by Chaim Potok
I wanted to say, It was beautiful; listening to the voices of the centuries teaching me Torah—that was beautiful. But, Papa, listen. The medieval commentators used the most advanced knowledge of their day to understand the Torah. But they did not have the tools we have today. They did not have anthropology, archeology, comparative religion, linguistics, a true grasp of the texture of history. I do not know what kind of commentaries Rashi, Ibn Ezra, the Ramban, and the others might be writing were they alive today; they might be helping me penetrate the precious rectangles of Torah I hold in my hands. I wanted to say all that, but I remained silent. For my father was right: what I had studied with Mr. Bader and in the yeshiva was not enough. It could not be the entire truth.
“You see,” he said, stirring in his chair, his face darkening. “I am correct. It was not enough. It is exactly like my brother David.”
He was silent then, sitting back in the chair with his eyes closed, the skullcap like a dark and severe crown on his head. The canary ruffled its wing feathers, hopped down to its water dish, and drank. My father said nothing for a long time. I remembered the months of his illness after the world he had built had suddenly been shattered in the early thirties. Nightmares long forgotten, dark wastelands of memory, suddenly flooded my mind. He had rarely if ever conveyed the impression of being a compassionate man; yet he had helped so many people, had given so much of himself to others. And he had suffered so terribly. What a strange fusion he was of duty and selflessness!
I sat and looked at him, feeling the sweat on my back and the iciness on the palms of my hands. The canary hopped back to its perch and pecked into its breast feathers. The silence dragged on, became dense with dread. Somewhere in the house a clock ticked. I had never heard a ticking sound in the living room before. I took a deep tremulous breath. My father stirred and opened his eyes.
“I could forgive you anything,” he said without preliminaries. “But I cannot forgive you going to the goyim to study Torah. Do the goyim come to us to learn their—what do you call it?—New Testament? I will tell you about the goyim. They either hate us too much or love us too much. They will never understand us and be natural with us. After the way we have been slaughtered you want to go out to the culture of the goyim? You want to mix Yiddishkeit with goyishkeit? You think that will make Yiddishkeit stronger? I will tell you what will make Yiddishkeit stronger. I want to bring Jews here because this a good land. I want to build yeshivas here. I want to build Eretz Yisroel. I do not want to mix Torah with goyim. I want to rebuild what was destroyed in Europe. That is what I want to do. And I will do it, if God gives me the strength. Go ahead. Go to your university to study with your goyim or your Jews who do not care about the commandments. I had no way of stopping my brother and I have no way of stopping you. At least you will not go there an ignoramus. At least I did my job. You were taught Yiddishkeit.”
“Papa—”
But he would listen to nothing more. “I do not want to hear another word, David.” He had raised his voice. The canary, suddenly agitated, began to fly about excitedly inside its cage, making wild fluttering sounds with its wings. “I want to talk practical matters with you.” He paused. “Where will you go to school?”
I told him.
“Good. It would be—unpleasant—if you were home. We will tell your mother you are studying Hebrew or history or some such subject. I do not want to upset her now.”
I said nothing.
“You will need money to live. You will tell me how much you need and I will give it to you. You are still my son and I am not a cruel or vindictive person.” He rose to his feet. The newspaper fell to the floor. He reached down for it and picked it up. Then he looked at me. “I did my best,” he said in a flat tone of voice. “The Torah says if a man marries and dies and has no children, then his brother should marry the dead brother’s wife and give the first-born son the dead brother’s name. You know this law and you know it is possible with ease to avoid such a marriage. I loved my brother despite all his arrogance. I loved him. I have continued my brother’s life. It is your job to continue his good name. Now I am going into the kitchen for a glass of coffee. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
I had nothing more to say.
