slightly in the chair and put his hands on the desk. Slowly, he closed the Talmud from which he and Danny had been studying. Then he sighed, a deep, trembling sigh that filled the silence of the room like a wind.

  “Nu, Reuven,” he said quietly, “finally, finally you come to see me.” He spoke in Yiddish, his voice quavering a little as the words came out.<
br />
  “I apologize,” I said hesitantly, in English.

  He nodded his head, and his right hand went up and stroked his gray beard. “You have become a man,” he said quietly. “The first day you sat here, you were only a boy. Now you are a man.”

  Danny seemed suddenly to become conscious of the way he was twisting his earlock. He put his hand on his lap, clasped both hands tightly together and sat very still, staring at his father.

  Reb Saunders looked at me and smiled feebly, nodding his head. “My son, my Daniel, has also become a man. It is a great joy for a father to see his son suddenly a man.”

  Danny stirred faintly in his chair, then was still.

  “What will you do after your graduation?” Reb Saunders asked quietly.

  “I have another year to study for smicha.”

  “And then what?”

  “I’m going into the rabbinate.”

  He looked at me and blinked his eyes. I thought I saw him stiffen for a moment, as though in sudden pain. “You are going to become a rabbi,” he murmured, speaking more to himself than to me. He was silent for a moment. “Yes. I remember. . . . Yes. . . .” He sighed again and shook his head slowly, the gray beard moving back and forth. “My Daniel will receive his smicha in June,” he said quietly. Then he added, “In June. . . . Yes. . . . His smicha. Yes. . . .” The words trailed off, aimless, disconnected, and hung in the air for a long moment of tight silence.

  Then, slowly, he moved his right hand across the closed Talmud, and his fingers caressed the Hebrew title of the tractate that was stamped into the spine of the binding. Then he clasped both hands together and rested them on top of the Talmud. His body followed the movements of his hands, and his gray earlocks moved along the sides of his aged face.

  “Nu,” he said, speaking softly, so softly I could barely hear him, “in June my Daniel and his good friend begin to go different ways. They are men, not children, and men go different ways. You will go one way, Reuven. And my son, my Daniel, he will—he will go another way.”

  I saw Danny’s mouth fall open. His body gave a single convulsive shudder. Different ways, I thought. Different ways. Then he—

  “I know,” Reb Saunders murmured, as if he were reading my mind. “I have known it for a long time.”