Pain woke me. Someone’s hand was on my foot and the pain of its touch sent flashes of reddish light into my eyes. Well, what has the scholar done to himself now? said the cheerful voice of Dr. Weidman. My eyes were closed against the horror on my parents’ faces and my brother’s bewildered and frightened gaze. I see what the scholar has done, said Dr. Weidman, suddenly no longer cheerful. The scholar should use his brains for practical matters too, he said almost angrily, or the scholar will not survive to a happy old age. Would the scholar like to tell me what happened? It was an accident! someone screamed. I didn’t know my foot kicked the sharp points in the yeshiva fence! It was an accident! I opened my eyes and wondered why they were all staring at me. Of course, someone soothed. Of course. I was hot and sweaty and Dr. Weidman was doing things to my leg that hurt and I cried. I closed my eyes. The pain was all up my leg and deep into my groin. Alex was sent from the room. They were talking together quietly near the window. I saw them through the slits of my eyes, my parents and Dr. Weidman, standing silhouetted against the window and talking. It was queer the way my father kept glaring at me in horror and disbelief and my mother kept wringing her hands and Dr. Weidman kept talking very quietly. They were making plans. They would do things to me. They were talking about me and would do things to me and they would not ask me if they could do them. No one felt it necessary to ask David. Everyone knew what David was and could do what they wanted with him. What would Dr. Weidman do? I would not let him take me to a hospital. I was terrified of leaving my room and my bed. My mouth was dry and my tongue felt thick and gummy. I was burning with fever and could not understand it because my nose and throat felt fine. My head hurt and my eyes ached. That’s from the fever, I told myself. You’re not sick. The fever is from the leg, not the nose and throat. That kind of fever doesn’t count. But the fever was burning inside me and in the night it was worse. I knew I was gasping and crying in the night but I could not hear my voice. I heard my mother’s voice chanting incoherent words. I kept my eyes closed but the redness of the fever was still clearly there despite the night. “Ochnotinos, chnotinos, notinos,” I heard my mother chant, and I shouted at her to please please stop it and go away. Sha, my father soothed. Sha, my son. My mother rushed from the room and returned a moment later with something in her hands. They sponged my body with a cool tingling liquid. My leg pulsed and throbbed. I could not move it. The pain was in my ankle and knee and thigh and groin. They put warm compresses on the wound and gave me aspirin. After a long while I grew very weary. The warm odors of the bakery ovens filled the room. Finally, I slept.
Later there was sunlight and my mother tried to feed me and I vomited on the bed and the floor. Afterward I lay trembling and sweating in fresh pajamas and the sour odor of vomit would not leave the room. Through the open window I saw the brick wall of the adjoining house and a sliver of pale sky. Then I was very hot again and the burning redness returned to my eyes, moving slowly back and forth, shimmering. I saw a red lake beneath an ash-gray sky. Along the edge of the lake wavelets of yellow fire lapped against a grass beach. A boat moved slowly near the shore, its single occupant bent over a book. David, someone called. The person in the boat looked up into the dull yellow sun that lay like a collapsed ball in the sky. Which David? the person in the boat said. David, someone called again. The boat drifted slowly from the shore. Which David? said the occupant of the boat, staring into the sun. David, came the call. David. The boat was very far from the shore. The occupant stood up. He was short and slight of build and wore a dark robe and cowl. Which David? he called back, speaking into the sun, his arms raised, his hands open. The demon David? The evil eye David? The darling David? The brain David? The arrogant spiteful David? The frightened David? Which David? The boat drifted off slowly, the occupant still standing and speaking into the sun. The cowl slipped from his head, revealing yellowish eyes and pale dim features and long dark tangled hair.
They kept putting warm compresses on my foot and giving me aspirin. I lay burning in my bed, the leg like something evil connected to me, causing me pain I could not bear. Maybe they would cut it off, I thought in my fever and pain. I cried out and felt my mother’s fingers stroking my face and head. Sha, my darling. Sha. You will be all right. Master of the Universe, bring him a complete healing. David, are you listening to me? Look at the son who bears your name and intercede for him. David. David. Do you hear me? Sha, my son. I promise you will be all right. David, intercede for me. David! She stroked my forehead and sat murmuring in the darkness. A train charged through the night. The odor of baking bread began drifting into the room. I fell asleep. There was daylight and the long journey of the sun and once again the night.