He went into the kitchen. I heard him puttering about at the sink. I went into my room and lay down on my bed. The apartment was silent. I could not stop trembling. How miserably I had failed! I had not even been able to begin explaining myself to my father. Who would ever believe me? I want to understand the Torah as it was understood by those who wrote it. I need to learn this new critical method so I can discover the truth about the beginnings of my people. I want to know who I was so I can understand better who I want to be. Why can I say that to myself with such ease but am unable to say it to others? Have I read too many books? Am I talking a language of shorthand? I felt alone, so absolutely alone. And at that moment I saw myself, as if through a silver mist, coming slowly off the bridge. And there on the corner, waiting, was Rav Sharfman. He turned to greet me, his dark hooded eyes without expression. We walked together toward the school.
That night I woke and heard a man crying. It was the most terrifying and anguishing of sounds—a stifled, gasping series of choking, wrenching sobs. I could not bear the sound and slid beneath my covers and brought my knees close to my chest. I slept in a fog of confused images and shifting visions and dreams. A murmurous voice penetrated my sleep. I came into dazed wakefulness beneath my covers and thought I heard my father’s voice chanting softly from the Book of Psalms. I raised my head from beneath the covers. A dark form stood at the foot of my bed. “Papa?” I whispered. “Papa?” The murmuring ceased. The form remained very still. I did not know if I was awake or asleep. I felt my eyes closing and a blackness descending upon me. Fingers brushed lightly across my cheek. I could feel the fingers through my sleep. Then the side of a face touched mine and lips brushed across my forehead. I knew I was asleep and had dreamed it. Then, suddenly, I opened my eyes and stared into the darkness. The form was gone. But there lingered unmistakably in the darkness, like the trace of a vanished hope, the faint warm odor of coffee.
In the last week of June I was ordained and in the first week of September I left home.
The test for ordination was given to me by Rav Sharfman and two other members of the Talmud faculty. I remember it as a four-hour ordeal comparable in intensity only to the oral defense of my doctoral dissertation which I underwent years later. In a small room, at a dark-wood table, we ranged over hundreds of pages of Talmud and the minutiae of Jewish law. At the start all three posed questions; some time in the third hour the other two sat back and Rav Sharfman alone directed the questions at me; darts of questions. He would ask a question and I would begin to answer and he would see I knew the answer and would stop me and ask a new question. I came out of the room shaking, exhausted, feeling the same dry-mouthed fatigue I had experienced after the descent to the river, and the same pulsing ecstasy. I had done well. A wisp of a smile had played across the thin curling lips as he had dismissed me.
My mother grew strangely calm the week I was to leave. She did my laundry; she ironed my shirts; she taught me some simple cooking skills, for I would be living alone in an apartment near the University of Chicago. “David wanted to study for a degree,” she murmured as she helped me pack my bags. “You will study for him, darling. Yes?” Her eyes filled. I held her to me and stroked her hair.
“We will send your books to you,” my father said to me at one point during the week when we were alone in the kitchen. “And also the books of Mrs. Horowitz. Is there anything else?”
I could not think of anything else.
“If you need money you will let me know. I am still your father. You need never feel shame with me.”
I thanked him.
He hesitated, looking down at his glass of coffee. Then he raised his eyes and I felt upon my face the full impact of his stern strength. “Whatever you do,” he said, “do not become a goy
.” And he turned his face away and put his hand over his eyes.
During my last Shabbat in the city I walked with Saul and my aunt and uncle in the park. It was a hot windless day. Saul said to me, “Will you be back in the winter?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you think I can help you in any way, will you write to me?”
“Yes.”
“I hope you don’t hurt Yiddishkeit with what you’re doing, Davey. We’ve been hurt enough in this century.”
“I don’t want to hurt Yiddishkeit, Saul.”
“No? You already have. The whole yeshiva knows what you’re doing. You know what effect it will have? You were one of the best students they ever had.”
I did not know how to respond to that.
“Even Yaakov Bader feels hurt, Davey.”
I choked back the memory of the bewildered pain I had inflicted upon my caring friend when I had told him of my decision.
