The Promise

by Chaim Potok

  That night Rachel and I swam together off the dock. It was a warm night and the sky was black and jeweled with stars. We swam in the bright light of the outdoor spots that illumined the stairway and the dock and a hundred yards of water. The water too was warm and we swam for a long time and later we sat on the dock and let the night dry us off and there were the pulsing sounds of frogs and crickets and the vaulting darkness overhead and the sense of the summer ending.

  “Is Danny really very religious?” I heard Rachel ask.

  “Yes.”

  “Does he wear a skullcap in the treatment center too?”

  “I’ve never asked him.”

  “I don’t know anything about Hasidism,” she said.

  We were silent awhile. The lake lapped gently against the shore.

  “Reuven,” Rachel said quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “What have we learned about ourselves this summer?”

  “That we’re good friends.”

  “Yes,” she murmured.

  “Very good friends.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that Molly Bloom is big with seed.”

  She laughed and softly, very softly, kissed my cheek.

  The next afternoon Rachel and her parents closed up the house and went home. My father and I spent the evening packing our bags. By noon the next day we were back in the city.

  Williamsburg was stifling, narcotized by the heat. Our first-floor brownstone apartment felt drained of air. I went quickly through the rooms, opening windows. The apartment seemed suddenly strangely small.

  Manya, our Russian housekeeper, returned the next morning. She gave me a hug that left my ribs aching and kept telling me in broken English how wonderful I looked, I had gotten so tan; but why was my father so pale, why hadn’t he been out in the sun more? Her graying hair was combed straight back from her forehead and braided into a large bun on the top of her head. She talked excitedly with my father in Russian for a few minutes. Then she put on her apron. I could hear the sounds of her man-sized shoes as she moved about, cleaning the apartment.

  The heat continued. Williamsburg baked and broiled in it; the asphalt-paved streets softened in it; the sycamores on my block drooped in it; the Hasidim walked in the shade alongside the houses and stores of Lee Avenue in vain attempts to avoid it.

  That Friday morning I traveled to the Zechariah Frankel Seminary and began to work on my father’s galleys. Ten days later, on a Monday, I returned to school.

  I called Rachel almost every day during September. There was a great deal of trouble convincing Michael to enter the residential treatment center, more trouble than anyone had anticipated. His parents went through all the preliminary interviews and were told by the staff people at the center that Michael ought to be admitted. An interview was set up for Michael with the chief of clinical services for the fourth Monday in September. On the afternoon of the Shabbat before the interview his parents told him what they were planning. He was terrified. He became hysterical. He would not go. He screamed that he would not go. They called the chief of clinical services and he talked to Michael over the phone.

  Michael went for the interview. He was calm, polite, responsive. Once back in the house, however, he became hysterical again. He would not go. He wasn’t crazy, he screamed. He would not go to a place where people were crazy. What were they trying to do to him? He would never go to a place like that. Abraham Gordon called the chief of clinical services. They talked a long time over the phone. Then Abraham Gordon told his son that an interview would be set up between him and Danny Saunders, Reuven’s friend. Yes, Reuven’s friend worked there. Would Michael see Reuven’s friend?

  Michael and Danny spent almost two hours alone on a morning in the first week of October. In the second week of October, two days after Yom Kippur, Michael entered the residential treatment center.

  BOOK TWO

  —And who do you think is the greatest poet? asked Boland, nudging his neighbor.

  —Byron, of course, answered Stephen.…

  —You don’t care whether he was a heretic or not? said Nash.

  —What do you know about it? shouted Stephen.…

  —Here, catch hold of this heretic, Heron called out.

  In a moment Stephen was a prisoner.