It was morning and Dr. Weidman was in the room again talking quietly with my parents. A week, he said. At the very most two. But he must eat. Yes, he said. Lymphatics, he said. No, he said. He is better off here. I watched him come back to the bed. How does the scholar feel? he asked cheerfully. Terrible? I would feel terrible too if I had your leg. But we will make you all better soon. And next time, if there ever is a next time, God forbid, David the scholar will not be so silly. All right? Does this hurt? And this? And this? Some brain. The head of a golem is what you have, if you’ll excuse my saying so. No, you must absolutely not move the leg. Read? Of course you can read if you can keep your eyes on a book for more than five minutes. He has a fever of one hundred four and he wants to read. Some brain. Continue the compresses and the aspirin. If the swelling gets worse, call me. And give him something to eat, Ruth. I will cure him and all that will remain will be a sack full of bones. Some cure. Goodbye. Come with me to the door, Max. I want to talk to you.
The fever dropped. My uncle came to visit. And my aunt. And Saul. They stood around the bed, trying to be cheerful. Dread lay across their faces like a dark fog. Mr. Bader came. He sat on a chair next to the bed. Never mind the silliness of what you did. It was an error. Now get well. You must get well. Are you going away soon, Mr. Bader? Yes. I turned my face to the wall.
Yaakov Bader came and stood uncomfortably near my bed, his dark eyes filled with kindness and concern. He fidgeted and stared around the room and talked and was gone.
The fever rose toward evening and there was a pounding in my head; I could not move my head or blink my eyes. I lay very still, feeling the raging of the fever. Sometime during that night I found myself in a green forest near a calm lake. The air was cool and clean and blue. I walked through the forest, calling out the names of the trees. My mother was with me, smiling, her eyes clear and bright as she listened. How still and cool the air was! Something flitted between the trees in the heart of the forest. It was gone. Then it was there again, a vague form moving lightly from tree to tree, coming toward us. My mother stopped and put a hand to her eyes. She removed the hand and her face glowed luminously with a joy that lighted the trees around us. The form moved among the trees, and I stopped, waiting, my heart pounding. Behind me my mother sighed. The form stepped out from behind a maple and my mother went soundlessly toward it and I saw them go off toward the grove of birch near the lake. I was hurt. Why hadn’t my mother said, This is David, my son. I would have loved to have been able to meet you, Uncle David, I heard myself say. I would have become your best friend. Be your own David, murmured the sweet gentle voice from the trees near the lake. Make your own beginning, my precious son.
I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
I was ill for close to six weeks and when I was well it was July and very hot. I sat outside on my chair in the sun, my leg propped up on a second chair, and dozed and read and dozed some more. My legs had not supported me when I came down off my bed the first day. I walked holding tightly to my parents’ arms and it was as if I were learning to walk all over again. I looked into a mirror and did not know who I was.
I slept a lot that summer, often outside on the chair in the sun. I had lost eight pounds during the illness. Alex brought me books to read from the library. Sometimes Eddie Kulanski went past me, walki
ng lightly on the balls of his feet and saying nothing. But I was too weary to care about Eddie Kulanski. He was all burned out of me. After a while it was almost as if I had never known him.
I sat in the sun and watched people enter and leave the shoe repair store. My father’s little business was doing well. Toward the end of the summer he began to talk about opening up a store of his own somewhere nearby. His face beamed and he rubbed his fingers thoughtfully against the cheek with the scar. “Little by little,” he said. “Slowly. Patiently. We will rebuild it, Ruth.” My mother nodded and smiled. In the evening, when he was away at his meetings, she sat in the kitchen writing letters.
