by Chaim Potok
Far into the night my mother and father and aunt and uncle sat on our screened-in front porch and talked. I lay awake and listened but they were speaking in such subdued tones that I could make out nothing of what they were saying. On occasion one of their voices would rise above the surface of their conversation, but the others would immediately make mention of the children, and the loud voice would sink into a level of sound inaudible to my ears. I was at my window when they left and I saw my uncle embrace my father. He held him in the embrace for what seemed to me to be a very long time while my mother and aunt looked on and, finally, looked away. Then my aunt and uncle went to their cottage and my parents went to bed.
But they did not sleep. Through the darkness and the thin wall that separated our bedrooms, I heard whispers and my mother’s soothing words and my father’s strained, subdued voice. “I cannot understand it, Ruth. There is nothing we can do. I have never been in a situation like this before. In Lemberg we could do something and see results. Why did I bring them here?”
“You did nothing wrong, Max. You advised them. That was all you did.”
“But I told them it would be better here. Do you see how some of them look at me? I feel like a criminal.”
“It isn’t only here, Max. It’s the whole world. Is it better where they were?”
“But I brought them here, Ruth. I worked like a slave—to bring them here. Now it is a catastrophe and nothing we can do will help. God in heaven, what have I done to my friends?”
And there were more whispers and it all went on a long time until I fell asleep numb with weariness and dread.
My father did not go horseback riding that summer, though he took us often to the movies. Sometimes he went to the movies alone, and I knew it was a war film. We returned to the city in the first week of September and my father and uncle sold the cottages and we never saw them again.
The meetings continued, less frequently now but with greater rancor than before. Often I heard the gentle voice of my uncle raised in defense of my father. Who hadn’t put money into the market? he would shout. Who hadn’t invested in real estate? They were lucky he had pulled out as much as he had or there would be no money now to maintain the cemetery, to keep up the death benefits, to maintain the sick fund. No, there was no money for travel loans to get families from Europe to America. Not now. Not until times were better. But what were they complaining about? Why were they shouting at Max? Didn’t they read the newspapers? People were jumping out of windows. At least there was still enough money in the treasury to keep the Am Kedoshim Society from bankruptcy.
I would lie in my bed and listen to his voice and imagine his gentle face red with anger, his eyes flaring behind their lenses, and I would remember how he had once said to me, “What should we have done, David? Sometimes you have to smash.” His voice had been soft then, but I thought I could remember some of the anger that had been embedded within it. His eyes had flashed for the briefest of seconds; the face had gone rigid. It was strange how a gentle person could turn so suddenly raging.
There were more empty seats in the synagogue now; people were moving from the neighborhood. Often on my way to meet Saul on the boulevard where we waited for our trolley car, I would see moving vans parked on the curb and brawny men carrying furniture out of houses.
“Why are so many people moving, Saul?” I asked him one morning when we had taken seats in the trolley car.
“They can’t pay the high rent. They move to a less expensive neighborhood.”
“Will we have to move, Saul?”
“No, we won’t have to move, Davey.”
“What does the word suicide mean, Saul?”
“Where did you see that?”
“Yesterday in a newspaper in Mr. Steinberg’s candy store.”
He explained it to me.
I sat in the clattering car and stared at him. “Because they don’t have money?” I heard myself say.
He nodded. His hair had gone uncut a long time. Brown strands curled out from beneath his winter cap and lay across his narrow forehead. A dark blur clouded his blue eyes as if water had been splashed upon his glasses. For a moment I wondered if he knew of someone in the Am Kedoshim Society who had done that. I was too frightened to ask him.
“I don’t understand it,” I said. “People kill themselves because of that?”
“Without money you can’t live,” Saul said. He hunched his thin shoulders and pulled his heavy jacket more tightly around him. It was cold in the trolley car. People rode in silence, reading newspapers or staring at the slatted floor or out the windows at the gray morning. I gazed out my window a moment, then opened my Chumash and reviewed some passages on which we were to be tested that morning. I closed the Chumash and went over the passages again inside my eyes. Then I sat looking out the window.
I counted four moving vans that morning parked along the streets, their backs open like black mouths. One morning in January, as the trolley car turned into the street beyond the small park, I saw men moving furniture onto the sidewalk and leaving it there. I did not see any moving van. The next day, Yaakov Bader came over to me during the mid-morning recess and said, “Come on and have a game with us, Davey.”
I shrugged and continued looking through the chain-link fence at the street.
“Come on, Davey. My uncle told me to make sure and take good care of you. I don’t want my uncle to be angry at me.”
I turned to him. A red wool cap framed his fair-skinned features which were flushed pink by the cold.
“The guys want you to play with us,” he said. “Come on.” His breath vaporized as he spoke. Slate-gray clouds covered the sky. The air burned with cold.
He led me to a sheltered corner of the yard where, in a basement doorway beneath the outdoor fire stairs, I joined a game of baseball cards. The boys played with their gloves off. They blew into their hands and stamped their feet. I played seriously against the background noise of the recess and lost all my cards.
“Boy, Davey, you may be a big brain, but you’re lousy at this. Look at all these Babe Ruths,” one of them said.