“Anyway, let me know if you ever think I can help you. How many cousins do I have?”
And he turned away from me, concealing the sadness that had entered his eyes.
My uncle wished me luck in a pained and poignant way. My aunt let me kiss her cheek. I returned home to a silent apartment, stared at my bed and my desk, and felt a wrenching loneliness. I lay down on my bed. The door to the apartment opened and closed. I heard footsteps in the hallway and the living room. It was Alex. He came into the room and sat down on his bed.
“It’s hot out there,” he said.
I turned my face to the wall.
He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “I’ll write to you, Davey. I’ll become the family letter-writer.”
“I only want to study the Bible,” I said. “They all act as if I’ve become a heretic or something.”
“You have,” he said. “In their eyes you have.”
I was quiet.
“ ‘A sinner who makes others sin,’ ” he quoted. “You’ll write books and others will read them. In their eyes you’re the worst kind.”
“All right,” I said.
“We shouldn’t fool ourselves,” he said. “Especially if we’re interested in truth.”
I left the following day. My mother’s strange calm remained with her even as I went through the door of our apartment. Alex embraced me. I felt my father’s iron handshake all the way downstairs to the cab. I boarded a train to Chicago.
I sat at a window and looked out at the river. Docks and boats glided by. The river was bluish gray in the morning sun. Above us flashed the underside of a bridge. I saw a shantytown and, across the river, a low stone wall and a towering bluff. On top of the bluff stood a reddish building, its green dome glistening in the sun. I looked at the rocky side of the bluff and thought I could see the huge boulder that had broken my fall and had also barred my further descent. I could feel its scarred surface on my fingers and palms as I sat in the train. I saw myself circling that boulder and felt again the sickening slide and fall to the ground below. It had been a feeling of sheer terror, that helpless slide and fall. And I felt it now again, that terror, as I sat looking out the window at the river and the bluff and the school and the two tall smoking chimneys that suddenly came into view. I closed my eyes. What was I doing? I had left behind a secure life and was going out on an insane search for intangible beginnings. Who cared about beginnings? The present was what everyone really worried about. I had made a grotesque mistake! I must go back! A wind moved across my face. Sh, someone whispered. Calm yourself. It is loneliness and fear. Did you think it would be easy to make your own beginning? I listened to the rasping voice within the whisper and grew still. I opened my eyes. The middle-aged man seated across from me smiled and wondered if I wanted to read his New York Times. He was finished with it, he said. I thanked him and took it from him and sat reading it as the train moved smoothly around a bend and smoothly and swiftly along the wide dark-blue waters of the Hudson River.
That was my first long journey into ancient beginnings, a train ride to Albany and Cleveland and then on to Chicago. The following year was 1947 and, with millions of our people everywhere, I exulted in the new beginning we were making on our ancient land. During the years that followed I longed to make a journey back into other recent beginnings but could not. I had seen a photograph in a newspaper of a dedication ceremony in Bergen Belsen: the camp had been turned into a vast parklike cemetery. Stone walls, grassy fields, paved lanes, groves of trees. I remember gazing at the photograph and hungering to enter it. But its borders remained impenetrable.
Then a few years ago I began writing a book on Genesis that took a sudden unexpected turn; it became necessary for me to do research into Bible manuscripts to be found only in Frankfurt and Erfurt. I was frightened, I hesitated, and even considered putting aside the book, but my wife and my colleagues urged me not to. In the end, the need to make that journey, both for the book and for myself, overcame the cold nervous urge to avoid it. I flew to Germany.
For days I worked in the Frankfurt Municipal Library with rare manuscripts and Bible fragments. Then I rented a car and drove along a beautiful autobahn to Erfurt. It was an April day. My hands were cold and sweaty on the steering wheel. To find Germany so new and clean and vibrantly alive had unnerved me: I had expected rubble somewhere. The borders of the highway were smooth and grassy and there were lovely bluish hills in the distance. I arrived in Erfurt in the evening and spent a few days there with the Erfurt Codices. Then, finally, I set out on my journey into the final beginnings of my family. I stared through the windshield, enmeshed in memories. I drove swiftly, and I remember thinking to myself, Slow down, don’t have an accident. I do not remember the road I took, or how long I drove.
