I woke in a lake of blood. Grayish light came through the windows. I saw my pillow soaked with blood. I could not move; a vast weariness had settled upon me all its mountainous weight. I thought to call out; but two nurses were suddenly beside me, holding me and changing the pillow. I lay back and once again fell into a deep sleep.
I was in a forest and a wind moaned through the trees and I woke and listened to the old man wheezing and coughing in the bed next to mine. It was night. He coughed and choked and breathed hollowly through the tube in his throat. I slept again and when I woke it was still night. I thought of the beach and the lake and my mother reading beneath the elm tree. A warm breeze blew across the tall grass and rippled the surface of the water. Saul was in a boat on the water reading a book. Alex was in the tall grass searching for frogs. A horse and rider came up the dirt path from the main road.
I woke sharply. Two forms in white had come to change my bandages.
Later that day I was helped from the bed by an orderly and found I could barely walk. My legs melted beneath me. In all the years of my illness and accidents I had never felt as weak as I felt now. He helped me to walk. In the bathroom mirror I saw a pale haggard face into which were set two eyes surrounded by skin that had turned a sickly blue-black color. The thick bandage gleamed in the mirror. I turned quickly away, shaken. Later I lay in my bed and slept. A nurse woke me and did things to my body. I turned my head slightly at her command and noticed that the bed next to me was empty and the old man was gone.
I was in the hospital a week. They all came to visit: my parents, Alex, my aunt and uncle, Saul, wearing stiff smiles designed to conceal their shock at the sight of my bandaged face and blackened eyes.
“The doctor is satisfied,” my father said. “It went well.”
“We are all going to the country and you will be able to rest,” said my aunt.
“We took two bungalows,” said my mother. She did not look at me as she spoke.
Alex kept glancing at me and looking away. Saul stood, at the foot of the bed, pale with shock, a queer fixed smile on his thin face.
“You have been through a lot,” my aunt said. “You need a rest.”
“We have all been through a lot,” said my mother.
I came home and spent a week in the house. Toward the end of that week I returned to the outpatient clinic of the hospital and had the stitches removed. I looked in a mirror and barely knew who I was. My face was pale, emaciated; a greenish pallor lay in the hollows of my cheeks; the broken ridge of the nose and ugly bulge of cartilaginous tissue had been repaired; patches of coagulated blood still showed beneath the skin around my eyes. I slept a great deal and sat in the park reading. The sun warmed my face. At the end of the second week in August we left the city.
I rested and had a pleasant time. Our bungalow was on the shore of a small lake. My aunt and uncle and Saul had a bungalow a few yards away from us. There were trees and a sand beach. The weather was warm and sunny. There were thunderstorms twice while we were there but they came in the late evening and did not upset the day. Saul and I lounged around reading or went rowing out on the lake. He liked to row and I sat in the boat with my book. “Why are you reading that stuff, Davey?” he asked me one day in a mournful tone. “You’re getting in deeper and deeper.” “Watch out where you’re rowing,” I said. “You’re getting shallower and shallower.” Alex swam and read novels and went horseback riding with my father over at a nearby stable. My uncle lay in the sun. My mother and aunt sat in the shade, talking; sometimes they put on bathing suits and went into the water. One hot day I entered the water and my uncle taught me to float and breathe and kick. Then he taught me the crawl. I had forgotten most of what my father had once taught me about swimming.
One morning my father invited me to go horseback riding with him and Alex. We were having breakfast. I saw my mother give me an anxious look. I thanked him and said I did not think I would like it.
“How do you know what you won’t like until you try it?”
“I’m a little afraid,” I said.
“It’s fun, Davey,” Alex said.
But I would not go. Later I saw them cantering through a grassy field beyond the lake and I marveled at the swiftness with which Alex had learned to ride.
“He rides well, your brother.”
I turned. My mother had come up silently behind me. We stood beneath the plane tree in front of the bungalow, gazing across the small lake and watching them ride.
After a while I heard my mother say, “How do you feel, David?”
I told her I felt fine.
“You look well,” she said, and let her eyes move slowly across my face. “You look—” She turned her eyes away. “You look rested,” she murmured, her pale face flushing slightly.
The following morning my father again invited me to go horseback riding with him. I declined.
“God in heaven, David, the whole world is not only books and books. There are other things too.”
He was angry. We all stared at him. My mother’s lips quivered.
I said I would go with him. My mother gave me a panicky look but remained silent.
Later that morning I walked with my father and Alex along a curving dirt path through fields of wild grass. Grasshoppers jumped and whirred through the warm air. I do not remember what we talked about. I was tense and sweaty and wished I had not acceded to my father’s request. Why was he so eager to have me ride a horse? The fields fell away and we crossed a meadow. A low white-painted stable lay a few yards beyond a draw. We skirted the draw and came up to the peeling white wooden posts of the corral. A man in jeans and boots and a wide-brimmed straw hat came out of the stable. The odor of dung and horses was very strong. I remember the three horses he and my father brought out. I remember the ease with which Alex slipped a leg into the stirrup and mounted. I remember sitting on my horse and feeling astonished at how high I was. I remember feeling the horse moving slowly beneath me. My father was talking to me. I remember the sun on my face and head and my hands sweating and Alex riding off by himself somewhere and my father still talking to me. I remember very little else. We walked back to the bungalow through the fields. I could still smell the odor of the dung and the sweat of the horses. I swam and lay on the beach in the sun and thought I could still feel myself moving on the horse.