“You ought to take your gloves off when you play, Davey,” another said.
“It hurts my fingers to do that.”
“Look at these hands,” a third said. He thrust a pair of chapped and reddened hands in front of my eyes. “My mother will kill me. What did I spend money on gloves for if you don’t wear them? She’ll absolutely kill me. How can you play with gloves on, Davey?”
I shrugged and moved away from them. Yaakov Bader walked with me through the noisy yard back to the chain-link fence.
“They were only kidding you, Davey. Don’t be so serious.”
We looked out at the deserted winter street.
“Is your uncle still in Europe?” I asked.
“He’ll be there until the summer.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s living in Switzerland this year.”
“Is he still in business?”
“Yes.”
“So many people went out of business. My father doesn’t have much business now. He’s home a lot.”
We were quiet, staring through the fence at the street.
“And so many people are moving. One of the boys in my house moved the other day. Monday, I think it was. Joey Younger. He’s in second grade. Do you know him?”
He shook his head.
“I never liked him too much. But I was sorry he had to move.”
“Two of my friends moved last month.”
“It’s a scary feeling. It gives me bad dreams sometimes.”
He nodded.
“You remember what we learned the other day in Chumash? Where Abraham says to God, when he’s talking about Sodom and Amorrah, ‘Will You destroy the good people and the evil people?’ Doesn’t it look like it makes no difference now if a person is good or bad? God is just destroying everyone.”
“Hey, Davey,” he murmured, stiffening and looking quickly about. “D
on’t talk like that.”
“I have that feeling, Yaakov. It’s a funny feeling. I don’t understand it. What difference does it make if you’re good or bad? Can you explain it to me?”
How can it make a difference? I thought. Was that old lady evil, the one Saul and I had seen sitting in a chair on the sidewalk yesterday afternoon surrounded by her furniture? I had dreamed about her. When the trolley car took me and Saul past her house again this morning, she was gone. Evil. It had a queer sound to it in English. It seemed a wet slimy word. The Hebrew word was harsher. Rasha. An evil man. Rishus. Evil. How could it possibly make a difference? I kept asking myself. Later, in class, I raised my hand and said, “I think there’s something not clear in verse twenty-two.” My anger did not come through in my words.
The teacher, a young man with a smooth-shaven face and rimless glasses, peered at me from across his desk and said, “Yes? What is not clear?”
“The verse says ‘Abraham still stood before God.’ But it was God who came to Abraham. The verse should have said, ‘God still stood before Abraham.’ ”
The teacher looked down at his Chumash for a moment, then looked up, cleared his throat softly, and said, “Are you able to read Rashi, David?”
I shook my head. I had taught myself the letters of the strangely shaped Hebrew alphabet in which the commentary by Rashi was printed in the lower half of our Bible texts. But I was not yet able to read the commentary with ease.
“Rashi asks your question. He tells us the Torah should indeed have said, ‘But God still stood before Abraham.’ ”
She had worn an old brown coat and a green scarf over her head and had placed her hands beneath her armpits for warmth. Stand before her and keep her warm, I thought, feeling the rage. How long had she sat in the cold? What happens to you when they put you out like that on the sidewalk?
“No, she will not freeze to death,” my mother had said. “Friends or neighbors will take her in. Relatives will come for her.”
“She was an old lady, Mama. What is God doing to the world? He’s making accidents everywhere.”
“Please do not talk that way, David,” she had said fearfully. “A Jew must have faith in God.”
Everywhere people were moving. In the darkness at night I imagined I could hear the hum and clatter of wheels and the tremor of the earth. Even the earth itself was moving; deep fissures appeared in it in my dreams.
“But the Rabbis did not want it to appear as if God could really have been standing, as it were, before Abraham,” said the teacher, “and so the text was changed to what we have now. It is called a tikkun soferim, David. A scribal emendation.” He hesitated, then cleared his throat. “All right, David? Do you understand?”
I did not understand. But I nodded my head anyway. I was no longer interested in the question.
