by Chaim Potok
The footnote to this paragraph read as follows:
Bible scholars speak always of the six books of the Torah (Hexateuch), because they maintain that the Book of Joshua was in ancient times joined to the Five Books of the Torah.
I read the paragraph again. Then I looked up from the book to the window. A queer tingling sensation had spread across the back of my neck. The book was a thin dark-covered volume of stiff yellowing pages. An odor of decay rose from it, and I had a sudden sharp image of the interior of Mrs. Horowitz’s apartment with its fetid air and the dark form of her dog moving about silently in the shadows. The book lay on my desk, waiting, and I felt its presence with a sense of apprehension and sharp excitement. It had been a long time since I had felt this way about a book. Sources, I thought. Sources. There was another German book somewhere in those cartons with the word “sources” in its title. Something about spells and sources. I turned away from the window and resumed reading.
I finished a little more than half the book by the early hours of the morning. My head ached and my eyes hurt. I saw the gray wash of dawn on my window shade and smelled the warm odor of baking bread—until I realized the odor was an illusion carried into my new room from all the dark years of the past. I lay in bed and tried to sleep. After a while I rose and went to the window and pushed aside the shade. The street was in shadows from the sun in the east behind me, but to the left, where the line of buildings fell away to the outdoor stone stairway that connected the cliff of Clay Avenue to the canyon of Webster Avenue, the sun shone through like a river of brilliant gold. The street wore a Sunday morning stillness. After a while I dressed and prayed and had breakfast and went to school.
Yaakov Bader said to me in the yeshiva study hall that morning, “You look terrible, Davey. What happened? Big night?”
“Very big. Did you ever hear of Graf and Wellhausen?”
“No. Are they a new comedy team?” He was in high spirits. He had met this girl last night, he said. Brooklyn College. Orthodox. Father an attorney. Who were Graf and Wellhausen?
I told him they were a new comedy team. “A German comedy team. They make bad jokes about the Bible.”
But he seemed in a dazed ecstasy over his Brooklyn College girl and had not heard me.
I looked around the study hall and saw Saul standing over his table, staring down at his folio of Talmud. The table was piled high with books. The hall was crowded and noisy, and he was about ten tables away from me. He had already been deep in study when I had arrived earlier and I had not wanted to disturb him.
During the morning I left the study hall and went up to the library on the second floor. I checked the catalog. There was nothing on Graf or Wellhausen. I checked it again. There was no category called Bible Studies or Bible Scholarship or Bible Criticism. I looked for David Hoffmann and discovered a number of books under his name in the area of Talmudic and midrashic studies. A brief biographic entry on one of the cards told me that he had been rector of an Orthodox rabbinical seminary in Berlin and toward the close of his life was regarded by Orthodox German Jewry as their supreme authority on matters of Jewish law. He died in 1921. The book I had read last night was not listed in the catalog.
I went over to the chief librarian and asked him if there were any books in the library on or by Wellhausen.
He sat behind a cluttered desk near the stairway that led to the third-floor stacks. He was a short thin-faced balding man who wore his rimless glasses down on the tip of his nose and knew every book in that library. He looked up at me from behind his desk. His brown watery eyes seemed to float above the rims of his lenses.
“Who?” he said.
“Julius Wellhausen.”
“Who asked you to read Wellhausen?” He had a gentle voice. I wondered at the hardness that now crept into it.
“There’s nothing by Wellhausen in the library?”
“David Lurie,” he said. “If it is not in the catalog it is not in the library.”
“Or Graf? Nothing on or by Graf?”
“For whom are you reading these people?”
“For no one. For myself.”
“They were anti-Semitic German goyim who tried to destroy the Bible. Why should we have their books? Do we have Mein Kampf?”
I told him I did not want to cause any trouble, I had merely been curious about them. He told me I was better off being curious about more important matters. I thanked him and went back downstairs to the study hall to finish preparing for my Talmud class.
On Sunday our Talmud classes ended at one o’clock. There were no English studies. I met Saul on the sidewalk outside the school. He was talking with Alex. We walked along toward our bus stop. The air was bright and warm. People eyed us in the street as we passed them in our skullcaps.
