The Promise Read online

  Chaim Potok

  THE PROMISE

  Chaim Potok was born in New York City in 1929. He graduated from Yeshiva University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, was ordained as a rabbi, and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He also served as editor of the Jewish Publication Society of America. Potok’s first novel, The Chosen, published in 1967, received the Edward Lewis Wallant Memorial Book Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. He is the author of eight novels, including In the Beginning and My Name Is Asher Lev, and Wanderings, a history of the Jews. He died in 2002.

  NOVELS BY CHAIM POTOK

  The Chosen

  My Name Is Asher Lev

  In the Beginning

  The Book of Lights

  Davita’s Harp

  The Gift of Asher Lev

  I Am the Clay

  Old Men at Midnight

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2005

  Copyright © 1969, renewed 1997 by Chaim Potok

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1969.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Potok, Chaim.

  The promise / Chaim Potok.

  p. cm.

  1. Schizophrenia in adolescence—Fiction. 2. Psychologists—Fiction. 3. Rabbis—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PZ4.P86 Pr PS3566.O69

  813’.5’4

  71088744

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82636-7

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  This is a work of fiction, one man’s vision of things. No correspondence between the people, places, and events in this book and people, places, and events in the real world is intended. What correspondence might exist is the result of coincidence.

  My deepest thanks to Professors Herbert Callen, David Halivni (Weiss), and Solomon Zeitlin, Drs. Israel Charny and Bernard Shuman, Adena, my wife, for helping with the research.

  C. P.

  TO

  THE CHILDREN

  Rena, Naama, Akiva

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Book Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Book Three

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

  FRANZ KAFKA

  Master of the Universe, send us our Messiah, for we have no more strength to suffer. Show me a sign, O God. Otherwise … otherwise … I rebel against Thee. If thou dost not keep Thy Covenant, then neither will I keep that Promise, and it is all over, we are through being Thy chosen people, Thy peculiar treasure.

  THE REBBE OF KOTZK

  All around us everything was changing in the order of things we had fashioned for ourselves.

  The neighborhood changed. In the years before the Second World War, the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn had been inhabited by only a few Hasidic sects. By the fifth year after the war, the neighborhood seemed dark with their presence. They had come from the sulfurous chaos of the concentration camps, remnants, one from a hamlet, two from a village, three from a town, dark, somber figures in long black coats and black hats and long beards, earlocks hanging alongside gaunt faces, eyes brooding, like balls of black flame turned inward upon private visions of the demonic. Here, in Williamsburg, they set about rebuilding their burned-out world. Families had been destroyed; they remarried and created new families. Dynasties had been shattered; elders met and formed new dynasties. Children had been killed; their women now seemed forever pregnant. And by the fifth year after the war, Lee Avenue, the main street of the neighborhood, was filled with their bookstores and bookbinderies, butcher shops and restaurants, beeswax candle stores, dry-cleaning stores, grocery stores and vegetable stores, appliance stores and hardware stores—the signs in Yiddish and English, the storekeepers bearded and in skullcaps, the gentiles gone now from behind the counters, the Italians and Irish and Germans and the few Spanish Civil War refugee families all gone now too from the neighborhood.

  The street I lived on changed. It was a quiet sycamore-lined street directly off Lee Avenue, and I had lived on it all my life with my father and Manya, the Russian woman who had come in to care for me when my mother died suddenly soon after I was born. The row houses on the street were all three-story brownstones, with small grassy back yards and neatly kept areaways in front where hydrangeas flowered and shone in the sunlight like huge snowballs. Then the newcomers moved into the street. They lived in a dimension of reality that made trees and grass and flowers irrelevant to their needs. So the street began to sag with neglect. The grassy back yards went slowly bald, the hydrangeas were left to fade and die, and the brownstones became old and worn. Soon even the musky odor of the ailanthus trees in the back yards was gone from the street.

  The school I attended changed. The Samson Raphael Hirsch Seminary and College stood on Bedford Avenue near Eastern Parkway in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. It had been a small Orthodox rabbinical school and secular college during the war, the only one of its kind in the United States. In the years after the war it had begun to expand. Adjoining homes and buildings were acquired, college departments were enlarged, additional faculty was hired, and in the final months of my senior year a graduate school was started. Sometime during the summer after my graduation from the college in the fifth year after the war, the name of the school was changed to Hirsch University. I continued to attend the rabbinical school for my ordination.