I stood beneath a cloudy sky before a stone entrance wall on which was written Lager Belsen 1944 1945. I had seen that wall in the newspaper photograph. I could not move. A paralysis of terror had seized me. I wanted to turn and rush away. Then he was there, Rav Sharfman, by the entrance wall, stern and tall and gloomy of countenance. Come, he murmured. You must see the remnants of the beginning of your family’s love for the Torah. But I could not move. You must enter, he said. You have nothing to apologize for. You have only to give thanks and to remember.
Still I could not move.
Beyond the stone wall were paths and knolls and trees. I was alone. The air was cool. I had wanted to come; now I wanted to flee. I could not confront this horror.
Then from beyond the stone wall someone called my name.
Papa? I said. Papa?
In dreams I visit here, he said. No one knows. You will tell no one.
David, someone murmured from beyond the stone wall. Come.
Uncle David? I said. Is that you?
The dead can journey too, he murmured. I sleep in Lemberg but all my beginnings lie here. Come.
I put on my skullcap and entered Bergen Belsen.
I walked along deserted paved paths between massive stone walls on which were words that read Hier Ruhen 2000 Tote—“Here rest 2000 dead”—April 1945; Hier Ruhen 2500 Tote April 1945; Hier Ruhen 5000 Tote April 1945. Weeds covered the mass graves. A trembling took hold of me. The gray April sky seemed to lower itself toward the earth. The day had darkened.
Papa? I said.
There was silence.
Uncle David? I said.
Only the silence.
I walked along slowly, a strange dryness in my throat and a dull ache inside my eyes. What had my father told me years ago when I first began studying with Mr. Bader? It was a tradition in our family that went back generations. We were Torah readers. My own father, your grandfather—how he loved to read the Torah. He would work in the mill and chant the words to himself, the precious words. How can a Jew not know the Torah?
He is buried here somewhere, my grandfather.
Papa? I called. Papa?
Silence.
Uncle David? I called. Uncle David?
There was only the silence.
They were all here,
grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. Who lies beneath my feet? I am walking on the dead of my family’s beginnings.
I found myself on a path leading to a massive stone wall that bore the words Hier Ruhen 1000 Tote April 1945. I stopped on the path. They were standing by the wall.
Ah, my brother, murmured my Uncle David. I am grateful. And he moved closer to my father and held him for a moment in a gentle embrace.
I tried, said my father. It was my job to try. We could have done more together as father and son. But the world kept coming between us, stealing my time and strength. And he went out to their evil culture.
I bowed my head.
To another culture, said my uncle gently. To bring new life to our roots.
To an evil culture. Look how it slaughters us.
Yes, said my uncle. I know. I know.
I tried, said my father. David, how Ruth and I tried.
You did well, my big brother, came the murmured words.
He turned to me.
David, he said. David. Look at me.
I raised my eyes.
He made a gentle sweeping gesture with his arm. Here is the past, he murmured. Never forget the past as you nourish the present.
I was silent. Slowly I nodded my head.
He turned to my father. Thank you, he murmured. Our David is giving new life to my name.
I closed my eyes. A wind brushed against me, lingered for a moment, and was gone. I opened my eyes and found myself alone. After a while I recited the Mourner’s Kaddish. Then I walked back between the graves to the car and drove away.
TO
Adena
MY WIFE
AND TO
Robert Gottlieb
MY EDITOR AND FRIEND
ALSO BY CHAIM POTOK
I Am the Clay
The Gift of Asher Lev
Davita’s Harp
The Book of Lights
Wanderings
My Name is Asher Lev
The Promise
The Chosen
The Gates of November