Saul looked pale and distraught. He walked with his shoulders stooped, his eyes cast down, his knees bent slightly forward. He was developing the sort of curving posture I saw on many of the Talmud teachers in the school. Alex walked tall and straight and fast, impatient to get home.
I asked Saul if he was all right. He said Rav Sharfman had called on him to read the Gemara in class that morning and had destroyed him. “I didn’t know how much I didn’t know,” he said miserably. “It was terrible. He called me stupid.”
I told him to console himself, the Ramban had called Ibn Ezra worse names than that. Then I asked him if he had ever heard of Graf or Wellhausen.
He had never heard of Graf and only vaguely of Wellhausen. Who were they?
“German goyim who tear pieces from the Torah.”
“Now I remember,” he said. “They’re anti-Semites.”
“Is that what you were reading last night, Davey?” Alex asked.
We had come to our corner and were waiting for the bus. It was a narrow side street and it led to the wide cobblestone avenue and the bridge that spanned the river.
“You’re reading those goyim?” Saul asked me.
I told him what I had been reading.
“All night you were reading,” Alex said.
We saw our bus up the block, moving slowly along the narrow street.
“Hoffmann attacks them for what they do,” I said. “I never even knew about any of this. It’s terrible what they do, Saul. They destroy the Torah.”
“Who takes them seriously, Davey? They’re a bunch of anti-Semitic goyim. German goyim yet.”
The bus pulled up to the curb and we climbed inside, paid our fares, and went up the aisle looking for seats. The bus was fairly crowded. People kept looking at our skullcaps. We sat down together on the last seat beneath the rear window.
“I don’t understand how I never knew about this before. The goyim are destroying the Torah and no one in the yeshiva says anything about it.”
“Who cares what the anti-Semites say about the Torah?” Saul said. “They should all lie in the earth.”
We were talking Yiddish. In front of us a middle-aged heavy-faced man with light brown hair and a large veined nose turned around, looked at us for a moment, and turned back. The bus moved quickly across the bridge. The river ran smooth and slate gray far beneath us. Overhead the vast expanse of sky was deep and blue and cloudless.
“I think we should care, Saul. I think it’s wrong to ignore what they say.”
“Ah, it’s all nonsense,” he said. “Don’t get yourself involved in it, Davey.”
“It’s not nonsense, Saul. Rabbi Akiva says in the Gemara that there isn’t a single extra letter in the Torah, and these goyim change words and move around whole sections of the Torah.”
The bus stopped. The man in front of us got up and moved to a seat five rows away. The bus started up again.
“They say the Torah wasn’t given by God to Moses. They say whole parts of the Torah were written after the Prophets.”
“Parts of the Five Books of the Torah were written after the Prophets?” Alex asked incredulously.
“That’s what Hoffmann says they say.”
“They’r
e crazy,” Saul said. “They’re anti-Semites and you should stay far away from them.”
“I’m not reading them. I’m reading Hoffmann.”
The bus had come off the bridge into the Bronx and was on the wide brick-paved avenue that led to 170th Street.
“I don’t know where you find the time to read everything,” Saul said, staring moodily out the window. “I only have Gemara to worry about and I haven’t got enough time to study it right.”
“My brother the brain,” Alex said. “Davey eats books, Saul.”
“One more day like today with Gemara and I’ll also start getting sick all the time. What a terrible day. Stupid. He called me stupid.”
“The Ramban called Ibn Ezra a false prophet,” I said.
“No one ever called me stupid before.” He was staring out the window and not listening to me. “In front of seventy people he called me stupid.”
“Were you?” I asked.
He turned to me. “What?”
“Was what you said stupid?”
He looked back out the window. “Yes.”
