by Chaim Potok
“Well,” Mr. Bader said, gazing at me. “You lost your carfare. All right. Come here and meet two good friends.” He told me their names. “And this is David Lurie,” he said, indicating me with a slight move of his hand.
“The son of Max Lurie?” said one of the two men in Hebrew.
“Correct,” said Mr. Bader, also in Hebrew.
The two men glanced at each other. They were short and slight of build, with leathery faces and calloused hands. Their hair was thick and combed straight back. They bore the vague resemblance to one another that brothers sometimes have, save that one had red hair and the other’s hair was dark brown.
“How is your father?” the red-haired one asked me in heavily accented English. “I have known him for many years.”
“He’ll all right,” I said.
“You can speak to him in Hebrew,” Mr. Bader said in Hebrew.
“Try German,” Mrs. Bader said from the doorway to the living room. She had returned from her Italian friend. “He needs practice in German.”
Mr. Bader laughed softly.
“What is your father doing?” asked the one with the brown hair.
“He is working,” I said in Hebrew.
“Yes? We heard he was not well.”
“He is well now.”
“What work does he do?” asked the red-haired one.
“He is a watchmaker.”
They looked at me. Then they looked at each other.
“I think,” said Mr. Bader in Hebrew, “that we are going to let the son of Max Lurie go home.”
“Give your father regards from us,” said the man with the red hair. “Tell him we wish him success in his new work. Tell him we said it seriously.”
The other nodded.
I went into the hallway with Mrs. Bader. “I can’t let you go home this late without eating,” she said. “Do you like bananas and sour cream? Come into the kitchen and let me give you something to eat.”
I sat at the table in the spacious kitchen and watched her doing things skillfully at the counter near the sink.
“David,” she said quietly, her back to me. She hesitated. Then she turned and said softly, “You cannot continue returning home late when you come here.”
I looked down at the top of the yellow and white table and was quiet.
“You have your own family, David, and they love you. Mr. Bader and I have great affection for you, but your parents should not be made to feel uncomfortable because you are studying Bible with my husband.” She paused. Then she said, “Do we understand one another, David?”
“Yes,” I said, after a moment, and hung my head. It’s so nice here, I thought. I only wanted it a little longer.
“That’s fine,” she said brightly. “This and a nickel will help you get back home.” She brought the dish of sliced bananas and sour cream to the table. “Would you like some bread and butter?” she asked.
I nodded.
“And a glass of milk?”
I nodded again.
“This isn’t supper, David. It is merely a snack.” She stood at the counter watching me eat. “Is your father really all right?” she asked. “I haven’t seen him in such a long time.”
“He’s well.”
“And his new work is going well?”
“I don’t know. I think so. Are those two men in the living room friends of my father’s?”
“Friends? No, I don’t think I would consider them to be your father’s friends. You certainly were hungry, weren’t you?”
We stood at the door. I put on my coat and hat.
“You understand what I said to you before about continuing to go home late?” she asked gently.
“Yes.”
“Good night, David. You have your books? Did I give you the carfare? Yes. Do you have it? Good. You have everything. Good night, David. We will see you on Wednesday.”
I took the trolley car back and walked the chill dark streets of Washington Avenue to my house. Supper was over. My mother sat at the kitchen table writing letters. I told her about the two men I had met in Mr. Bader’s apartment. “They send regards, Mama.”
“I will tell your father.”
“How do they know Papa?”
“They know him. It has to do with Zionist politics.”
“They were surprised when I told them Papa is a watchmaker.”
“Yes?” she said quietly. “They were surprised? Do you know anyone who is not surprised by that?” She peered at me wearily over the tops of her recently acquired glasses. “I saved you some chicken.”
“The men were from Palestine, Mama.”
She seemed neither startled nor intrigued by that bit of information. “Your father knows many people from Palestine.”
“I liked the way they spoke Hebrew,” I said. “It’s a different kind of Hebrew.”
She sighed faintly. “I must finish this letter, David.”
Later I went through the hallway into the living room. My father was at his workbench. I stood near the doorway to my parents’ bedroom looking at him painstakingly take apart a watch. The room was dark save for the pool of light cast by the lamp near his head. His hair had begun to recede but it was still dark brown and wavy. He wore a tall dark skullcap on his head when he was home, though in the store he was bare-headed. I saw his fingers separate a piece of the watch from the movement and place it gently on the top of the desk. He was so silent; the room was silent. We never disturbed him when he worked. Looking at him now and remembering the two men I had met in Mr. Bader’s apartment, I realized that my father had a life outside our family about which I knew nothing. The meetings he went to; the subdued night conversations with old friends that took place frequently in our living room or kitchen, their voices so low I could not hear; the conferences with Mr. Bader—I knew nothing about any of this save that it had to do with Zionist politics, as my mother always put it. Once he had been in real estate and had failed. Now he was a watchmaker. I could not understand how the two were connected.
I turned away, went past the canary, and found my brother seated at my desk doing his homework.
“You weren’t home,” he said immediately.
