by Chaim Potok
One day in March Rav Sharfman called on a student who was inadequately prepared. The student, a nervous high-voiced Brooklyn boy, started reading, ran words together incorrectly, stopped, read the passage again, this time correctly, and began to explain it. Rav Sharfman let him talk. The student’s face became flushed; his voice grew higher. He mired himself in a swamp of contradictory explanations. Finally he stopped and sat in pale trembling silence, staring down miserably at his volume of Talmud.
“You’re not prepared,” Rav Sharfman said in English with contempt.
The student began a lame excuse. A wave of the hand stopped him.
“Prepare or don’t come to my class. You warm up before class, not during class. Understand?”
The student nodded, shrinking with shame.
“No excuses,” Rav Sharfman went on. “No excuses in this class. Now, Besser, continue reading.”
A few minutes later we were tangled in a passage of Talmud from another tractate that bore vague allusions to our own. Someone in class mentioned a similar passage in a third tractate. Then we were comparing the commentaries on the three passages, all of whom tried with varying degrees of success to reconcile the contradictions between the passages. I raised my hand because I had just remembered a medieval commentary on a somewhat similar passage of Talmud in another tractate I had studied many years ago.
Rav Sharfman was bent over the pile of open volumes on his desk.
“Rebbe,” I said.
He looked up and fixed upon my face his large black eyes and gloomy countenance.
I gave him the explanation of the medieval commentary.
“That’s nonsense!” he said. “Absolute nonsense!”
There was a stir in the class behind me.
“But it’s the Meiri. I remember—”
“Lurie, if the Meiri was in my class and said that, I would throw him out.”
He looked back down at the books on his desk. I saw eyes go wide all around the room. The Meiri is one of the greatest of the early medieval Talmud commentators. Rav Sharfman stood tensely behind the desk, pursing his lips, tugging occasionally at his Vandyke. He turned pages impatiently, moving from book to book. We sat in silence and waited.
Finally he looked up and said in Yiddish, “We will do it this way. Listen, all of you.”
He spent forty minutes explaining the various passages in a way that eliminated the contradictions with ease.
We talked about that explanation for days, in the corridors, in the cafeteria, in the study hall. We went over it again and again. We were awed by it, all of us who were his students in that classroom.
That was how those weeks went by, those last weeks of the war against Germany. One evening Rav Sharfman gave a talk in the study hall to commemorate the anniversary of his father’s death. He spoke that evening of the struggle to be a man of Torah. His voice was soft, subdued. He spoke of hardships and deprivations, of the joy of discovery, of loneliness. I heard he was to give a lecture at a Jewish community center in mid-town Manhattan and I took a subway and sat in a crowded hall and listened to him speak of Kierkegaard and Rudolf Otto and the anguished search for faith. Into this talk he wove words of Torah, legal statements, passages of midrash. “My God, he’s great,” I heard someone say afterward. “I couldn’t follow him after the fourth sentence,” was the response.
In class he was the master Talmudist. Somehow he had adopted the language of the baseball field and made it on occasion the controlling metaphor of his relationship to his students. “You struck out there, Lurie,” he said to me one afternoon, and I shook my head with dismay. “Okay, you’re on first base,” he said to Yaakov Bader after a lengthy struggle with a difficult passage. “Now make it to second.” It had seemed strange to me at first to hear that kind of language used even occasionally by a Talmudist. I wondered about it aloud one night in Saul’s presence.
“He’s always talked that way,” Saul said.
“Why?”
“Maybe his kids like baseball. He has two boys.”
“You know what he said to me today?”
“What?”
“ ‘That’s a home run, Lurie.’ ” I imitated his raspy voice. “ ‘I’ll even let you run around the bases one more time for that one.’ ”
We laughed together.
I grew accustomed to the sudden interjections of the language of baseball into the heavy Talmudic atmosphere of the class. It gave strange electric life to the things we talked about; it seemed to bring the outside world closer to us; it cheered the cold brittle legal intellectualism of our discussions. “You’re playing to the grandstands, Lurie. Don’t play to the grandstands.” I had attempted some Talmudic gymnastics that did not work. But I could see he was pleased by the attempt; a faint smile had played fleetingly across his thin lips.
The weather turned warm. I walked often to school now, sometimes two or three times a week. On occasion, when I would take a bus to school in the morning I would walk back in the late afternoon. I remember walking home late one April afternoon, my ears still resonating with the “home run with bases loaded” I had achieved earlier that day in my Talmud class. I crossed the bridge, feeling the sun and the warm April wind on my face. I kept hearing Rav Sharfman’s voice. I noticed people clustered together in little groups on the streets. I crossed beneath the Jerome Avenue elevated train and started up the hill toward Grand Concourse. It seemed strange the way people were clustering and huddling together on the streets, talking softly to one another. Traffic was heavy. A bus went by, pouring fumes into the air. I saw it stop in front of my father’s store. I started past the store and stopped. My parents were behind the counter. Half a dozen customers were inside. My mother was crying. I stared at her through the window and she noticed me and beckoned to me. I went quickly inside and was told that President Roosevelt had died that afternoon of a cerebral hemorrhage.
