by Chaim Potok
In the night the radiator seemed strangely loud and the cold sharper than usual. Alex no longer came to my bed. I missed him. I lay awake and waited for sleep. It came reluctantly and crept into my bed, then slipped away with the first rush of steam into the cold radiator. I lay awake and smelled the bread baking in the ovens.
I was ill with pain and fever the day Mr. Bader returned from Europe. A few days later when he came to the house I was still in bed. I heard his polite, courtly voice in the doorway and in the kitchen and then in the living room. After a while he stood near my bed, peering down at me inside the circle of light cast by the dresser lamp.
“Well, hello,” he said, faintly smiling. “You have had quite a time this winter, I hear.”
I stirred and gazed up at him from my pillow and said nothing.
“Yes,” he murmured. “I understand.” He looked older, thinner. He put a finger on the knot of his tie and smiled. “How do you feel, David? I heard of your injury. I am deeply sorry. But Dr. Weidman tells me you are fine, that there was no harm done to your voice. Once I hurt my knee and I felt the pain there long after the injury was gone. I understand how you feel.”
I lay very still and saw his craggy face and brown hair and thick eyebrows and gentle smile. His face, always tanned in the past, was now very pale. Had he seen the fires? Had he lost his tan in the glow of German torches? He seemed quieter now than in the past, less self-assured. He touched a finger to his tie again and coughed quietly.
“My nephew tells me he’s been watching over you. That’s fine. Look at that stack of newspapers. Are they yours? You’ve read them all? How old are you now, almost ten? Well.” He smiled. “Well. I don’t know whether to talk to you as if you were ten or twenty. But the difficulty with the voice will be gone soon, won’t it? Otherwise how will I teach you for your bar mitzvah? How will you learn grammar?” He paused, then coughed again lightly. “A cold. A German cold. I cannot get rid of it. We all had a difficult time this winter, David. But I am certain the difficulty with your voice will be over very soon. Good night, David. Be well. Have a good Pesach.”
He went quietly from the room.
But I did not want to use my voice. There was tranquillity in silence. To speak would be to call back to life the troublesome web of scratchy relationships I avoided by moving quietly through the world. Also, I would cough and bleed if I talked, even though the choking feeling seemed almost entirely gone from my throat now. I saw myself coughing and bleeding. I saw the blood spraying the snow. I shuddered and was silent.
I remained silent even through Passover. Seated around the open extension table in our living room during the first Seder were my parents, my aunt and uncle, Saul, my brother, and I. When my father asked me to recite the Four Questions, I shrank back in my chair.
“What is the matter with you, David?” he said loudly, his squarish features wearing some of his old anger.
The rushing of the blood in my ears drowned out his next words. Saul turned pale.
“Max, Max,” I heard my uncle say, shaking his head.
“It certainly won’t help to lose your temper at the child,” said my aunt.
“David,” my father said. “Look at me. It has been a black year for all of us. But now it is coming to an end. Do not make it blacker.”
“For heaven’s sake, Max,” said my uncle.
“Tact is not one of your assets, Max,” my aunt said.
My mother seemed panicky with fear. Her eyes darted nervously from face to face. I wanted to tell her not to be afraid, it was comforting to be silent. I said nothing.
Alex asked the Four Questions, his voice echoing through the apartment. He had been reciting them anyway for the past two years; my father had wanted me to recite them tonight to get me to use my voice.
“How is this night different from all the other nights?” Alex chanted. “All the other nights we eat leaven and unleavened bread; tonight only unleavened bread. All the other nights …” It’s different, I thought. It’s different. Tonight my Golem is resting. But in two nights, after the first days of Pesach are over, we will work again—though it was tiring now, the work, and bore increasingly the mark of futility. I sat in silence at the table before the wine and the matzot and listened to the chanted words that recounted the deliverance from Egypt. Two nights later, in the darkness of my room, I leaped into the menacing land and roamed troubled streets in search of those who needed aid.
All through that month and into May I would not speak. Dr. Weidman examined me and pronounced me fit; skinny but fit. The shock would wear off, I heard him tell my mother. “Patience, Ruth. Patience. The boy was terrified.” My father called him a messenger of the Angel of Death but accepted his reassurance, for he had emerged from his own darkness and was nightly attending a school somewhere in the city. He was learning how to repair clocks and watches. During the day he was away a great deal of the time at meetings somewhere downtown.