The bus entered the shadows beneath the Jerome Avenue elevated train and emerged into an uphill street lined with stores. We rode in silence. At the stop before the tunnel that led beneath Grand Concourse, I gazed out the bus at the dark interior of my father’s store. The gold letters on the window glittered in the sunlight. A rich lustrous glow emanated from my father’s name. M. LURIE. I imagined I saw him sitting astride the stallion on the street in front of the store. What a laughable picture! But I did not laugh. I turned my eyes away from the store and glanced at my cousin and brother. Saul sat slouched down in his seat, looking forlorn. Alex was reading another of his novels. I felt sleepy but strangely exhilarated. I closed my eyes and began to review inside my head some of the pages in the book I had read through the night. I spent the rest of the day reading the book and finished it a little after midnight.
That Tuesday I took a subway to a tall building in midtown Manhattan and rode up in an elevator to the office of the surgeon whose name had been given to me by Dr. Weidman. He turned out to be a tall ruddy-faced man in his fifties with smoothly combed light brown hair and large freckles on the backs of his hands. His name was Dr. Bernstein. I lay on the examining table and watched the freckles as his fingers probed my face. He spoke softly as he probed. “Does that hurt? And that? How’s your father? You will give him my best regards, won’t you? Sit up and let me have a look at it.” He was using instruments and lights. “I haven’t seen your father in a while. We grew up together in Lemberg but I came here before the war. You have frequent colds? Well, I think we can take care of that. We’ll need some pictures and we’ll schedule the surgery for the first week in July. Yes, we’ll make all the arrangements. My nurse will notify you. Do give my regards to your father. Ask him if he remembers the day I pulled the stunt with the cat. Goodbye. We’ll see you soon.”
His nurse sent me to another office on the same floor. I stood in front of a machine in a dim room and a man in a white frock told me to hold perfectly still and he went out. I heard clicks and whirring sounds. He told me to move my head to the right and to the left. There were more sounds. A few minutes later I was outside on the street, walking very quickly toward the subway. I took a train farther downtown and, in a Hebrew bookstore, purchased a copy of the Hertz Commentary. Then I took another subway to the main branch of the New York Public Library on 42d Street. I walked quickly up the tall front stone stairway and went inside and checked the catalog for books by David Hoffmann. There were many books under his name, including the one I had just completed. I took out a book on Leviticus and another on Deuteronomy, neither of which was in my school library. I noticed there was another volume to the book I had read, published in 1916, and I took that one out too. Laden with books, I came out of the library and turned up 42d Street to the subway. The street was very crowded. On the corner I stopped for a moment to watch the news flashing across the Times building. The Germans were advancing toward Tobruk and El Alamein in North Africa. Inside the concussing rush and roar of the train I began to read the Hertz Commentary. I looked up “Bible criticism” in the index and read all the passages on it in the book. I looked up the bibliography and saw a list of medieval Jewish authorities and commentators, most of whom I had studied with Mr. Bader. I saw two additional lists of modern commentators, one of forty-eight Jews, the other of twenty-six non-Jews. I had never heard of any of those commentators except David Hoffmann, some of the Jews, and a few of the non-Jews who had been mentioned in the Hoffmann book. I sat in the train, reading the Hertz Commentary. I made it back to school in time for my afternoon college periods and read the Hertz Commentary all through my classes.
During the free period I went downstairs to the library and leafed quickly through all the writings of David Hoffmann that I could find in the stacks. Somewhere in one of the books by Hoffmann that I read that day I saw underlined in faded black ink his justification for his writings against Biblical criticism. He regarded those writings as “a sacred task, a necessary way to respond decisively to these new critics who come as oppressors to do violence to the holy Torah.” I remember nothing about the rest of that day save that I spent it reading the Hertz Commentary. Late in the night I put it aside and leafed through the Hoffmann books I had taken from the library.
Alex woke, stared at the clock near his bed, stared at me, and said, “For God’s sake, Davey. Go to sleep.” He rolled over, sighed, and was immediately asleep. I sat at my desk in the circle of light cast by my lamp, and read. After a few minutes I was conscious of someone else in the room with me. I turned my head and saw my father in the doorway. He wore his pajamas and robe. His tall dark skullcap was on his uncombed hair.