“It’s okay, Alex.”
“You need it now?”
“No.”
“There are some words here I don’t understand, Davey.”
“What words?”
He showed them to me. I looked at the book. It was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. A friend’s older brother had loaned it to him, he said. But he couldn’t understand whole parts of it.
“God in heaven, Alex. You’re too young for that book.”
“I am not!” He stiffened with anger. “I need a little help with it, Davey.”
So I sat with him for a while and read and explained to him parts of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He sat on my chair at my desk, reading aloud and becoming increasingly upset as he went along. The book was clearly too difficult for him.
He slammed the book shut. “I hate it!” he shouted.
“Go to sleep,” I said. “In two years you’ll love it.”
“I hate it!” he shouted again.
“Really? Do you know how many books you hate? All the great books in the world that you can’t read yet, all those books you hate. My bright little brother. Don’t be in such a hurry, Alex.”
That sobered him somewhat. He stared petulantly at Tom Sawyer, gave it up with painful reluctance, and picked up another book. He sat at my desk in my chair, reading. I sat on my bed and reviewed the section of Mikraot Gedolot I had learned earlier that day, then began to prepare in advance for Wednesday night.
Later I lay in bed in the darkness of the night and listened to my brother’s faint snoring. My parents were talking softly in the kitchen. I saw inside my eyes all that I had learned that day; then I went over all the pages my teachers would be teaching in school the next day, for I had read far into all our textbooks. I began to drift languidly into sleep as timber drifts on the surface of a slow-m
oving river. I felt myself spinning with exquisite slowness in a lazy eddy of cool water when from somewhere deep within the darkness of the river a thought darted upward like a strange creature and, almost asleep, I suddenly found myself wondering if a machine gun had as many parts as a watch and was as difficult to take apart and put together. I came sharply awake and could not understand why I had thought that. The room swarmed faintly and I thought I could hear a vague stirring from the dark shadows in the corner near my bed. I opened my eyes and saw only the dim outline of the window shade. The shade was still. The room was silent. After a while I slept.
Then I was ill for almost a week and when I was able to go back outside the weather had turned warm and there were young leaves on the trees that lined the streets of Mr. Bader’s neighborhood. There were leaves too on the trees beyond the stone wall of the zoo, but I did not go into the zoo that spring for I did not have time for lions and tigers.
In late May the weather turned hot. Windows were opened all up and down my street. Women sat near their windows staring into the street and on Sundays men sat in their undershirts drinking beer and listening to the radio.
I would leave the apartment a little before four o’clock in the afternoon and walk quickly by the open windows, hearing vaguely the radio voices that moved out into the street like waves. I walked in and out of the voices and took my trolley and rode to Mr. Bader’s neighborhood where, walking through the hot streets, I would often hear those same voices coming through the open windows of new elegant apartments in which men sat not in undershirts drinking beer but in summer shirts sipping amber liquids from tall glasses containing chips of ice.
All though May and into June I walked quickly alongside open windows on Sunday afternoons. Soon it began to seem as if all the radio voices were one voice; and then one day I walked slowly and it was indeed one voice, the deep organlike voice of a man. I stopped at a window to hear what he was saying and a man in an undershirt gave me an angry look and I walked on. I walked slowly now, listening; then I took the trolley and walked slowly again, still listening. The man was talking about President Roosevelt and the New Deal and liberals and Communists. When Mr. Bader let me into his apartment I asked him who Father Coughlin was. He seemed astonished and murmured, “I know you are a bookworm, David. But such a bookworm?” And he told me about Father Coughlin.
“Why do they let him broadcast?” I asked.
“America is a free country, David, and he has a very large following.”
“Does he hate Jews?”
“He probably does, but he is not yet being too crude about it.”
“They shouldn’t let him broadcast,” I heard myself say in a voice I had not heard in a long time. “But what do the goyim care?”
He gave me a strange look. “They care, David. He is attacked quite frequently by gentiles. Would you like a glass of iced tea? Oh, I forgot, you have been taught that Eastern European prejudice against iced drinks. How about a glass of milk? Then we’ll go and do our work.”
“Why can’t they leave us alone? Why do they all hate us?”
“They do not all hate us,” he said quietly.
“Most of them hate us or don’t care about us.”
“Most people don’t care about anyone except themselves and the ones very close to them.”
“I hate them. I despise them.”
“Do you?” he said very gently. “Well, you are certainly your father’s son on that point.”
“They hate us and kill us.”
“Yes. But there are many good souls among them. They help keep the world alive.”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I said abruptly. “I want to study. Please.”
“Of course,” he said. “We should not waste our study time talking about Father Coughlin.”
We did not talk again about Father Coughlin. But I continued to move in and out of the sound of his voice as I walked the two and a half blocks of Washington Avenue from my house to the trolley and then two more blocks from where the trolley let me off to the house in which Mr. Bader lived. After a while I started walking along the curb of the sidewalk but it did no good, I could still hear his voice. The radios were turned to it and sending it out to the street. All through the coming months when the leaves became full and the streets turned dry and dusty with summer heat I kept walking through the sound of that voice on my way to Mr. Bader to study Bible.