Mr. Bader came to the house one Sunday afternoon, carrying a heavy package which he placed on my desk. “Your job for the next few years,” he said, smiling. Then he winked and said, “If you can find where you misplaced your voice.” He went out and closeted himself with my father for more than an hour.
The package was a set of Mikraot Gedolot, the large multi-volumed work containing the major rabbinic commentaries to the Bible. It was bound in brown buckram, the letters stamped in gold, a floral pattern on the front of each binding along with a picture of a Torah scroll and the Ten Commandments, all in gold. There were ten volumes, each of them eight inches by eleven inches in size. I made room for them on a shelf in my bookcase. Alex looked at them enviously. I started to tell him to make sure to keep away from them, but I remained silent.
The weather turned warm. Somewhere green buds were appearing on trees but I did not see them. I thought of the trees on my old street and was quiet. From the window of my classroom I saw Alex playing happily. Eddie Kulanski had shed his heavy winter jacket for a pale blue loose-fitting sweater. He remained along the periphery of my narrow channel of existence like a dormant predator. I thought I saw his cousin on our street one day but I could not be certain.
The Golem continued his nightly forays into the dark fires within my rectangle. There seemed no end to the fires. I thought they would be with me all the rest of my life, until the night in May when they burned the books.
I watched them from my bed. They came along the wide tree-lined boulevard, students, thousands of them, their torches reddening the sky. In a square opposite a university lay a vast heap of treasure, jewels piled on jewels, gold and silver, diamonds, all glittering in the light of the torches. Then flames were put to the treasure, and faces made red and pink and orange by the sudden leaping of the fire laughed as the jewels curled and the bindings smoked and cracked and the pages went brown and the teeth of flame tore into the soul of the world. Books were being burned! Books! Golem! Stop them! He was suddenly by my side, in his gray shirt and baggy trousers, looking strangely small and weary, his face, my face, worn with the nights of sleepless forays against the hordes of the Angel of Death. Now! Now! A leap, and we were inside the tumultuous square, the deafening noise, the laughter, near the curling edge of the smoke and flames that rose to the black and silent sky. From everywhere books were being thrown to the flames. The crowd roared. A rage filled my being and I knew I could kill out of my hate. But the books had to be saved. Scatter them! Stamp out the flames! The fire was as tall as a hill and I plunged into it. Something had to be saved. Something. I reached into the flames and clutched a single volume and rushed with it into the wild crowd, shouldering my way out into the sudden dark silence of a night boulevard. There, beneath a street lamp, I gazed at the singed pages of the book I had saved. It was badly burned. I could not make out the title or the author. What did it matter? I placed it gently beneath a flowering linden tree and, thick-limbed with fatigue, moved from the rectangle of burning books into the chill quiet of my bed.
I remember th
inking then that they might soon come for my own books and I did not know what to do. Golem, I whispered. Golem.
The room was silent.
Golem. Where are you?
The silence echoed faintly.
I peered into the darkness and saw, in a deeply shadowed corner, a small mound of earth, a gray shirt, and a pair of dark trousers. As I looked, they dissolved slowly and were gone.
I lay in my bed and listened to the silence. Alex snored softly. The apartment was still. The window shade was dark. I got out of bed, pulled up the shade, and gazed out at the alleyway. Cats lounged among the garbage cans near the metal doors of the basement. The sky was dark and tranquil. I stopped at my bookcase for a moment, then went back to my bed. I closed my eyes and whispered into the suddenly swarming darkness, “Let not my thoughts trouble me, nor evil dreams, nor evil fancies, but let my rest be perfect before Thee.” I whispered, louder, feeling the words move out across my throat, “Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flieth by day; of the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor of the destruction that wasteth at noonday.” Then I spoke in a normal voice into the night of my room and said, “In the name of the Lord, the God of Israel, may Michael be at my right hand; Gabriel at my left; before me, Uriel; behind me, Raphael; and above my head the divine presence of God.” I repeated that passage of the prayer two more times.
The room grew very silent. I hugged to myself the large firm brown rectangle of the volume of Genesis I had taken to my bed. The window shade scraped softly upon the sill. It remained blank. I closed my eyes and slept and was not awakened by the morning noise of the radiator.