  JAMES JOYCE

  Five

  Then there were the twilight weeks, a length of gray time between October and December when the weave formed in the summer seemed to come apart and I had little contact with Rachel and none at all with Michael. The patterns of our lives were being spun out in different worlds, and as the sycamores turned and the air grew cold the summer became a distant dream, and I could recall it sharply only in the very early mornings as I lay in my bed, no longer asleep but not yet fully awake—the carnival, the old man, Michael’s rage, the Sailfish, the cove, the clouds, the long days with Rachel, and the brief hours with Abraham Gordon. At odd moments of the day—in the classroom as Rav Kalman explained a passage of Talmud, in the manuscript room of the Zechariah Frankel Library as I worked on my father’s galleys, on a bus, in a store on Lee Avenue—a disconnected piece of the summer would float slowly toward me and expand into dim memory, and I would hear Danny telling me he wanted to sleep for a year under the maple or Michael asking me what his parents were planning. But the strange conjunction of events that had begun with the carnival appeared disentangled now, and the summer faded together with the leaves of the sycamores.

  I saw Danny on the third Shabbat in October. He was doing very well in school and working very hard at the treatment center. But he would say nothing to me about Michael, except that he was as well as could be expected. No, it was not a good idea for me to visit him yet. His symptoms were volatile; the setting was open—so Danny’s supervisor felt there should be no visitors outside the immediate family. Danny himself thought there would be no harm in my visiting Michael. But Danny was only a student. They would trust his judgment only just so far. I could not see Michael.

  I was not certain I understood what he meant about Michael’s symptoms being volatile, and I did not ask him to explain it. He would have explained it himself had he wanted to. But I could tell easily enough from the brooding look in his eyes and the set of his face that he was concerned about Michael.

  I asked him if he was opening his window these days. He smiled. Yes, he said. He was opening the window now. Bravo, I said. We would make a Western gentleman out of him yet. He smiled again and said nothing.

  I dated Rachel once that fall, in the last week of October, on a cold and windy Saturday night. She had let her hair grow and it lay on her shoulders, a silken flow of auburn. She wore a red dress and a white coat with a fur trim, and she looked lovely. I took her to see The Moon Is Blue at the Henry Miller Theatre in Manhattan, and both of us enjoyed it. Afterward, over ice cream in a crowded cafeteria on a side street off Broadway, we talked about the summer, about her parents, her uncle, a fight over loyalty oaths that was brewing in her school, her paper on Joyce, for which she had received an A; it seemed we talked about everything—except Michael. He was doing as well as could be expected, she said, echoing Danny. And that was all she would say about Michael. Yes, she had seen Danny a few times at the treatment center during the past weeks. Was Minkin’s book on Hasidism any good? she asked. She wanted to find out about Hasidism.

  “What for?” I asked.

  Was Minkin’s book any good? she asked again.

  I told her it was a good book and I suggested other books on Hasidism. “You may as well get a rounded education if you’re really curious. The section in Graetz’s history will curl your hair.”

  Had I ever heard of the Kotzker Rebbe? she asked me.

  “Who?”

  “The Kotzker Rebbe.”

  I had never heard of him.

  She picked moodily at her plate of ice cream.

  “Who was the Kotzker Rebbe?” I asked.

  A Hasidic rebbe of the last century, she said. Danny had once alluded to
him. But she knew nothing about him, had also never heard of him, knew nothing at all about Hasidism.

  “Why didn’t you ask Danny?”

  There had been no time to ask Danny. She was too embarrassed to ask Danny. Her words sounded lame.

  “Ask your uncle.”

  She didn’t want to ask her uncle.

  “Why not?”

  She just didn’t want to, that’s all. A crimson flush spread slowly across her face. She avoided looking at me. But I understood, and the understanding was edged with an emotion I had no right to feel but felt anyway. I told her she would probably find the Kotzker Rebbe mentioned in one of the books I had recommended to her. She did not mention Danny again that night.

  A few days later I remembered her question and I asked my father if he knew who the Kotzker Rebbe had been. It was a Tuesday night and we were having supper at the time in the kitchen. Manya was standing guard over the stove and throwing glances at the table to make certain I was eating. My father seemed a little surprised at the question.

  “Why are you asking?”