I went home in the snow with Saul and was ill in bed for five days. Early in the morning of the second day a rumbling noise woke me from a nightmare-choked sleep and I went to my window. A moving van stood at the curb in front of our house. I turned cold with dread. Two heavy-set men got out, trudged through the remnants of the snow, and opened the back gate of the van. Then they went into the house. I look around wildly. My brother was asleep. The apartment was still. A few minutes later Tony Savanola came out of the house carrying his schoolbag. He stood near the maple and looked at the long black moving van. His shoulders were bowed. Suddenly I had my window open and I was screaming, “Tony! Hey, Tony! Are you moving, Tony?” I saw him turn, his eyes wide. Staring up at me through the winter branches of the maple, he nodded his head and rubbed gloved knuckles into his eyes. I leaned further out the window and the freezing air stung my face and whipped through my pajamas. “It’s not fair you should be moving, Tony. That Eddie, he should be moving. I’m sorry, Tony. I’m sorry.” I was shouting but I no longer knew what I was saying. I heard a shout behind me. It was my mother’s voice. She was pushing me away from the window. I fought her and kept shouting at Tony. My mother’s face was dead white. Then my father was in the room and the window was slid shut and I was in bed beneath my covers shivering not from cold but from a dark horror that had no face to it but pierced with a poisoned sword good people and evil people alike. I stared at the glinting tip of the sword and did not know what to do. After a moment I slid deep beneath my covers and lay very still, dimly aware that in the dark world outside my brother had wakened and was crying. I closed my eyes and did not move and listened to my brother crying. Then my mother took him out and the room was silent. In the silence I thought I could hear furniture being moved and the voice of Mrs. Savanola somewhere in our apartment. Then she was inside my room and I came out from beneath my covers and looked at the fat and round woman dark with sadness now. Tony was with her. They were saying goodbye. Good luck. You be a good boy to your mama. She a very good mama. And you listen to your papa. He a good honest man. Goodbye, Tony, I heard myself say hoarsely. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Hey, he said. Hey. Don’t get excited, Davey. You’ll get more sick. We played some nice games, Davey. I’m sorry that crazy Eddie broke it all up. Goodbye, Davey. Goodbye. I lay beneath my covers and looked up at my sheet and brushed my lips across its smooth surface. We have to do something, I thought. Something. Something.
I was able to go to our little synagogue that Shabbat. My father read slowly from the Torah scroll, his voice peculiarly tremulous. He had lost some weight. There were vague hollows now in his cheeks. The scar curved faintly inward within the darkness of his Shabbat stubble.
There were fewer people every month in our synagogue now. On the first day of Passover it was almost filled again, for the weather was lovely and people walked long distances to be together once more; no one in our group violated the prohibition against riding on Shabbat or festivals. But that Rosh Hashanah the little synagogue had many empty seats. My uncle led the Morning Service. Mr. Bader, back from Europe, read the Torah. My father sounded the shofar, the strident blasts rasping loudly through the small room. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah he faltered over the teruah blast during the repetition of the Silent Devotion. He stood at the podium in the white knee-length cotton garment that he wore over his dark suit and in his tall white skullcap and tried to complete the series of staccato blasts from the ram’s horn, and for the third time the attempt ended in a hoarse spitting wheeze before he was halfway done. His face was dark red; the veins and muscles bulged in his neck. The congregants were very still. He had never had any difficulty sounding the shofar before. He waited a moment, cleared the spittle from the shofar by blowing into it, then tried once again and was able to complete the blast. The congregants stirred with relief and the service continued. My father came back to his seat next to me and out of the corner of my eye I could see his flushed face and the faint trembling of his hands. I turned my head away and gazed out the window at the Catholic church. It seemed to me that in recent weeks its attendance too had decreased. Small sparse groups would straggle from it now rather than the brisk and lively crowds I had once seen. Sometimes I saw Eddie Kulanski and his parents come out of the church. They would go slowly past the statue of the woman in flowing robes and she would gaze down at them, her arms outstretched. They rarely looked at her. I would see Eddie Kulanski and think about Tony Savanola and wonder where he was. People came and went in your life and you never knew what happened to them. And sometimes I found myself thinking too of Mrs. Horowitz and her dog.
At the end of the Afternoon Service that day my father walked home from the synagogue in a dark silence.
I raised my hand in class that week and said to my teacher, “I don’t understand something in verse one.”
The teacher was a short, pudgy middle-aged man with a smooth-shaven, fleshy face, cold gray eyes, and a sharp tongue. We were in the second chapter of Exodus. He looked up from his Bible text.
“Yes? You waited until the fourth verse before you realized you did not understand the first verse? Where’s the brain all your previous teachers told me you have? Wha
t don’t you understand?”
“It says in the first verse that a man from the house of Levi married a daughter of Levi.”
“Yes, it says that.”
“And in the next verse it says she had a baby.”
Some of the boys turned their heads and looked at me. The teacher sat behind his desk and said nothing.
“In verse four it says that his sister watched him when he was in the river. But if he was the first child born how did he have a sister?”
Yaakov Bader, who sat in the front row, glanced down at his Chumash, then looked back at me in astonishment.
“Moses was not the first child,” said the teacher.
“But it says in the verse—”
“They were married before but they separated because of the decree of Pharaoh. Then he took her back as his wife and Moses was born.”
“Where does it say that?”
“Can you read the commentary of Rashi?”
I shook my head. I could read the letters and words now but the smallness of the print hurt my eyes and set the letters swimming after a few minutes.
“You will find it in Rashi.”
I wondered how Rashi had discovered an important bit of information like that when it was not even written in the Torah.
A few minutes later I raised my hand again. I did not understand verse five, I said.
“Yes?” asked the teacher. “What don’t you understand?”
“The verse says, ‘And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river.’ It should really have said, ‘And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to the river to bathe.’ ”
He stared at me. A block away an elevated train rumbled by on the trestle. We could hear it distinctly through the closed window of our room. One of the students coughed.
“You will find your question in Rashi,” said the teacher finally. “You are sure you cannot read Rashi?”
I shook my head.
“Rashi tells us to turn around the verse and explain it as follows: ‘And the daughter of Pharaoh came to the river to bathe in it.’ ”