Chaim Potok - The Chosen

I was frightened and said tightly, 'Your home hasn't blown up recently, so I take it you haven't told your father.'

'No, I haven't. And I'm not going to, either. Not yet.'

'When will you tell him? Because I'm going to be out of town that day.'

'No,' he said quietly. 'I'm going to need you around that day.'

'I was only kidding,' I told him, feeling sick with dread.

'It also occurred to me recently that all my concern about my brother's health was a fake. I don't have much of a relationship with him at all He's such a kid. I pity him a little, that's all. I was really concerned about his health because all along I've wanted him to be able to take my father's place. That was something all right, when I realized that. How am I doing? Are you bored yet?'

'I'm bored stiff,' I said. 'I can't wait until the day you tell your father.'

'You'll wait,' Danny said tightly, blinking his eyes. 'You'll wait, and you'll be around, too, because I'm going to need you.'

'Let's talk about your sister for a change,' I said.

'I heard you the first time. Let's not talk about my sister, if you don't mind. Let's talk about my father. You want to know how I feel about my father? I admire him. I don't know what he's trying to do to me with this weird silence that he's established between us, but I admire him. I think he's a great man. I respect him and trust him completely, which is why I think I can live with his silence. I don't know why I trust him, but I do. And I pity him, too. Intellectually, he's trapped. He was born trapped. I don't ever want to be trapped the way he's trapped. I want to be able to breathe, to think what I want to think, to say the things I want to say. I'm trapped now, too. Do you know what it's like to be trapped?'

I shook my head slowly.

'How could you possibly know?' Danny said. 'It's the most hellish, choking, constricting feeling in the world. I scream with every bone in my body to get out of it. My mind cries to get out of it. But I can't. Not now. One day I will, though. I'll want you around on that day, friend. I'll need you around on that day.'

I didn't say anything. We sat in silence a long time. Then Danny slowly closed the Freud book he had been reading. 'My sister's been promised,' he told me quietly.

'What?'

'My father promised my sister to the son of one of his followers when she was two years old. It's an old Hasidic custom to promise children away. She'll be married when she reaches eighteen. I think we ought to go over and visit your father now.'

That was the only time Danny and I ever talked about his sister.

A week later. I went up with my father to our cottage near Peekskill. While we were there, America destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, and the war with Japan came to an end.

I didn't tell my father about that last conversation I had with Danny, and I had many nightmares that year in which Reb Saunders screamed at me that I had poisoned his son's mind.

That September Danny and I entered Hirsch College. I had grown to five feet nine inches, an inch shorter than Danny, and I was shaving. Danny hadn't changed much physically during his last year in high school. The only thing different about him was that he was now wearing glasses.

By the end of our first week in college, Danny was feeling thoroughly miserable. He had discovered that psychology in the Samson Raphael Hirsch Seminary and College meant experimental psychology only, and that the chairman of the department, Professor Nathan Appleman, had an intense distaste for psychoanalysis in general and for Freud in particular.

Danny was quite vocal about his feelings toward Professor Appleman and experimental psychology. We would meet in the mornings in front of my synagogue and walk from there to the trolley, and for two months he did nothing during those morning trolley rides except talk about the psychological textbook he was reading – he didn't say 'studying', he said 'reading' – and the rats and mazes in the psychology laboratory. 'The next thing you know they'll stick me with a behaviourist.' he lamented. 'What do rats and mazes have to do with the mind?'

I wasn't sure I knew what a behaviorist was, and I didn't want to make him more miserable by asking him. I felt a little sorry for him, mostly because I had found college to be exciting and was thoroughly enjoying my books and my teachers, while he seemed to be going deeper and deeper into misery.

The building that housed the college stood on Bedford Avenue.

It was a six-story building, and it occupied half a block of a busy store filled street. The noise of the traffic on the street came clearly through the windows and into our classrooms. Behind the college was a massive brownstone armory, and a block away, across the street, was a Catholic church with a huge cross on its lawn upon which was the crucified figure of Jesus. In the evenings, a green spotlight shone upon the cross, and we could see it clearly from the stone stairs in front of the college.

The street floor of the building consisted of administrative offices, an auditorium, and a large synagogue, a section of which contained chairs and long tables. The entire second floor was a library, a beautiful library, with mazelike stacks that reminded me of the third floor of the library in which Danny and I had spent so much time together. It had bright fluorescent lights that didn't flicker or change color, I noticed immediately the first time I walked in – and a trained, professional library staff. It also contained a large reading room, with long tables, chairs, a superb collection of reference books, and an oil painting of Samson Raphael Hirsch which was prominently displayed on a white wall – Hirsch had been a well-known Orthodox rabbi in Germany during the last century and had fought intelligently through his writings and preachings against the Jewish Reform movement of his day. The third and fourth floors had whitepainted, modern classrooms and large, well-equipped chemistry, physics and biology laboratories. There were also classrooms on the fifth floor, as well as a psychology laboratory, which contained rats, mazes, screens, and a variety of instruments for the measuring of auditory and visual responses. The sixth floor consisted of dormitory rooms for the out-of-town students.

It was a rigidly Orthodox school, with services three times a day and with European-trained rabbis, many of them in long, dark coats, all of them bearded. For the first part of the day, from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon, we studied only Talmud. From three-fifteen to six-fifteen or seven-fifteen, depending on the schedule of classes we had chosen for ourselves, we went through a normal college curriculum. On Fridays from nine to one, we attended the college; on Sundays, during that same time span, we studied Talmud.

I found that I liked this class arrangement very much; it divided my work neatly and made it easy for me to concentrate separately upon Talmud and college subjects. The length of the school day, though, was something else; I was frequently awake until one in the morning, doing homework. Once my father came into my room at ten minutes to one, found me memorizing the section on river flukes from my biology textbook, asked me if I was trying to do four years of college all at once, and told me to go to bed right away. I went to bed – half an hour later, when I had finished the memorizing.

Danny's gloom and frustration grew worse day by day, despite the fact that the students in his Talmud class looked upon him with open-mouthed awe. He had been placed in Rav Gershenson's class, the highest in the school, and I had been placed one class below. He was the talk of the Talmud Department by the end of two weeks and the accepted referee of all Talmudic arguments among the students. He was also learning a great deal from Rav Gershenson, who, as Danny put it, loved to spend at least three days on every two lines he taught. He had quickly become the leader of the few Hasidic students in the school, the ones who walked around wearing dark suits, tieless shirts, beards, fringes, and earlocks. About half of my high school class had entered the college, and I became friendly enough with many of the other non-Hasidic students. I didn't mix much with the Hasidim, but the extent to which they revered Danny was obvious to everyone. They clung to him as though he were the reincarnation of the Besht, as though he were their student tzaddik, so to speak. But none of this made him too happy; none of it was able to offset his frustration over Professor Appleman, who, by the time the first semester ended, had him so thoroughly upset that he began to talk about majoring in some other subject. He just couldn't see himself spending four years running rats through mazes and checking human responses to blinking lights and buzzing sounds, he told me. He had received a B for his semester's work in psychology because he had messed up some math equations on the final examination. He was disgusted. What did experimental psychology have to do with the human mind? he wanted to know.