  The winter came late that year. There was a long Indian summer and the sycamores on my block turned slowly in the gentle winds. The leaves remained on the trees until early November, and then began to fall. Soon the street was covered with them and I felt them beneath my feet, thin, brittle, papery things that had once been green with life. The sycamores stood bare against the sky and seemed to be waiting for the winter. In late December the air turned suddenly cold and bitter. And on a day in early January I walked beneath the naked sycamores on my way home from school and saw the sky dull gray and heavy with clouds and felt the first flakes of snow against my face, and the winter was here.

  All through that winter my father was writing his book on the Talmud. He wrote during those afternoons when he did not have to teach and every evening and night, except the nights of Shabbat and festivals. He left the apartment only to go to his school or occasionally to m
eet with a colleague or to do research in the rare-manuscript room at the Zechariah Frankel Seminary, the non-Orthodox rabbinical school and teachers institute on Eastern Parkway.

  In the late spring of that year I met Rachel Gordon at a party. She was a junior at Brooklyn College and majored in English literature, and when I first met her I found myself intrigued by the fact that she was the niece of Professor Abraham Gordon, who taught Jewish philosophy at the Zechariah Frankel Seminary and whose books were scorned and despised by the rabbis in my very Orthodox school. I began to date her. Both of us were surprised and pleased when we discovered we would be together for part of the coming summer in a resort area near Peekskill, a small town about thirty miles from New York, where her parents had a lakeside home and where my father and I vacationed every August in a cottage we rented.

  In the first week of June the spring weather ended abruptly with a stifling heat wave. On Lee Avenue the dark-clothed Hasidim sweated in the fierce heat, but the sycamores on my block shaded the street and there was a breeze in the nights and I could hear it in the leaves through the open window of my room.

  Rachel and her parents left for their summer home in the last week of June. I went up to visit her on a Sunday morning in the middle of July and met her cousin Michael, who was with them that summer. He was a sad-faced, precocious fourteen-year-old boy and he spent the morning roaming along the shore collecting frogs and salamanders and the afternoon reading an astronomy book while Rachel and I swam and sailed on the lake. New York seemed dazed with heat when I returned that night.

  In the first week of August my father and I packed some bags and left for the cottage on a day when the heat reached to just over one hundred degrees and even Lee Avenue surrendered to the summer and stood empty and deserted, a stagnant pool of shimmering asphalt burning in the sun.

  BOOK ONE

  Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional.

  You are embarked.

  PASCAL

  One

  The county fair was Rachel’s idea. She had a passion for the theater, James Joyce, and county fairs, and she could be quite persuasive when it came to those three passions. We would go on the Sunday in the third week of August, the closing night of the fair, when there would be a fireworks display. We would have a splendid time, she said. It was also her idea that we take her cousin Michael.

  It was warm that Sunday night and the sky was clear and filled with stars. We sat in the front seat of the DeSoto and Rachel drove carefully along the dark asphalt country roads. Michael sat quietly between us, staring out of the windshield. A moment after we reached the highway he suddenly became quite talkative. He chatted about his frogs and salamanders. He talked about Andromeda, white dwarfs, and red giants. He seemed to know a great deal about astronomy. He had a high, thin voice and he spoke animatedly and in a rushing flow of technical words. I saw Rachel smiling. She wore a yellow sleeveless summer dress and her short auburn hair blew in the warm wind that came through the open windows of the car.

  We came to a crossroads, bright with the neon life of a night highway, then went around a sharp curve. Set into the darkness about an eighth of a mile away, and looking as though it had carved itself into the night, was the county fair. Michael abruptly ceased talking and leaned forward in the seat.

  The fair lay stretched out upon a huge field alongside the highway, bathed in a blaze of electric lights and neon signs, with strings of bulbs across an entrance arch spelling out the word PARKING, and floodlights poking bright fingers into the black sky, and blurred gashes of colored lights from a moving Ferris wheel and parachute jump. The brightness formed a pale, smoky, faintly pink arc-shaped cloud over the entire area, sealing it off from the darkness beyond. In the center of the field was a roller coaster with strings of lighted bulbs following its tortuous contour.

  Rachel parked the car and we came out onto the graveled surface of the parking lot and to a chain-link fence with a gate. We went through the gate and into the county fair.

  The three of us were standing on an asphalt road that was jammed with people. Teen-agers jostled roughly through the crowd, children ran about wildly, young and old couples moved along or stood near booths playing carnival games. A thick din choked the air. I heard gongs, bells, rifle shots from a nearby shooting gallery, the music of a calliope, the whooshing roar of the roller coaster, and a steady waterfall of human noise. It seemed as if all the noise of the world’s wide night had descended upon this one stretch of lighted earth.

  “We’re in the wrong place,” I said to Rachel.

  She stood alongside me on the asphalt road, her face pale in the garish lights. Michael was staring around wide-eyed at the booths.