“My scholar,” he murmured. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
I looked at my watch. It was after two in the morning.
“Go to sleep,” he said. “You will make yourself sick.”
“Soon,” I said.
He gazed at me for a moment in silence, then shook his head slowly. “You have no idea how much like my brother you are.” He closed his eyes. His lips went momentarily stiff and his face emptied itself of expression. Then he opened his eyes and smiled vaguely. “You have time for a glass of tea with your father? Me with my store and you with your books—we have no time even to talk to each other. A glass of tea, yes? And you will tell me what you are reading so late at night. I am not the most educated Jew in the world, but I am far from being an ignoramus. I saw the German book on your desk today. I am curious to know why my son is reading a German book. Come, join me in a glass of tea. I am sorry we are able to talk only at two o’clock in the morning. But it is better than not talking at all.”
We walked together through the silent apartment and he turned on the kitchen light and put on a kettle of water. He sighed as he sat down in his chair. “Once I was able to stay up through the night and then do the work of two men the next day. In the war there were weeks I did not sleep at all during the night. Twenty minutes, an hour. I would sleep on my feet or on my horse. Not anymore. I envy you your young strength.”
It seemed astonishing to me that my father should be envious of my strength. I had poured myself a glass of milk. I sat sipping it.
“Your mother looks all right these days, doesn’t she?” he asked softly. “I was worried about your mother. But I think she will be all right now. She is very good with the customers in the store. I have a tendency sometimes to be—impatient.”
The kettle boiled. He got up and poured himself a glass of tea. A darkness of fatigue lay across his face and clouded his eyes. I had never seen him this tired before save during the fearful months many years ago when we had moved to Washington Avenue. But those memories had begun to drift away. In the daytime, dressed, working, he radiated good health, exuberance, self-control, mastery; now in the night he seemed strangely tired, worn; the lines were deeper on his forehead and around his eyes. There was gray near his
temples; his once thick wavy brown hair was receding seriously, revealing a somewhat ungainly upward-sloping head. He blinked his eyes, then rubbed at them with the fingers of his right hand. The stubble on his face accentuated the forward thrust of his lower jaw. The scar stood out clearly. He sat sipping his glass of tea.
“The store is a lot of work,” he murmured. “It is a great success. God has been good to us. But it is endless work.”
“Can I help?” I asked.
“Yes. Do your job and study. That is how you can help. The books that you are reading, this German book, they are for school?”
“No, for myself.”
“What books are they?”
I described the Hertz Commentary and the Hoffmann book.
He sipped slowly from his glass of tea, the cube of sugar between his teeth. “Higher criticism of the Torah,” he said, speaking the words in English. His eyes narrowed and the wings of his nostrils flared slightly. Then he said, resuming his Yiddish, “Why do rabbis write about such matters?”
“To show how wrong it is.”
“And Hertz uses goyim to help him?”
“Goyim who are Bible scholars.”
“I need goyim to help me defend the Torah of Moses?”
“Goyim are attacking it.”
“Nu, so what? What haven’t goyim attacked that belongs to us? Why should a Jew waste his time on such nonsense?”
“Papa, some Jews fight with guns, other Jews fight with words.”
“This Hertz and Hoffmann are important people?” he asked, after a moment.
I told him that Rabbi Hertz was the Chief Rabbi of all the Jews of the British Empire and Rabbi Hoffmann had been in his day the greatest authority on Jewish law for the Orthodox Jews of Germany.
Beneath his robe I could see clearly the firm outline of his shoulders. “I am uncomfortable with German books in my house,” he said after a while. “It is like having here a member of an evil family. I did not mind so much when they were lying in the cartons out of sight in your closet. But now I see the German books on your desk and it disturbs me, even though you tell me they were written by a rabbi. I have known many rabbis who have been wrong. And I cannot begin to tell you how much I hate the Germans and everything that is German. That land is inhabited by the hosts of the Angel of Death. Whatever they touch they poison. But if my David thinks it is important for him to read German books, all right. I will ask you not to read them in my presence. Tell me something. You are considering becoming a Bible scholar?”