by Chaim Potok
“What?” he said, vaguely startled.
“I can see him and hear him. He sounds angry. He doesn’t like Ibn Ezra.”
“David,” he murmured. And again, “David.”
“I can’t get a picture in my eyes of what happened, Papa. It bothers me. They all try to give good explanations, but they can’t really answer all the questions.”
Then I remembered something and I thought, It’s like God telling Noah to take two animals of each kind and then telling him to take seven of the clean kind and two of the unclean kind, and then the Torah telling us that only two of each kind came into the ark. There had been similar difficult sections. But this one about Noah and his sons upset me very much and I did not know why. “I don’t have a picture in my eyes of what really happened and who really was cursed.”
“What do you mean, a picture in your eyes?”
“I have to see it in my eyes, Papa, before I can understand it.”
He was silent a moment. A block away, an elevated train rushed by on the trestle. My window rattled. I could feel the house vibrate.
“I think,” he said quietly, “you want too much. You are only eleven years old, David.”
“Mr. Bader doesn’t have a picture either, Papa. I have a picture of Noah. But I don’t have a picture of this thing that happened to him and who was cursed.”
“David,” he said, after a long moment.
“Yes, Papa?”
“You are learning a lot from Mr. Bader.”
“Yes.”
“He is a good teacher.”
“Yes.”
“I am glad. Because he is doing my job and I do not like others to do my job unless they can do it better than I can. But I want to tell you something my brother David, may he rest in peace, once said to me. He said it is as important to learn the important questions as it is the important answers. It is especially important to learn the questions to which there may not be good answers. We have to learn to live with questions, he said. I am glad Mr. Bader is a good teacher and I am glad he tells you truthfully that he does not have answers to all your questions.”
“I like Mr. Bader. He said he won’t be going back to Europe so soon.”
“Yes, I think his job will keep him here for a while.”
“Is there still a lot of export-import business now in the Depression?”
He looked at me. “David, you are so deep in your books that you do not know what is going on right under your nose. Mr. Bader is no longer in the export-import business. He is the European director of the Jewish Overseas Aid Committee.”
I said nothing. European director. It sounded very important.
“It is a big job and he is a good man for it.”
Still I said nothing. After a moment, I hung my head.
He stood quietly outside the circle of light, gazing at me. Then his hand came out of the darkness and entered the light and I felt it gently stroke my face. “I understand,” he said quietly. “Yes, I understand. But you must understand, too. In order to help Jews I will work on committees, but to make a living I will work only for myself. That is the way I am, David. If you do not like your father as a simple watchmaker, there is nothing I can do about it.” He paused for a moment, reflecting, a hard set to his face now. Then slowly his features softened. “You have heard of Rabbi Yosi the Galilean?”
“Yes. In the Gemara.”
“What was he?”
“A shoemaker.”
“And you have heard of Rabbi Yehoshua?”
“Yes.”
“What was he?”
“A blacksmith.”
“Some are rich and some are poor. What does how much money a man makes have to do with his wisdom or the good he is able to do for others? There is a man on my committee who may go on home relief next month. He is the best man I have. No one in the entire Revisionist office has as sharp a brain as this man. It is nice to have lots of money and it is terrible to be poor and hungry. But the most terrible thing of all is to be useless. Do you understand me, my scholar?”
I nodded my head slowly, feeling a vague drumming sound in my ears. I heard myself ask, “What committee, Papa?”
He withdrew his hand from my cheek. I saw the play of shadows on his face as his head moved slightly to register his annoyance. “David, you do your job and I will do mine. Your job is to study. My job is—whatever my job is. When it comes time for you to know my job, I will tell you about it. Now I think you ought to let Noah rest a little bit and get yourself to bed. It is very late. Noah will still be here tomorrow and you can worry about him then.”
I said suddenly, without thinking the words, “Is Hitler going to kill all the Jews in Europe, Papa?” A faint trembling had taken hold of me, as if the room had begun of itself to vibrate.
I saw him looking at me outside the rim of light, his eyes suddenly narrow. “I do not know what Hitler will do,” he said very quietly.
“I see the newspapers, Papa. Isn’t anyone doing anything?”
“Yes,” he said with bitterness. “They are filling the air with words.”
“Words?” I heard myself say. “The Canaanites don’t listen to words. We have to save them, Papa. Your father and mother, Mama’s father and mother, Aunt Sarah’s father and mother. We have to get them out.”
He said nothing. He stood there, staring at me, his lower jaw set tight and jutting forward.
“Papa?”
He stirred. “Two cousins are out,” he said, still staring at me.
“What?” I said.
“They went to Eretz Yisroel. Your grandparents have decided to stay. They accepted—jobs.”
“But he’ll kill them, Papa.”
“They have jobs,” he said. “A person who has a job to do does it and worries later about whether or not he could have been killed. I think you ought to go to sleep now, David.”
“The Golem could kill him. He could sneak in and kill him.”
“What?”
“He could find him alone in his bed and kill him.”