  I told him.

  “In what connection did Danny mention the Kotzker?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  He seemed puzzled. The Kotzker had been a Hasidic rebbe during the last century in the Eastern European town of Kotzk near Lublin, my father said after a moment. He was a very strange and erratic personality. He was always involved in quarrels and controversies with other Hasidic sects and sometimes with his own followers. For the last twenty years of his life he had closed himself in his room and refused to come out.

  “Twenty years?”

  My father nodded. “Why?”

  No one knew, my father said. There were many theories, but no one really knew. “What is Danny’s interest in the Kotzker?”

  I told him I didn’t know and would ask him when I saw him again. But I did not see Danny for quite a while, and when I did see him next I had completely forgotten about the Kotzker Rebbe.

  My days at school had settled into their normal routine: Talmud in the mornings and the early afternoons with Rav Kalman; philosophy courses in the graduate school on some late afternoons and evenings. I suffered patiently through Rav Kalman’s periodic tirades during the early part of the fall and by November found them repetitious and dull. He was a great Talmudist, but I had nothing to do with him outside the classroom. I wanted no personal relationship with Rav Kalman.

  The last batch of galleys for my father’s book came at the end of September. I worked on them steadily in the rare-manuscript room of the Zechariah Frankel Library. My father sent them back in the third week of October. The book was done. My father roamed around the house for a week, looking like a man who was searching for something he had lost. Then, slowly, he returned to his Zionist activities. The book was due to be published in the second week of January, but advance copies would be ready for mailing to various scholarly journals by the middle of December. My father waited for the book as he had once waited for the news of the end of the Second World War and for the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel.

  One afternoon in October I met Professor Abraham Gordon in the manuscript room of the Zechariah Frankel Library. He was seated at one of the small tables, peering through a magnifying glass at a manuscript written in Arabic. A black skullcap sat on top of his balding head. I came over to him, and he was glad to see me. He put down the glass and shook my hand and waved me into a chair. How was my father and was the book finished and why hadn’t I come to talk to him? I asked him about Michael. Michael was doing as well as could be expected, he said, repeating the words that became the liturgical response to every question I asked about Michael that fall. We talked softly so as not to disturb the others around us. Had I seen the latest attack against him in the Orthodox press? he asked cheerfully, and named an Orthodox weekly published in Brooklyn. I told him I hardly ever read the Orthodox press. He smiled. The writer had called him a pagan. He laughed, and a bearded gentleman sitting at a nearby table threw him an annoyed look. “They are running out of names to call me,” he said in a whisper. He was trying to sound cheerful, but he looked worn. His round, heavy face seemed to have taken on additional lines. “Give my warmest regards to your father,” he said. I went home, wondering why I had once been so eager to meet him. Rav Kalman really was not too difficult to endure after all.

  There seemed nothing unusual about that fall, and yet everything about it was strange, faintly distorted and askew, as if the summer had somehow affected the delicate mechanism of balance inside my ears. The High Holidays came and Hasidim choked the Williamsburg streets and blackened them with their dark caftans and dark suits and dark fur-trimmed hats. The Festival of Succoth came and a jungle of palm fronds and citrons moved about the streets. Simchat Torah came and there was dancing and singing into the night and the streets swarmed with gyrating Hasidim embracing the Torah scrolls and singing their joy to the dark sky. I had seen it all before; there should have been nothing strange about it now. And yet it all seemed strange, and I did not know why. I told myself it was because we were in a time of waiting: for my father’s book, for news about Michael, for my ordination. But I did not really know why. Then there was another long Indian summer, and finally the leaves began to fall.

  All during those last weeks of August it had seemed as if the separate lines of our lives were being manipulated somehow, purposefully and carefully brought together by some master weaver. Now it seemed the weaver had wearied of his game. The lines hung free. So the summer turned slowly into the mist and smoke of autumn.

  Six

  The twilight weeks came to an abrupt end in early December with a classroom conversation and a phone call.