“Oh, my God!” I heard myself say, and suddenly all around me the air whispered evilly and swarmed and I was cold with horror and shock.
One of the customers, an elderly man, was crying and wiping his eyes with a handkerchief.
“What will happen?” my mother kept saying. She could not stop crying. Her eyes, wide and panicky, roamed wildly around the store. “Max, what will happen?”
“Truman will finish the job, that is what will happen,” said my father. Then he said to me, “David, take Mama home. I will close up and be home soon.”
I walked home with my mother. She leaned on my arm and wept; Alex was home, listening to the radio and weeping. My father came home, his face very stiff. My aunt and uncle and cousin came over. We sat around the kitchen table, listening to the radio. My aunt’s normally cool composure was broken. She wept openly. My father’s eyes were moist. He did not weep. Once he rose abruptly and left the kitchen. He was gone for a while. No one said anything when he returned.
“What kind of reward was that to give him?” my uncle murmured. “How cruel God is. A few weeks more and he would have seen the war end.”
“Everyone is comparing it to Moses,” my aunt said. “He was able to see it from far away.”
“A bitter consolation,” my father muttered. “It is God doing His usual bad job.”
“Max,” my mother said. “Please.” She sobbed softly and wiped at her eyes. “It’s strange,” she said brokenly. “I feel as if I knew him all my life. How do you explain such a feeling?”
“This Truman is a nobody,” Alex said. “A real nothing.”
“I pity him,” Saul said.
We sat in the kitchen, listening to the radio.
I remember clearly the newspaper photographs of that weekend—a black face wet with tears, a woman with a handkerchief pressed to her lips, a puzzled look on the face of a little girl, the funeral train, the burial, the simple grassy plot; remnants of a man. I lay awake into the nights of that weekend. Faint whispers came to me from the dark corners of my room. I fought them back and they retreated.
On Monday mor
ning I rose early and walked to school. As I turned off the bridge onto the wide avenue someone fell into step with me and I looked and it was Rav Sharfman.
“Good morning,” he said in English. “You like to walk, I see.”
I was so astonished that I stopped and stared and did not know what to say.
He stopped too and turned slightly sideways, his head tilted to the right. He wore a dark suit and coat and a battered dark hat. His hooded eyes gazed at me without expression.
“Good morning, Rebbe,” I heard myself say thickly, and cleared my throat.
The bridge and the avenue were heavy with traffic. A bus turned from the avenue onto the bridge with a roar of its accelerating motor and a gush of fumes.
He turned to continue walking and I walked beside him.
“I notice you from time to time as you cross the bridge,” he said, looking straight ahead. “Where do you live?”
I told him.
He glanced at me and glanced away. “That’s a long walk.”
“I enjoy it.”
“Do you walk by yourself?”
“Yes.”
We walked half a block in silence. He looked down at the two books of Talmudic commentaries I was carrying.
“What are you reading?”
I told him.
“What are you reading that is not required for class?”
“I don’t have much extra time.”
He turned, then, and gave me a long look. His large black eyes moved slowly across my face.
“I heard once that you used to read many books not required for your classes,” he said.
We were on the corner facing the school. We crossed the avenue.
“I used to read books on the Bible,” I said, using the word Tanach, which is the acronym for the three sections of the Hebrew Bible.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I heard.”
We entered the wide metal front doors of the building. With a brief nod, he turned to the right and went up the short flight of steps and through the doors to the administration offices. I turned left and went along the corridor to the study hall.
I noticed during the course of that week that he was always alone, except when he was with his students in the classroom. Other teachers of Talmud would stand together in the corridors, chatting, or sit together in the study hall. He sat alone and walked about alone.
I met him again one morning in the last week of April as I turned off the bridge onto the avenue. He slipped into step beside me.
“Good morning, Lurie.”
“Good morning, Rebbe.”
“You have courage to take such long walks.”
“I like it. I have time to think.”
He was silent a moment.
“What are you reading?”
“Commentaries.”
“Lurie.”
“Yes?”
“The books you once read. Which were they?”
“I read lots of books, Rebbe.”
“Tell me their names.”
“All of them?”
“In the last two or three years. Not the books for school.”
He listened with no trace of emotion on his features as I named the books. He interrupted me with a raised hand and asked me a question about one of the books I had mentioned. I responded. He asked me questions about a second and third book and I responded to those as well. From the nature of his questions it was obvious he had also read those books. They were books on scientific Biblical criticism. One of them was The Book of Genesis by S. R. Driver.
We crossed the street and entered the school and separated inside the large entrance hall. I watched him go up the stairs toward the administration offices.
I was puzzled by his queries. I had the impression he had been waiting for me at the end of the bridge but I could not be certain. In the classroom he continued to relate to me in his normal manner. I struck out and hit a double that afternoon.
When I rode by the store later that day I noticed that my mother was not behind the counter. I came into the house and discovered she was in bed. She had felt very tired, she said, and had gone home.