I said to my mother when I entered the kitchen, “What did Papa’s father do for Mr. Bader’s father?” My voice sounded hoarse. It resonated strangely inside my ears and tickled the back of my throat.
She stared at me and almost dropped the dish of cereal in her hands. “Well,” she said, and her voice shook. “No good morning? Nothing? Just a question?”
“Good morning, Mama.”
“Good morning, darling. Let me get used to hearing you again for a minute. Yes. Good morning. You and your father are full of surprises this month. You will make a nervous wreck of me with your surprises. Well. Mr. Bader. Your father’s father helped Mr. Bader’s father and his family escape from Poland into Germany from the police of the Tsar.”
I looked at her.
“It was your grandfather’s job in those days,” she said. “He did it well.”
My father came into the kitchen, wearing his pajamas and robe. “Good morning,” he said, giving me an intent look. “You found your voice. For a change, Weidman was right.”
“Max,” said my mother.
“I am glad,” he said, still looking at me.
“Sit down and have your cereal,” my mother said.
“How do you feel, David?” asked my father, taking his seat at the table.
“I’m all right, Papa. How does my father feel?”
He gazed at me and smiled faintly. “Your father has good days and bad days. Today will be a good day. I need a glass of coffee, Ruth.”
“They burned books yesterday, Papa,” I said.
He looked at me.
“When will I start studying with Mr. Bader?”
“Soon,” he said, narrowing his dark eyes.
“Thousands of books,” I said. “Can I start very soon, Papa?”
“I will talk to Mr. Bader,” he said in a quiet voice.
“It wasn’t possible to stop them,” I said. “But there are other ways.”
I felt them looking at me as I bent over my breakfast and ate with more appetite than I had had in months.
My English teacher had given me a small blue book called The Golem. One afternoon I returned it to her.
“Did you like it?” she asked pleasantly.
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Well,” she said, surprised. “It’s nice to be hearing you again, David.”
“But it’s only a story, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“There are books that are more than stories,” I said. “I like those books better. Storybooks are like air. You don’t have anything left when you finish a storybook.”
“Oh?” she said, smiling at me in a strange way.
“I don’t care for storybooks too much. My little brother reads them all the time. He knows how to read already and he’s not even in school yet. But I don’t feel I have anything added to my mind when I read a storybook. I don’t even like newspapers too much anymore.”
“Indeed?” she said. Her rouged features seemed to have paled a little. “What books do you like, David?”
“Books that are true and never change and that you can never stop learning from.”
“What books are those, David?” she asked in a very quiet voice.
“They’re like something that’s in a photograph,” I said, suddenly unable to keep back the rush of words. “It’s always there and you can look at it and learn from it and it never changes.” And it’s a comfort, I thought. And I’m tired and I want something firm and fixed, something that won’t change every day like the newspapers, something that will make everyone happy that I’m studying it. “I have it in brown rectangles,” I said, “but it comes in lots of shapes and colors. It’s the most important set of books in the whole world and I’m going to know all of it.”
“Well,” she said, staring at me. “You are certainly making up for all your weeks of silence, young man.”
I felt her still staring at me as I walked through the room and out the door.
In the school yard, Yaakov Bader clapped me on the back when I challenged him to a game of baseball cards, and then promptly cleaned me out. I went over to Saul. He was standing near the chain-link fence with some members of his class. They were discussing a passage of Talmud they had learned that morning.
“Hello,” I said to Saul. “I’m all right.”
His mouth opened slightly. We moved away from the group and stood leaning against the chain-link fence.
“How do you feel, Davey?” he asked soberly.
“I’m tired. But I’m okay.”
“Who isn’t tired? The whole world is tired. I’m glad you got your voice back, Davey. What happened? Just like that it came back? You had everyone really scared. You know what the midrash says about the voice?” He quoted the midrash about the three sounds or voices that make people happy: the voice of the Torah, the voice of rain, and the voice of coins. Then he quoted the midrash about how the voice of Jews studying Torah prevents their enemies from harming them. He was into a third midrash when the whistle blew and the recess was over.
Alex climbed into my bed that night. “I was so scared,” he murmured. “You used to have such dreams, Davey.” He fell asleep and lay with his arm across my chest, snoring quietly.
