The Chosen Read online

  “Yes, abba.”

  “Reuven—”

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind. Go to sleep. I am going to sit here for a while and have another glass of tea.”

  I left him sitting at the kitchen table, staring down at the white cloth.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE NEXT DAY I met Danny’s father.

  My father and I woke early so as to be in our synagogue by eight-thirty. Manya came in a little before eight and served us a light breakfast. Then my father and I started out on the three-block walk to the synagogue. It was a beautiful day, and I felt happy to be out on the street again. It was wonderful to be outside that hospital, looking at the people and watching the traffic. When it didn’t rain and wasn’t too cold, my father and I always enjoyed our Shabbat walks to and from the synagogue.

  There were many synagogues in Williamsburg. Each Hasidic sect had its own house of worship—shtibblach, they were called—most of them badly lighted, musty rooms, with benches or chairs crowded together and with windows that seemed always to be closed. There were also those synagogues in which Jews who were not Hasidim worshiped. The synagogue where my father and I prayed had once been a large grocery store. It stood on Lee Avenue, and though the bottom half of its window was curtained off, the sun shone in through the uncurtained portion of the glass, and I loved to sit there on a Shabbat morning, with the gold of the sun on the leaves of my prayer book, and pray.

  The synagogue was attended mostly by men like my father— teachers from my yeshiva, and others who had come under the influence of the Jewish Enlightenment in Europe and whose distaste for Hasidism was intense and outspoken. Many of the students in the yeshiva I attended prayed there, too, and it was good to be able to be with them on a Shabbat morning.

  When my father and I came into the synagogue that morning, the service had just begun. We took our usual seats a few rows up from the window and joined in the prayers. I saw Davey Cantor come in. He nodded to me, looking gloomy behind his glasses, and took his seat. The prayers went slowly; the man at the podium had a fine voice and waited until each portion of the service had been completed by everyone before he began to chant. I glanced at my father during the Silent Devotion. He stood in his long prayer shawl, its silver trim bathed in sunlight, its fringes dangling almost to the floor. His eyes were closed—he always prayed from memory, except during a Festival or a High Holiday Service—and he was swaying slightly back and forth, his lips murmuring the words. I did not wear a prayer shawl; they were worn only by adults who were or had once been married.

  During the Torah Service, which followed the Silent Devotion, I was one of the eight men called up to the podium to recite the blessing over the Torah. Standing at the podium, I listened carefully to the reader as he chanted the words from the scroll. When he was done, I recited the second blessing and the prayer that thanks God when a serious accident has been avoided. As I left the podium and walked back to my seat, I wondered what blessing, if any, I would have recited had my eye been blinded. What blessing would Mr. Savo make if he were a Jew? I asked myself. For the rest of the service, I thought constantly of Mr. Savo and Billy.

  Lunch was ready for us when we got home, and Manya kept adding food to my plate and urging me to eat; food was necessary for someone who had just come back from the hospital, she told me in her broken English. My father talked about my work at school. I must be careful not to read until Dr. Snydman gave me his permission, he said, but there was nothing wrong if I attended classes and listened. Perhaps he could help me study. Perhaps he could read to me. We would try it and see. After the Grace, my father lay down on his bed to rest for a while, and I sat on the porch and stared at the sunlight on the flowers and the ailanthus. I sat like that for about an hour, and then my father came out to tell me he was going over to see one of his colleagues.

  I lay back on the lounge chair and stared up at the sky. It was a deep blue, with no clouds, and I felt I could almost touch it. It’s the color of Danny’s eyes, I thought. It’s as blue as Danny’s eyes. What color are Billy’s eyes? I asked myself. I think they’re also blue. Both Danny’s and Billy’s eyes are blue. But one set of eyes is blind. Maybe they’re not blind anymore, I thought. Maybe both sets of eyes are okay now. I fell asleep, thinking about Danny’s and Billy’s eyes.