  December was cold, but without the snow and the sleet that often invade New York before the technical coming of winter. The leaves were gone from the sycamores but there was bright sunlight and clear skies, and I enjoyed the bus rides to school in the early mornings through the waking streets.

  The school stood on Bedford Avenue a few blocks from Eastern Parkway. The rabbinical and college departments were housed in a whitestone building that fronted directly onto Bedford Avenue. Alongside were the half-dozen brownstones that comprised the various graduate departments. It was a busy, asphalt-paved street, noisy with traffic and crowded with shoppers who frequented the many stores directly across the street from the school. Even with the windows closed the sounds of the street came into the classrooms: the roar of accelerating buses, the loud hum of wheels, the blare of automobile horns, and occasionally a human voice or the barking of a dog.

  The whitestone building had six stories. For four years I had climbed up and down the stairs of that building to get to my various college classes. Now almost everything I needed was on the street floor. To the left of the large marble lobby beyond the stone stairs and the metal double door of the school was a long, narrow, tiled corridor. Along the right side of this corridor were the doors that led to the school synagogue, which stood parallel to the corridor, with the Ark against the far right wall and fixed pews taking up half the length of the huge floor. The rest of the synagogue was filled with chairs and long tables. From nine to twelve every morning—except Friday and Shabbat when we had no classes, and Sunday when we had a different schedule—I sat at one of those tables with some of my classmates and prepared for my Talmud class, or shiur, as these classes are called. At noon I went down one flight of stairs and had lunch in the school cafeteria. Then, from one to three in the afternoon, I attended the shiur given by Rav Kalman—in the classroom directly across the corridor from the synagogue. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons I left the shiur at three o’clock and took a Bedford Avenue bus to a nearby synagogue where I taught Hebrew school. On Monday and Wednesday I came out of the whitestone building and went into the adjoining three-story brownstone for my graduate philosophy classes. It was a fine arrangement.

  During my last year in college I had attended the shiur given by Rav Gershenson. He
was a kind, gentle person in his late sixties, with a long, pointed gray beard, brown eyes, and a soft, often barely audible voice. He was the greatest Orthodox scholar of Talmud in the United States. He was also a magnificent teacher, and often I would sit in awe, watching the thrusting gyrations of his hands as they danced through the air, thumbs extended and carving invisible circles of emphasis for the explanations with which he would untangle a difficult inyan, or Talmudic discussion. I did not know anyone who had ever been in his class who did not speak of him with respect and love.

  Then Rav Jacob Kalman entered the school and was given the Chullin shiur. The Talmud tractate Chullin deals with the laws of ritual slaughter and with the dietary laws. A thorough knowledge of this tractate is one of the requirements for Orthodox ordination. I entered Rav Kalman’s shiur.

  No one seemed to know anything about Rav Kalman beyond the facts that he had been a teacher in one of the great yeshivoth in Vilna before the Second World War and had spent two years in a German concentration camp in northern Poland. But during the first few months after his arrival at Hirsch the corridors and the cafeteria buzzed with all kinds of rumors about him: his wife and three daughters had been shot by Storm Troopers in front of his eyes in a wood outside of Warsaw; he had escaped from a concentration camp, been caught, and escaped again; he had crossed the Polish frontier into Russia and fought with Russian partisans for a year. One rumor had it that he had organized a group of Orthodox Jewish partisans that specialized in blowing up the tracks of German trains carrying Jews to the concentration camps. Another rumor had it that he had been concealed in a bunker for more than a year by a Polish farm family, had been discovered, had been forced to watch the execution of the family, and had somehow escaped again. He was said to have made his way across northern Russia into Siberia and from there to Shanghai, where he had waited out the war under the eyes of the Japanese, who were not possessed of Hitler’s feelings toward Jews and who left the few Jews under their rule alone. According to this version of the life of Rav Kalman, he was brought to America by the administration of Hirsch University and was promptly invited to teach in the rabbinical department.