That Shabbat we went over to my Cousin Saul’s new apartment on Clay Avenue. My uncle gave me a gentle embrace. My aunt kissed me lightly on the cheek and threw my mother a knowing glance. My mother looked nervously away.
I waited to hear from Mr. Bader.
He returned to Europe before I could see him again. An emergency, my mother said and would say no more. I spent the summer studying the first of my brown rectangles, verse by verse, with the help of my father, my cousin, and my uncle. I was rarely on the street; I did not like the street. Eddie Kulanski was on it often and sometimes his cousin. My brother roamed the street as if it were an extension of our apartment, always dragging in his wake a cluster of magnetized followers.
In September Saul entered a yeshiva high school in upper Manhattan and Alex entered first grade. In November my father opened a small watch repair service in the window of the shoe repair store owned by the Italian on our block. Mr. Bader returned from Europe. He came to the apartment one evening in December, looking dapper and tired and quite thin. A frown of concern had settled into his dark eyes. He remained in the States throughout th
e winter and on occasion he visited with us in our apartment; but it was not until the early spring that he had the time to teach me Torah with any degree of regularity. I began traveling to him on Sunday afternoons and Wednesday evenings, taking with me a Hebrew grammar, a notebook, and the first volume of my Mikraot Gedolot, the Book of Genesis.
FIVE
Sky and earth were gray with lingering winter cold. Six people sat in the trolley car, each alone at a window. I looked out my window at the almost deserted Sunday afternoon streets. The car stopped at a drab intersection. On the sidewalk two dogs fought one another over a scrap of bone.
I opened my Mikraot Gedolot and reread the Rashi commentary on the first word of the Hebrew Bible, bereshit, “in the beginning.” Then I reread the Ramban, another commentary. “Listen to how they talk to one another, David,” Mr. Bader had said to me the week before in his study. “Look at how the different parts of the page are arranged and you’ll understand how Jews have been talking to each other for two thousand years about the Bible. First, there is the text itself in this column of large type; that’s the heart of the page. Right next to it are these little markings, Masoretic notes which tell us how words should be spelled and call to our attention unusual words and vowels. They keep guard over the text and make sure it is correctly transmitted. I’ll teach you more about these markings later. Would you like another cup of tea and lemon, David?”
I drank another cup of tea and lemon and listened to him tell me about the second-century Aramaic translation of Onkelos, a Palestinian, whose words appear alongside the Masoretic notes; and the eleventh-century commentary of Rashi, a Frenchman, who always refers to Onkelos, cites him, differs or agrees with him, talks to him, listens to him, and very often uses the midrash to explain the text; and the twelfth-century commentary of Abraham ibn Ezra, a wandering Spanish-Italian Jew, who parallels Rashi on the printed page in most editions of the Mikraot Gedolot and often differs with Rashi by giving his personal views of the literal meaning of the text in addition to taking account of those who came before him; and the Ramban, who lived in Christian Spain in the twelfth century and who refers often to Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra, talks with them, argues with them, and adds his own original ideas and often the ideas of the mystics; and Sforno, an Italian Jew living during the time of the Italian Renaissance who tries to understand the Torah as a religious man of the Renaissance. There were other commentaries too on the page, and some that were printed separately in the back or as individual works; but Onkelos, Rashi, Abraham ibn Ezra, the Ramban, Sforno, and one or two others were the greatest of them all. They represented different ways of understanding the text. “You’ll learn to listen to their voices, David. You’ll listen to the way they talk to each other on the page. You’ll hear them agreeing and disagreeing with each other. Sometimes the Ramban gets very nasty when he disagrees with Ibn Ezra. At times he disagrees strongly with Rashi. And I’ll show you some commentaries that aren’t in the Mikraot Gedolot and you’ll listen to their voices too. You can pick and choose whichever commentary you like best on a verse. All of them, together with the text, make up the Torah, Prophets, and Writings—our Bible. And don’t confuse the Ramban with the Rambam, David. The Ramban is Nachmanides and the Rambam is Maimonides. They were two different people. Now let me show you what Rashi said on the first word of the Torah, and then we’ll see what bothered the Ramban when he saw Rashi’s words and what the Ramban added. Don’t you want your tea, David?”