  • • •

  It was a light, dreamless sleep, a kind of half-sleep that refreshes but does not shut off the world completely. I felt the warm wind and smelled newly cut grass, and a bird perched on a branch of the ailanthus and sang for a long time before it flew away. Somehow I knew where that bird was, though I did not open my eyes. There were children playing on the street, and once a dog barked and a car’s brakes screeched. Someone was playing a piano nearby, and the music drifted slowly in and out of my mind like the ebb and flow of ocean surf. I almost recognized the melody, but I could not be sure; it slipped like a cool and silken wind from my grasp. I heard a door open and close and there were footsteps against wood, and then silence, and I knew someone had come onto the porch, but I would not open my eyes. I did not want to lose that twilight sleep, with its odors and sounds and whispered flow of music. Someone was on the porch, looking at me. I felt him looking at me. I felt him slowly push away the sleep, and, finally, I opened my eyes, and there was Danny, standing at the foot of the lounge chair, with his arms folded across his chest, clicking his tongue and shaking his head.

  “You sleep like a baby,” he said. “I feel guilty waking you.”

  I yawned, stretched, and sat up on the edge of the lounge chair. “That was delicious,” I added, yawning again. “What time is it?”

  “It’s after five, sleepyhead. I’ve been waiting here ten minutes for you to wake up.”

  “I slept almost three hours,” I said. “That was some sleep.”

  He clicked his tongue again and shook his head. “What kind of infield is that?” He was imitating Mr. Galanter. “How can we keep that infield solid if you’re asleep there, Malter?”

  I laughed and got to my feet.

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked. “I don’t care.”

  “I thought we’d go over to my father’s shul. He wants to meet you.”

  “Where is it?” I asked him.

  “It’s five blocks from here.”

  “Is my father inside?”

  “I didn’t see him. Your maid let me in. Don’t you want to go?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Let me wash up and put a tie and jacket on. I don’t have a caftan, you know.”

  He grinned at me. “The uniform is a requirement for members of the fold only,” he said.

  “Okay, member of the fold. Come on inside with me.”

  I washed, dressed, told Manya that when my father came in she should let him know where I had gone, and we went out.

  “What does your father want to see me about?” I asked Danny as we went down the stone stairway of the house.

  “He wants to meet you. I told him we were friends.”

  We turned up the street, heading toward Lee Avenue.

  “He always has to approve of my friends,” Danny said. “Especially if they’re outside the fold. Do you mind my telling him that we’re friends?”

  “No.”

  “Because I really think we are,” Danny said.

  I didn’t say anything. We walked to the corner, then turned right on Lee Avenue. The street was busy with traffic and crowded with people. I wondered what any of my classmates would think if they saw me walking with Danny. It would become quite a topic of conversation in the neighborhood. Well, they would see me with him sooner or later.

  Danny was looking at me, his sculptured face wearing a serious expression. “Don’t you have any brothers or sisters?” he asked.

  “No. My mother died soon after I was born.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “How about you?”

  “I have a brother and a sister. My sister’s fourteen and my brother is eight. I’m going on
sixteen.”

  “So am I,” I said.

  We discovered that we had been born in the same year, two days apart.

  “You’ve been living five blocks away from me all these years, and I never knew who you were,” I said.

  “We stick pretty close together. My father doesn’t like us to mix with outsiders.”

  “I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but your father sounds like a tyrant.”

  Danny didn’t disagree. “He’s a very strong-willed person. When he makes up his mind about something, that’s it, finished.”

  “Doesn’t he object to your going around with an apikoros like me?”

  “That’s why he wants to meet you.”

  “I thought you said your father never talks to you.”

  “He doesn’t. Except when we study Talmud. But he did this time. I got up enough courage to tell him about you, and he said to bring you over today. That’s the longest sentence he’s said to me in years. Except for the time I had to convince him to let us have a ball team.”

  “I’d hate to have my father not talk to me.”