In the fall I returned to school and in the late spring, three weeks before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, I was graduated. Mr. Bader returned to the States briefly the next January, looking thin and tired, but well dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie, his brown hair smoothly combed and parted in the middle. How was I doing with my studies? he wanted to know. I was doing well in high school and studying Bible on my own. He listened to me talk eagerly about Jeremiah and patted my arm. My father nodded approvingly. A faint knowing smile flickered upon my mother’s thin lips. He left for Europe a few weeks later. When he returned to the States in January of the following year I was shamefacedly unable to report to him significant further progress in Bible. My high school studies were proving difficult enough to be interesting and were taking up a lot of my time. He seemed disappointed and hurt.
“You’ve done almost nothing in Bible since I saw you last,” he said.
“It’s been a hard year. I was sick a lot.”
“You’ve been sick a lot before, David.”
We studied together. But it was no longer as it had been before. Much of the excitement was out of it. He left for Europe in March, two weeks after German troops marched into Austria.
That fall, one month after the Munich Agreement delivered Czechoslovakia to Germany, my uncle and aunt traveled to Palestine and were gone ten weeks. Saul moved into the yeshiva dormitory and I rarely saw him. He had grown into a tall thin tense person with thick glasses and a squinting gaze. He would be a teacher of Talmud one day; that was clear enough. He had begun to smoke.
I did not know why my uncle and aunt had chosen that time to go to Palestine, for there were riots and demonstrations and shootings there all the time now. They had a job to take care of, my father said in response to my question, and would say no more. It had to do with Zionist politics, Saul told me. Something about the Revisionist organization. My mother shook her head nervously, murmured some words about having to build things with patience, and told me it was late, I had to go to bed, did I want to get sick again.
I was ill periodically. Dr. Weidman began to talk about surgery. They were waiting until they could be certain I had stopped growing. I dreaded the prospect of surgery. It was a darkness somewhere in the future and I would not let myself think about it.
Early in 1939, Mr. Bader returned from Europe and I studied Ezekiel with him for a number of months. But the passion for Bible was all gone from me now. The yeshiva I attended emphasized Talmud; Bible was not even taught. You were expected to review the weekly Torah reading by yourself. Whatever Bible most of the yeshiva students knew they remembered from the verses cited in their volumes of Talmud.
“They laugh at you in my yeshiva when you talk too much about Bible,” I told him. “They think it’s for children or for a few hours on a Shabbos afternoon. They only want you to study Gemara.”
“Yes,” he said soberly. “I’m familiar with that yeshiva attitude toward the Bible. I thought you might have been able to overcome it.”
At the end of one of our sessions he handed me a pamphlet entitled Persecution—Jewish and Christian and Let Us Consider the Record by the Reverend Chas. E. Coughlin.
“We talked about him once,” he said. “You ought to read this. In America the poison is only words so far. In Europe it is already killing Jews. Take it home and read it, David.”
I took it home and read it and heard echoes of its hate all around me as I walked the streets of my neighborhood.
That September Germany invaded Poland. Five weeks later Mr. Bader left for Lisbon.
Suddenly, very suddenly, that fall there were no more letters to my mother from her family in Europe. The last letter arrived around the end of September. It had been written in late August by her mother, a somber letter full of foreboding. “But we must have faith in the Master of the Universe,” she wrote. “Your father and I send you and Max and the children our wishes for a healthy and prosperous New Year. Kiss our grandchildren for us, my daughter. Perhaps one day they will be able to see the farm. It has been a hot summer but we have had plenty of rain and the trees in the forest are beautiful.” The mail service to and from the conquered areas of Eastern Europe was terminated. My mother could no longer write to her family in Poland. She continued writing letters to Palestine. She wept easily that fall and winter, and would lapse into strange staring silences during which she seemed to hear and see nothing around her. The silences deepened and grew lengthier as the Nazi darkness spread itself across Europe.