The next morning my father asked me again if I wanted to go horseback riding with him and Alex.
“No,” I said.
“You did not enjoy it?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I just don’t care for it.”
“You looked pretty good on that horse, Davey,” Alex said.
“Come with us,” said my father.
“I’ve had my thrill,” I said. “Leave me alone.”
He looked at me. A sudden electric silence filled the kitchen. My mother’s face drained of color. He said, explosively, “Don’t you dare talk to me that way!”
“I’m sorry. I apologize. Please. I have no interest in horses.”
He finished the meal in a raging silence. Then he quickly chanted the grace and left. Alex followed him out.
“David,” my mother murmured, turning to me.
“It’s okay, Mama. Don’t worry. It’s okay. No more horses.”
“Don’t make him angry at you, David. Please.”
“I understand. It’ll be okay, Mama. I promise.”
She came out of the bungalow a while later and walked over to where I was sitting on the beach. There was a warm wind and I heard it in the trees. She stood facing the lake. The sun shone upon her pale features. I heard the wind loudly in the trees.
“Do you remember their names?” she asked softly.
“Names?”
“Of the trees.” She seemed shy, hesitant.
“Yes.”
She smiled deeply. “He never forgot the names,” she murmured. After a moment she turned to me. “Your father loved his brother very much,” she said. “He wa
s also very jealous of him. Of his—mind.”
“I understand,” I said.
“No, you do not understand at all,” she said. “But I am happy you remember the trees.”
She turned and went slowly back inside the bungalow.
Later I saw my father and brother in the field beyond the lake. They rode to the edge of the lake and let their horses drink. Alex saw me and waved. I waved back. My father ignored me. Saul and my uncle lay sleeping on a blanket; my mother and my aunt sat in wicker chairs beneath the plane tree. I sat on the beach and went back to reading Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel. I had finished the Hertz Commentary and was reading the scholars Hertz had attacked.
We returned to the city in a heat wave. I sat in the small synagogue on Rosh Hashanah. My father led the Morning Service, his stocky frame garbed in white, his voice firm and strong. The white-bearded old man read the Torah and left desolation in his wake. The heat wave continued. In the days that followed Rosh Hashanah, I sat in the park beneath a tree, reading. In the last week of September I started my third year of college and chose history as my major subject. One Shabbat afternoon in late December I looked up from the German book I was reading and gazed out my window at the falling snow. I realized with quiet astonishment that I had not been ill since the summer.
All through that winter, as the German advance into Russia and North Africa was finally halted, I read German books on Bible scholarship. I could not read them in my father’s presence. If I was in the living room with a German book and he came in with his newspaper, I would have to leave and continue reading in my own room. Once I brought into the living room the Moses Mendelssohn translation of the Bible into German—one of the books given to me by Mrs. Horowitz. It made no difference to my father that it was the Bible and that the translation had been done by the greatest German Jewish scholar of the eighteenth century; he told me to take the book from the room. Another time I brought in a book on midrash and preaching from the times of the Prophets up to the modern period—another volume left to me by Mrs. Horowitz. The book was in German and he ordered me to remove it from his presence. I told him the author, Leopold Zunz, had been one of the greatest German Jewish historians of the last century. He asked me if I was reading the book for school. I told him I was reading it for myself. He told me the German Jewish scholars of the last century had been responsible for the destruction of Torah Judaism. He did not want to be in the same room with anything German. I brought the book into my room and read it at my desk.
On Friday afternoon I would come out of school after my English classes and take the subway to the 42d Street library. I would bring back with me books for Shabbat reading. He sent me out of the living room late one Shabbat afternoon in March and I went angrily into my room where, unlike the living room, we did not leave a light burning all through Shabbat. I read by the dying light of the day until my eyes would no longer focus on the page.
“You’re lucky you don’t love Goethe,” I told Alex one night.
“Nothing lucky about it,” he responded with a thin smile.
“My lousy luck scientific Bible criticism was started by German goyim.”
“Your lousy luck will get lousier if you keep reading this stuff, Davey.”
“What do you mean?”
“I hear talk in school.”
“What talk?”
“Someone heard two of the Talmud teachers talking about you.”
“I have to read these Germans if I’m going to answer them back.”
“Are you planning to answer them back, Davey?”
“I don’t know enough to answer anyone back.”
“Why bother?”
“Why? Why? Listen to this and you’ll understand why. Listen to how they sneak the anti-Semitism in even when what they’re saying has nothing to do with the text they’re commenting on. Listen.”