“I am pampering myself,” she said to me from her bed. But she would not look directly at me and I did not like the greenish cast to her skin and the white blotches on her cheeks.
“We are going to have a little problem with your mother,” my father said to Alex and me in the kitchen that night. “The war is ending and your mother is waiting to hear about her family. Our job now is to be patient and strong. Do you understand?”
Alex and I looked at each other. We understood.
I heard my mother cry out in her sleep that night, shouting Polish words I did not comprehend. My father soothed her and she grew still. I lay awake a long time afterward, fighting back the whispers that moved back and forth across the dark floor of my room.
She felt well enough to return to the store later that week. But she was tense and easily upset. Small failures would strain her timid resolve. She was now what I vaguely remembered her having been when I was a child: fearful of hurt, timorous, withdrawn. One evening that week she began to speak of her childhood on the farm outside of Bobrek. We listened in silence to the spinning out of her years before the darkness of my Uncle David’s death. My father sat stiffly in his chair, not a trace of emotion on his face. We were in the kitchen. From the living room came the sudden singing of the canary. My mother’s voice faltered and grew silent.
I walked to school the next morning and had before my eyes my mother’s haunted face. The memories of her past whispered themselves at me during the Talmud class. The trees, David. How they would sing in the summer wind. And there was a horse I loved. And Papa taught me to ride it. Jewish girls don’t ride horses, he said. But this Jewish girl I trust. I named the horse Balak and rode him and felt the wind on my face. The farm, David. The forest, David. The sky, David. The rich black earth, David.
Through the veil of whispers came a knife edge of anger. Someone had called my name. I looked at Rav Sharfman.
“Are you dreaming?” I heard him say.
“I’m nightmaring,” I said without thinking the word. I heard the swift beating of my heart and sat stiffly in my seat, waiting.
But he said nothing more to me and turned away and went on explaining the passage of Talmud I had drifted away from moments before on the tide of whispers.
After the class I waited until everyone had left and apologized to him for my lack of attention. I told him about my mother.
He closed the volume of Talmud on his desk.
“We are all waiting,” he said in Yiddish with no emotion on his face. “The entire Jewish people is waiting.” He glanced at the books I held in my hand, then looked away and went slowly from the room.
And then the war in Europe was over. We sat around the kitchen table listening to the radio. I heard my father take a long tremulous breath. A slight flush had risen to his squarish face.
My mother blinked her eyes nervously. “Max? Will we know soon?”
“Yes,” my father said. “We will know soon, Ruth.”
He did not look at her as he spoke. Instead he looked out the window at the pale sunlight on the street.
I woke very early one day that week and set out to walk to school. It was a warm sunny day. I avoided the tunnel beneath Grand Concourse and used the street. I stood a moment at the corner of Grand Concourse waiting for the light to change and glanced at the morning papers in the newsstand. At the corner of Jerome Avenue, I looked at the papers again. I bought one of the papers and looked at the photographs. I folded the paper and walked quickly to school.
In class that afternoon Rav Sharfman called on me to read. I read and explained and he did not interrupt me. His eyes remained upon my face as I spoke. The class was very still. At one point a passing bus drowned out my words and I stopped and went back over what I had said. His hooded eyes regarded me without expression. Finally he stopped me and clarified a complicated point in
a late medieval commentary. He told us the explanation had been the insight of his grandfather. That was the first time he had ever mentioned any member of his family to us in class. Then he dismissed us.
“Did you see the pictures?” Yaakov Bader asked me in the corridor.
“Yes.”
“In the afternoon papers?”
“No.”
“Besser has a paper.”
I went over to Irving Besser and looked at the photographs.
“You have family there?” I asked him.
“My father’s family. Brothers, sisters.”
“Where?”
“In Lodz,” he said.
We looked at the pictures together a moment longer.
“I can’t believe it,” he said.
“Believe it,” I told him. “It’s a photograph.”
I felt a queer whispering sound in my ears. It was gone a moment later.
I rode back home on a bus later that day and saw my parents in the store behind the counter. The store was crowded. Alex was home listening to the radio. The afternoon newspapers were strewn all over the kitchen table. I looked at the photographs. Then I went into my room and closed the door and lay down on my bed. I covered my eyes with my hands. It made no difference. I saw the photographs inside my eyes.
My mother came home in a while to prepare supper. Later I heard my father enter the house. We sat around the table eating.
“We knew a lot about what was going on,” my father said. “But we did not know this. A nation of maniacs. They should be destroyed.”
“They have been,” said Alex.
“Wiped out. Every last one of them. Like Amalek.”
“We ought to poison their wells,” Alex said with grim humor.
“Cut it out,” I told him.
“Somebody ought to do something,” he said bitterly.
“Aren’t we tired of blood?” I said. “Hasn’t there been enough blood?”
“Only Jewish blood does not make the world tired,” my father said.
“Max,” my mother murmured, raising her eyes from her plate. “How soon will it be now?”
“Very soon, Ruth. There are Irgun boys in the camps.”
I looked at him.