  “It isn’t pleasant,” Danny said very quietly. “But he’s a great man. You’ll see when you meet him.”

  “Is your brother going to be a rabbi, too?”

  Danny gave me a queer look. “Why do you ask that?”

  “No special reason. Is he?”

  “I don’t know. Probably he will.” His voice had a strange, almost wistful quality to it. I decided not to press the point. He went back to talking about his father. 4

  “He’s really a great man, my father. He saved his community. He brought them all over to America after the First World War.”

  “I never heard about that,” I told him.

  “That’s right,” he said, and told me about his father’s early years in Russia. I listened in growing astonishment.

  Danny’s grandfather had been a well-known Hasidic rabbi in a small town in southern Russia, and his father had been the second of two sons. The firstborn son had been in line to inherit his father’s rabbinic position, but during a period of study in Odessa he suddenly vanished. Some said he had been murdered by Cossacks; for a time there was even a rumor that he had been converted to Christianity and had gone to live in France. The second son was ordained at the age of seventeen, and by the time he was twenty had achieved an awesome reputation as a Talmudist. When his father died, he automatically inherited the position of rabbinic leadership. He was twenty-one years old at the time.

  He remained the rabbi of his community throughout the years of Russia’s participation in the First World War. One week before the Bolshevist Revolution, in the autumn of 1917, his young wife bore him a second child, a son. Two months later, his wife, his son, and his eighteen-month-old daughter were shot to death by a band of marauding Cossacks, one of the many bandit gangs that roamed through Russia during the period of chaos that followed the revolution. He himself was left for dead, with a pistol bullet in his chest and a saber wound in his pelvis. He lay unconscious for half a day near the bodies of his wife and children, and then the Russian peasant who tended the stove in the synagogue and swept its floor found him and carried him to his hut, where he extracted the bullet, bathed the wounds, and tied him to the bed so he would not fall out during the days and nights he shivered and screamed with the fever and delirium that followed.

  The synagogue had been burned to the ground. Its Ark was a gutted mass of charred wood, its four Torah scrolls were seared black, its holy books were piles of gray ash blown about by the wind. Of the one hundred eighteen Jewish families in the community only forty-three survived.

  When it was discovered that the rabbi was not dead but was being cared for by the Russian peasant, he was brought into the still-intact home of a Jewish family and nursed back to health. He spent the winter recovering from his wounds. During that winter the Bolshevists signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, and Russia with drew from the war. The chaos inside the country intensified, and the village was raided four times by Cossacks. But each of those times the Jews were warned by friendly peasants and were concealed in the woods or in huts. In the spring, the rabbi announced to his people that they were done with Russia, Russia was Esav and Edom, the land of Satan and the Angel of Death. They would travel together to America and rebuild their community.

  Eight days later, they left. They bribed and bargained their way through Russia, Austria, France, Belgium, and England. Five months later, they arrived in New York City. At Ellis Island the rabbi was asked his name, and he gave it as Senders. On the official forms, Senders became Saunders. After the customary period of quarantine, they were permitted to leave the island, and Jewish welfare workers helped them settle in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Three years later the rabbi married once again, and in 1929, two days before the stock market crash, Danny was born in the Brooklyn Memorial Hospital. Eighteen months later his sister was bora, and five and a half years after the birth of his sister, his brother was born by Caesarean section, both in that same hospital.

  “They all followed him?” I asked. “Just like that?”

  “Of course. They would have followed him anywhere.”

  “I don’t understand that. I didn’t know a rabbi had that kind of power.”

  “He’s more than a rabbi,” Danny said. “He’s a tzaddik.”

  “My father told me about Hasidism last night. He said it was a fine idea until some of the tzaddikim began to take advantage of their followers. He wasn’t very complimentary.”

  “It depends upon your point of view,” Danny said quietly.

  “I can’t understand how Jews can follow another human being so blindly.”