  “What did you do, take a wrong turn somewhere?” I was annoyed and I let my voice show it.

  “No, I did not take a wrong turn somewhere.”

  “What happened to your county fair?”

  “It was advertised as a fair. You saw the poster. Annual county fair. In big red letters. You saw it too.”

  “I don’t like carnivals,” I said.

  “Neither do I.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  She looked around indecisively, chewing her lip. I saw her glance at Michael, who stood nearby staring at the roller coaster.

  “Why don’t we call up James Joyce and find out what he would do?” I said, feeling irritated and annoyed and wanting to get away from the noise and the wildness.

  She gave me an angry look. “Don’t be nasty,” she said. “It isn’t my fault.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “We’ll see the exhibits and go right home.”

  “They’ve probably got three cows and two horses in a tent somewhere.”

  “We’ll look and go right home. So it won’t be a total waste. What gall to advertise this as a fair.”

  We found the tent. There were cows, horses, calves, pigs, roosters, hens, awkward paintings by local artists, and some prizewinning home-baked pies. The wooden floor of the tent was covered with sawdust, and the smell of animal droppings was very strong.

  “I’m thrilled,” I said. “You have no idea how thrilled I am to see rural America at its creative best.”

  “Don’t be mean,” Rachel said. But she was as angry as I was.

  “I’m not mean. I’m thrilled.”

  “I’ve seen beautiful fairs.”

  “Let’s go home,” I said.

  Michael stood a few feet away from us, looking curiously at a prize calf. He wore a rumpled white sport shirt, tan shorts, and an old pair of tennis sneakers with the laces untied. He had wild dark-brown hair that badly needed trimming and dreamy blue eyes behind shell-rimmed glasses that were too large for his narrow face.

  We came out of the tent onto the black asphalt road of the carnival. Michael wanted to know where the other exhibits were.

  “That’s all there is,” I told him. “We just saw the whole fair. It’s a carnival. They stuck some animals in and called it a fair. But it’s a carnival.”

  “We’re going home now,” Rachel said.

  Michael stared at her, his mouth dropping open.

  “Reuven and I don’t like carnivals,” Rachel said.

  But Michael did not want to go home. Why should we go home just because it was a carnival? he wanted to know. What was wrong with carnivals? He and Rachel stood on the road, arguing. It seemed to me they argued a long time. Michael had a strong, stubborn, aggressive streak. In the end, Rachel yielded.

  We walked along the crowded asphalt road through the litter of pop bottles, ice-cream wrappers, soiled paper bags, popsicle sticks, beer cans, discarded newspapers. The carnival booths lined both sides of the road, and from inside the booths pitchmen shouted their games to the crowd. Some booths were large, with expensive-looking prizes on their shelves; most were small shanty-like affairs, with gambling games or tossing games operated by hard-voiced carnival people some of whom wore derbies or straw hats. The booths were on wheels and were scarred
and blotched from travel. The carnival had been set up in the form of a circle, with the booths lining both sides of the curving asphalt road, and the Ferris wheel, parachute jump, and roller coaster in the center.

  We approached a ring-toss game operated by a short, double-chinned pitchman in a straw hat. He was chewing on a dead cigar and shouting automatically at the crowd. He took off the straw hat and wiped his bald head with a red handkerchief. There was no one at his booth. He put the handkerchief away and saw me looking at him. His voice focused itself directly upon us, and we were drawn reluctantly to the booth.

  We played the ring-toss game twice. Then we went to another booth and played a pitching game. Michael played awkwardly. His glasses kept slipping down the bridge of his nose and he kept pushing them back up with abrupt motions of his hand. After the pitching game Rachel told him again that she wanted to go home but he ignored her and went on ahead, moving restlessly along the asphalt road. He was a thin, narrow-shouldered, gawky boy, about five inches shorter than my own five feet ten inches, and he seemed all caught up in the tumult around us.

  So we continued along the asphalt road, playing the games and ignoring the freak shows. Even Michael did not want to see the freak shows. We fired rifles at wooden ducks, threw pennies into flat plates, tossed baseballs at fat-nosed clowns. Rachel won a charm bracelet from the penny-tossing game, and Michael came away from the fat nose of a clown with a pen and pencil set which he stuck away in his shirt pocket with a triumphant grin. Now he wanted to go on the roller coaster, he said.

  Rachel told him she did not like roller coasters.

  “Then I’ll go with Reuven,” he said.

  I told him I did not like roller coasters either.

  “Then I’ll go alone,” he said, and started by himself toward the ticket booth.

  Rachel looked at me helplessly.

  “Your cousin is a first-class brat,” I said. “Come on. We can’t let him go up there by himself.”