SIX
The yeshiva building occupied an entire block in a gentile neighborhood in upper Manhattan. It had been built in the late nineteen twenties. Its facade was of reddish stone and veined light gray marble; it had spacious windows and a huge green dome that rested upon a sky blue base made decorous with golden arabesques. The building housed a parochial high school and college and a rabbinical seminary. It had been built by Eastern European Orthodox Jews who wanted their American-born children to achieve a synthesis of Torah and modern secular learning. I attended that school for ten years of my life.
It stood on a bluff overlooking the Harlem River. Across from the school was a narrow terracelike park with benches and paved walks and small islands of grass. A stone parapet bordered the outer edge of the park. Beyond the parapet was the brush-covered rock-strewn side of the bluff that dropped about two hundred feet to the roadway and river below. There was a path down the bluff to the river but you did not take it unless you were sure of yourself as a climber. In my junior year in high school one of my classmates tried it alone one afternoon and fell. He was unable to move and no one heard his cries. He lay injured through the night and was not missed until morning. The police found him dead near the boulder that had broken his fall. There was an assembly of the entire school. We were warned not to descend the bluff to the river.
We could see the river from the school and the park. It ran wide and slow and dark. Along the opposite shore were a lumberyard and a shantytown and railroad tracks. Toward the south was the stone and steel bridge that connected this part of Manhattan to the Bronx. North of us the river followed languidly the curving shoreline of Manhattan as its waters branched off from the choppy expanse of the Hudson. We could not see the Hudson from the school.
In the morning I concentrated on Talmud; in the afternoon I studied secular subjects. My Talmud teachers were rabbis who had been trained in the yeshivas of Eastern Europe; the secular teachers were Americans and Europeans who had been trained in colleges and universities. All the secular teachers were Jews but many of them did not observe the commandments. The Talmud teachers were rigid adherents of Jewish Orthodoxy. Many of them wished they could be teaching in one of the other yeshivas in New York where secular studies beyond the state-required minimum were forbidden.
All through my first three years in that yeshiva I studied only Talmud in the morning. Bible was not offered as a course of study. During the first semester of my senior year, this deficiency must have been noticed by someone in the administration and a course in Song of Songs began to be taught one hour a week by a man brought in from the Teachers’ Institute, the department that trained Hebrew teachers. This department was regarded as the embodiment of frivolity and light-headedness by the students of Talmud, and as a breeding ground for apikorsim, Jews who are knowledgeable in Jewish stud
ies but who deny the divine origin of the Torah. The hour given to Song of Songs was taken from the Thursday Talmud class. This abridgment of Talmud time was deeply resented by the zealous Talmudists in my class. They flaunted their resentment in the face of the helpless Bible teacher by using the class to catch up on the news during that first fall of the war. The desks of that class were black and white with The New York Times and the New York Post; the air of that class was on occasion dense with newspaper sounds. Song of Songs, despite the vaunted authorship of King Solomon, could not compete effectively with the news about the German conquest of Poland. The teacher spoke bravely into the dead air of inattention.
He was a short, thin, mild-tempered man in his fifties, with a bald head, a graying mustache, and thick glasses. He spoke in a soft voice made virtually inaudible by the whispers, coughs, and newspaper noises in the class. I would sit in the front row directly before his desk trying to listen while all around me was the rainfall of indifferent disturbance. He was not a bad teacher if you were willing to be taught. From time to time he would appeal in a timorous voice for silence. The class would be quiet for a few minutes; then, slowly, the level of noise would begin to rise. He would order that the newspapers be put away; they would disappear, then reappear, at first surreptitiously, then openly. He would threaten to report the class to the administration; an empty and futile threat, for we all knew that no Talmud student in our school would be punished for not studying Song of Songs. Toward the end of the first month of that class, he was teaching only four or five interested students, who sat near his desk, while the other twenty or so students sat scattered throughout the large airy second-floor room waiting impatiently for the hour to end. It bothered me to see the teacher so brazenly offended and I lost patience one Thursday afternoon when a student sitting some rows behind me loudly riffled his newspaper while turning a page. In the corridor after the class I told him I didn’t care if he wanted to remain an ignoramus in Bible, but he was going to have to stop disturbing those who were serious about the class.