One fall afternoon I saw two boys coming toward me on the street carrying copies of Coughlin’s Social Justice magazine and felt a sudden shiver of dread. I hesitated, then continued walking. They passed me by without a glance, two tall boys with light hair and blank faces. I took the trolley to Mr. Bader’s apartment and found it difficult to concentrate on the words in front of me.
That was the evening we began to study the section on Noah and the Flood. A week later we were deep in the attack by the Ramban on the words of Abraham ibn Ezra to chapter nine verse eighteen in Genesis. “Rabbi Abraham left his path of simple explanations of the text and began to prophesy lies,” wrote the Ramban. We spent a long time trying to understand clearly their differing explanations of the Biblical text, “And Ham was the father of Canaan,” and their understanding of verses twenty-four and twenty-five, “And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him. And he said: Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.”
Mr. Bader explained the horrifying deed done to Noah. “I think you are old enough to understand it,” he said. “And if I am going to teach you Bible I am going to teach it to you the way it is written. The Torah is an account of man in his beauty as well as, sometimes, in his ugliness. Now we’re at one of the ugly parts.” And he read the commentaries of Rashi and Ibn Ezra that talked about Noah’s having been emasculated by someone to prevent him from having a fourth son. Between verses twenty-one and twenty-two is where the deed is hinted at, he said; and it seems to have been done by Canaan, the youngest son of Ham; otherwise why would verse twenty-two state, “And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father”? Why mention Canaan here at all in connection with Ham unless Canaan was implicated in that terrible act against Noah? But if the deed was done by Canaan, Noah’s grandson, why are we told in verse twenty-four that Noah awoke and saw what his youngest son had done to him? And if it was his youngest son who had committed the deed, why in verse twenty-five is Canaan, Ham’s youngest son and Noah’s grandson, the one who is cursed? Finally, Mr. Bader said in his quiet voice, according to the list of sons in chapter six, verse ten, Japheth and not Ham was Noah’s youngest son. But in chapter nine, verse twenty-three, Shem and Japheth behave very respectably toward their father and there is no indication at all that Japheth was implicated in the deed.
Those were the problems the commentators faced as they attempted to explain the Biblical text. When I had prepared the material in advance I had understood in a general way the words of the Ramban and Ibn Ezra and very clearly the words of Rashi. I listened to Mr. Bader’s careful explanation of the Ramban and to his review of Ibn Ezra. Then he paused and looked at me. Which commentator did I like best? he asked.
I hesitated. Then I shrugged. I didn’t know, I said. I wanted to think about it.
“It is a very complicated section,” he said. “They are very honest about its difficulties and they each give good explanations.”
I said nothing.
“You are not satisfied.”
I shrugged again. I was very confused.
“The David Lurie answer.” He smiled, imitating my shrug. “I thought we had outgrown that. Shall we read some more or shall we stop here?”
We decided to stop and I went home in the chill autumn night thinking about the passage and was back in time for supper.
“Hello,” my father said, looking up from the kitchen table. “My scholar is on time today. You look just like my brother David, may he rest in peace, when you wear your sad face. What is the matter?”
I
told him I was upset by something in the Torah that I could not understand.
“What?”
“The section about what happens to Noah after the Flood.”
He glanced quickly at my brother, who sat at the table reading a book. “Rashi is very clear on what happened.”
I shrugged. He sat still, looking at me.
“Please wash up, darling,” my mother said, with weariness in her voice. “I am ready to serve supper.”
He came into my room late that night and stood by my desk watching me read and I did not hear him. Alex was asleep in the shadows along his side of the room. The curved gooseneck lamp cast a soft yellow light on the books on my desk. Then I heard a cough and I looked up and saw my father’s face in the dimness beyond the circle of light.
“How you study,” he murmured. “I have been standing here almost ten minutes.”
“I’m sorry, Papa.”
“No, no, you did nothing wrong. It is good to be able to concentrate the way you do. I was never able to do that when I went to school. I could not sit quietly for too long. You are still bothered by the section in Noah?”
“I don’t understand it, and I don’t understand how Rashi and Ibn Ezra and the Ramban or any of the others explain it.”
“Everything up until now you understood clearly?”
“Not everything, Papa. But this bothers me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It bothers me. The Ramban is so angry at Ibn Ezra.”
“Angry?” His face appeared to float in the shadows beyond the light. The scar on his cheek, reflecting some of the light, seemed a dim white line in the shades of darkness that were the planes and hollows of his cheeks and lips and prominent jaw. “How do you know he is angry?”
I read aloud the words of the Ramban.
“Why do you say he is angry? He disagrees with him, that’s all.”
“He calls him a liar, Papa.”
“Do not take it so seriously, David. It is a way they have of talking. Ibn Ezra says it was Canaan and the Ramban agrees with Rashi that it was Ham. Why are you so upset?”
“But I hear him talking, Papa. And he sounds angry.”