“David—”
“I’m tired,” I said. “I really thought they were going to leave us alone for a while.” Then I said, “It would be a nice world if there were no goyim in it, Papa.” I was very sleepy and my eyes hurt.
“You think so?” my father said. “I doubt it. We would probably start killing each other. Who knows? Go to sleep, David.”
His arm came out once again from the darkness into the light and he caressed my cheek. Then he turned and went from the room.
Later I lay very still in my bed and thought, The Golem is dead and cannot do anything. The Canaanites are going to rule the world for a thousand years. The Angel of Death and the Canaanites. It is all one enemy with different faces. Canaanites, Greeks, Romans, Christians, and now the Germans. They will kill as many Jews as they can and the others will flee and hide in caves as they did in the time of the Romans. All the world will be filled with black idolatry. Why do they hate us so much? A face hovered somewhere in the darkness, dim, white, cool, distant. I reached for it but it moved away. Then it was there again and I sought it with my eyes and it moved slowly closer to me and it was the face of the statue in flowing robes outside the church where Eddie Kulanski and his parents used to pray. I looked at the white marble features, at the sweetness and loveliness of that face, at the sad, tender, wistful smile on its lips. It stood very close to me now, and I saw its beckoning arms. Its eyes and face were filled with compassion, but when I touched the stone it was cold.
Through the window of my classroom I saw Eddie Kulanski walking with a group of his friends. He had grown and his wrists stuck out from the sleeves of his jacket. His face was fuller but the gray eyes were still half-closed and his mouth remained small and thin. He carried on top of his books a copy of Social Justice. I watched him cross Washington Avenue and go up the block to the apartment house where he lived.
Day after day I watched for him and saw him come along the side street from his school, a
lways in the company of others, and cross Washington Avenue and walk to his house. Once or twice he stopped at the newsstand to look at a magazine.
One afternoon I saw him stop in front of the window of the shoe repair shop and look inside. It was a small shop and my father’s workbench was set very close to the window, making it appear as if he were on display. A small sign had been placed in the window among the heels and laces and shoeshine equipment: M. LURIE, WATCH REPAIR. Beyond his workbench were the lathes and workbench of Mr. Donello, the thin, bald-headed Italian who owned the shop. During the first weeks my father had been in that window I had cringed each time I had seen the nakedness of the panel of hooks he had placed on the wall above his workbench. But now it was laden with watches. A second panel had been put up near it and was almost entirely covered with watches. My father worked bent over his bench, oblivious to the faces that stared at him through the window. Now I watched Eddie Kulanski at the window. He leaned forward, peering inside at my father. Then he straightened and walked slowly home.
The next day he entered the store, stayed a few minutes, and went home. I found out from my father that he had left an Ingersoll pocket watch to be repaired.
He returned to the store a few days later and I saw him standing inside near the window, talking to my father. He paid for the repair work and came out of the store holding the watch in his ungloved right hand. He put the watch to his ear. Then he slipped it into a pocket and walked toward his house. He still had that light springy walk and it was not difficult to imagine him as having grown into a precise duplicate of his cousin.
I saw him and thought of him often as the winter months slipped by and rumors began to float in from the fringes of our neighborhood, from the streets beyond the elevated train and the beer factory on the hill and the public library, from the deep east Bronx of Hunt’s Point that lay between Bruckner Boulevard and the East River, about Jews molested, attacked, beaten by goyim. On occasion we would read of an event in the newspapers and talk of it in the school yard.
“He’s an old man,” Yaakov Bader told a group of us on a bitter cold day as we stood near the chain-link fence in the yard. “They were bothering these two kids and he told them to stop and one of them broke his arm. My father knows him.”
“What do you mean?” someone said. “Just like that they broke the man’s arm?”
“He says they hit him with something but he can’t remember what.”
“But just like that to break someone’s arm?”
“It’s nothing to them to use their hands.”
“On my block I once saw two of them torturing a cat.”
“They’re the messengers of the Angel of Death.”
Heads nodded sober agreement. Plumes of steam rose from their mouths into the freezing air. An elevated train rumbled by along Third Avenue.
I moved out of earshot and away from the dread in their faces.
One night someone threw a stone through our classroom window. In the morning the janitor swept the glass from the floor and hammered plywood across the open space. It was the window near which I sat. In the weeks that followed it became clear that the yeshiva was in no hurry to replace the glass. I could no longer see the street.
Saul told me one Shabbat afternoon in January that there were platoons of goyim numbering about twenty-five each walking the streets of New York looking for Jews. They would try to sell a copy of Social Justice to someone who looked Jewish and if he refused to buy it they would start taunting him and pushing him and then they would beat him and run off. We were in his room when he told me that and I gazed out his window at the brick-paved street that was Clay Avenue and at the narrow section of Claremont Park where a middle-aged woman was walking her dog along a paved path between fields of brown winter grass.
“Why don’t the police stop them?” I asked.
“The police are Irish and Catholic,” he said, squinting his eyes myopically through the window. “What do you expect?”
“Are you all right?”