  “He’s not just another human being.”

  “Is he like God?”

  “Something like that. He’s a kind of messenger of God, a bridge between his followers and God.”

  “I don’t understand it. It almost sounds like Catholicism.”

  “That’s the way it is,” Danny said, “whether you understand it or not.”

  “I’m not offending you or anything. I just want to be honest.”

  “I want you to be honest,” Danny said.

  We walked on in silence.

  A block beyond the synagogue where my father and I prayed, we made a right turn into a narrow street crowded with brownstones and sycamores. It was a duplicate of the street on which I lived, but a good deal older and less neatly kept. Many of the houses were unkempt, and there were very few hydrangea bushes or morning glories on the front lawns. The sycamores formed a solid, tangled bower that kept out the sunlight. The stone banisters on the outside stairways were chipped, their surfaces blotched with dirt, and the edges of the stone steps were round and smooth from years of use. Cats scrambled through the garbage cans that stood in front of some of the houses, and the sidewalks were strewn with old newspapers, ice cream and candy wrappers, worn cardboard cartons, and torn paper bags. Women in long-sleeved dresses, with kerchiefs covering their heads, many with infants in their arms, others heavily pregnant, sat on the stone steps of the stairways, talking loudly in Yiddish. The street throbbed with the noise of playing children who seemed in constant motion, dodging around cars, racing up and down steps, chasing after cats, climbing trees, balancing themselves as they tried walking on top of the banisters, pursuing one another in furious games of tag—all with their fringes and earlocks dancing wildly in the air and trailing out behind them. We were walking quickly now under the dark ceiling of sycamores, and a tall, heavily built man in a black beard and black caftan came alongside me, bumped me roughly to avoid running into a woman, and passed me without a word. The liquid streams of racing children, the noisy chatter of long-sleeved women, the worn buildings and blotched banisters, the garbage cans and the scrambling cats all gave me the feeling of having slid silently across a strange threshold, and for a long moment I regretted having let Danny take me into his world.

  We were approaching a group of about
thirty black-caftaned men who were standing in front of the three-story brownstone at the end of the street. They formed a solid wall, and I did not want to push through them so I slowed my steps, but Danny took my arm with one hand and tapped his other hand upon the shoulder of a man on the outer rim of the crowd. The man turned, pivoting the upper portion of his body—a middle-aged man, his dark beard streaked with gray, his thick brows edging into a frown of annoyance—and I saw his eyes go wide. He bowed slightly and pushed back, and a whisper went through the crowd like a wind, and it parted, and Danny and I walked through, Danny holding me by the arm and nodding his head at the greetings in Yiddish that came in quiet murmurs from the people he passed. It was as if a black-waved, frozen sea had been sliced by a scythe, forming black, solid walls along a jelled path. I saw black- and gray-bearded heads bow toward Danny and dark brows arch sharply over eyes that stared questions at me and at the way Danny was holding me by the arm. We were almost halfway through the crowd now, walking slowly together, Danny’s fingers on the part of my arm just over the elbow. I felt myself naked and fragile, an intruder, and my eyes, searching for anything but the bearded faces to look at, settled, finally, upon the sidewalk at my feet. Then, because I wanted something other than the murmured greetings in Yiddish to listen to, I began to hear, distinctly, the tapping sounds of Danny’s metal-capped shoes against the cement pavement. It seemed a sharp, unnaturally loud sound, and my ears fixed on it, and I could hear it clearly as we went along. I listened to it intently—the soft scrape of the shoe, and the sharp tap-tap of the metal caps—as we went up the stone steps of the stairway that led into the brownstone in front of which the crowd stood. The caps tapped against the stone of the steps, then against the stone of the top landing in front of the double door—and I remembered the old man I often saw walking along Lee Avenue, moving carefully through the busy street and tapping, tapping, his metal-capped cane, which served him for the eyes he had lost in a First World War trench during a German gas attack.