“My eyes hurt. I have to get my glasses changed again.”
From the living room came the murmur of conversation. Our parents were there, together with some of their friends.
“Is your father going to Boston again for the Revisionists?” I asked.
“How do you know he’s going to Boston?”
“I thought I heard Papa and him talking about it earlier.”
“Don’t have such big ears, Davey.” He squinted his eyes again at the woman walking the dog in the park. “I just got these glasses two years ago,” he said moodily. “It’s the small print in the Gemara, the doctor says.”
Alex was in the room with us, listening. On the way back, as we waited to cross Webster Avenue, he said to me, “Everybody is so scared, Davey.”
I was quiet. We crossed the wide, brick-paved street.
“You know what our teacher said? He said if we’re stopped by goyim we should run away and not fight back. He said a Jew shouldn’t fight.”
I knew his teacher, a short thin-faced man with a high voice and weak eyes.
“Do your teachers say anything about it, Davey?”
“No.”
“What would you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I hate to feel this way, Davey. I hate it. The stinking bastard goyim.” His cheeks were red with the winter wind and his breath vaporized in the air as he talked. He was almost as tall as I, and very strong. He looked a duplicate in miniature of my father, who was walking behind us talking quietly with my mother. “I hate it,” he said again. “It’s a bad feeling to feel this way, Davey.”
I agreed with him. We walked the rest of the way home in gloomy silence.
Early that March, a week before Purim, one of Saul’s classmates was jumped by a group of youths selling copies of Social Justice near the Nedick’s orange juice stand on Times Square. The Irish policeman on duty waited awhile until he broke up the fight.
In our school yard the following day, Yaakov Bader said, “They broke his nose, and his eyes are all black and blue. My father knows the family.”
“Did he fight back?” someone of the group asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What good does it do to fight back? It only makes them angrier.”
“But you can’t not fight back.”
“I would’ve run.”
“They were all around him.”
“The bastards.”
They huddled together, talking.
I moved away from them and leaned against the chain-link fence, feeling the trembling of my heart.
The night after Purim, Joey Younger came out of the Blendheim movie theater on 169th Street near Washington Avenue and started down toward Webster Avenue. As he approached Park Avenue, four boys came out of an alleyway and blocked his path. They asked him for money. He gave them all the money he had and turned his pockets inside out to show them he had no more. They asked him if he was Jewish. He said no, he wasn’t Jewish. They asked him to prove it. He began to cry. One of them kicked him in the groin. Another struck him across the back with a chain. They fled.
That incident made the Daily News and the Daily Mirror. The school buzzed with it tensely. There was a faculty meeting and the rumor of an assembly during which we would be told how to act if we were ever stopped in the street by goyim. The assembly did not take place. My Hebrew teacher, a stout man with a short dark beard and a kindly smile, never mentioned the incident. None of the English teachers mentioned it.
Joey Younger returned to school a week later, looking very pale and nervous. I came into the school that morning, passed by the open door of his classroom, and saw him surrounded by his classmates. I had not had anything to do with that class since I had been skipped out of it after first grade. I hesitated in the doorway. Classrooms were territories in which outsiders were sometimes unwelcome. I saw Larry Grossman, the fat boy who had bullied me all through my first year of school but had stayed away from me since that tim
e, standing alone near a window and looking at the group around Joey Younger. I went into the room and edged through the group.
“Hey, Joey,” I said. “Hey.”
He looked at me and his thin, long-nosed face broke into a sudden smile.
“How do you feel, Joey?”
“I’m okay, Davey.” His face wore a greenish pallor. He was as unkempt as always. “I still hurt where they hit me. But the doctor says there were no injuries inside.”
“I’m sorry you were hurt, Joey.”
“Bastard goyim,” someone in the group said.
I moved back out of the crowd and felt a faint push and looked to my right. Larry Grossman stood beside me. “Hello, shmuck,” he said in a nasty voice. “Who asked you to come in here?”
I started to move away. He grabbed my arm. He was fat and had the strength of his weight.
“Let go of me,” I said, frightened.
“You’re a skinny shmuck, you know that?” He grinned at me. He had wet lips. No one was paying attention to us. They were all crowded around Joey Younger. “I bet your petzel isn’t even big enough for a goy to kick.”
I pulled my arm loose and walked quickly away, trembling.
During the mid-morning recess, boys crowded around Joey Younger in the school yard. I stood near the chain-link fence with Yaakov Bader, watching the commotion.
“Some way to become a hero,” Yaakov Bader said. “The poor kid.”
“I grew up with him.”
“What kind of kid was he?”
“The same kid he is now. He always kept away from goyim.”
“They could have really hurt him with that chain.”
“The kick was no pleasure,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Not there it isn’t. I got hit there in a stickball game once. It hurts.”
“What do you think is going to happen?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t think we can walk in the streets alone at night anymore.”
I stared through the chain-link fence at a passing horse and wagon.
“Don’t look so sad, Davey,” Yaakov Bader said. “It’s not the end of the world.”
“I wonder what the Golem of Prague would do.”