I read to him from Theologie des Alten Testament by Walther Eichrodt, translating as I went along:
“It was not until in later Judaism a religion of harsh observances had replaced the religion of the Old Testament that Sabbath changed from a blessing to a burdensome duty.”
“How about that?” I said. “Isn’t that beautiful? Shabbos is ‘a burdensome duty.’ And listen to this.”
I read to him from an earlier page of the same book a passage dealing with what the author called “the powerful and purposive movement in the Old Testament.” Alex sat propped up against the wall near his bed, listening halfheartedly.
“This movement does not come to rest until the manifestation of Christ, in whom the noblest powers of the Old Testament find their fulfillment. Negative evidence in support of this statement is afforded by the torsolike appearance of Judaism in separation from Christianity.”
I looked up at Alex. “How do you like being called a torso?”
“I’ve been called worse things than that by goyim.”
“But he’s supposed to be a great scholar, Alex.”
“Didn’t the Jewish scholars answer them back?”
“The Jewish scholars in the last century wrote almost nothing about the Torah.”
“They were smart. They had good Jewish heads. Who cares what those anti-Semitic goyim say?”
“That’s not the reason. They were afraid of what the Jews would say.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Some of the Jewish scholars thought the goyim were right.”
“About what?”
“That the Torah was created by Jews and not by God.”
He sat up very straight and looked at me. “Don’t play around,” he said. “What are you trying to do?”
“I’m not playing around, Alex. I’m reading.”
“Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Jews are dying for a Torah created by men?”
I did not respond.
“You ought to take that stuff and flush it down the toilet,” he said. “The best way to answer an anti-Semite is with your fist, not by reading the garbage he puts out. You read enough garbage about anything, you begin to believe it. And you better not bring those books to school anymore, Davey.”
“Why not?”
“Because my name is also Lurie and I don’t want any trouble. I don’t have your brains and I sweat for every A I get. I don’t want problems.”
“Who’s going to make problems for you?”
“My friends are asking me why you’re reading these books. I like having friends. And I don’t want any of the Talmud teachers to start thinking your books are rubbing off on me.”
“Oh, come on, Alex.”
“No, you come on, Davey. You’re so buried in books you don’t see what’s going on right in front of your nose. Are you waiting for a personal invitation from the registrar for a private talk?”
I stared at him. He was angry. His face was flushed and his lower jaw jutted forward sharply.
“It’s not that kind of a yeshiva,” I said. “What are you talking about? The yeshivas you’re talking about are downtown and in Brooklyn.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Let someone else find out for sure. I want to graduate and not have problems. Keep your books in the house.”
I was bewildered by his words and I promised him I would think about it. The next day Yaakov Bader told me that some of the members of our class had approached him and requested that he speak to me about not bringing the German books on Bible criticism to the school anymore.
I stared at him. “I can’t believe it,” I heard myself say.
He gazed at me sadly. “It’s true, Davey.”
Now I was angry. “Who the hell do they think they are?”
He made an effort to calm me. “They all have families in Europe, Davey.”
“So do I have family in Europe.”
“But it’s the Torah, Davey. It’s not just any kind of book. You’re reading how the Germans take apart the Torah.”
I told him no one had a right to tell me what I could
and could not read. I wanted to think about it, I said. On the bus back home that evening, I decided to read the German books at home and to take with me books on the Bible written in English. As I rode past my father’s store, I saw it was very crowded. My father and mother stood behind the counter, waiting on customers. My father was laughing at something one of the customers had said. I looked away and closed my eyes.
That Shabbat afternoon my father came from his bedroom into the living room and sat down in his easy chair. His face wore the residue of his nap. He yawned and took up his paper and looked at me. I was reading an English book. Alex sat on the couch inside Moby Dick. My mother was still napping. The volume I held in my hand was titled The Book of Genesis by S. R. Driver, an English Bible scholar whose writings had been consulted by Hertz in the preparation of his Commentary. I looked at my father and remembered a passage I had read in this book a few hours earlier and I turned back to reread it:
It follows that the Bible cannot in every part, especially not in its early parts, be read precisely as it was read by our forefathers. We live in a light which they did not possess, but which it has pleased the Providence of God to shed around us; and if the Bible is to retain its authority and influence among us, it must be read in this light, and our beliefs about it must be adjusted and accommodated accordingly. To utilize, as far as we can, the light in which we live, is, it must be remembered, not a privilege only, but a duty.
I read the passage a third time, then flipped back to the chapter I had been reading when my father had entered the room. The chapter was called “The Historical Character of the Deluge.” A few minutes later my father rose and, without a word, went to the kitchen. Alex and I looked at each other. I heard my father pouring himself a glass of tea. He did not return to the living room.
I returned home very late that night from a date with a Brooklyn girl. Alex was asleep. I undressed quietly and sat at my desk for a while, reading. Someone came softly into the room and stood in the shadows beyond the light from my desk lamp. I looked up from the book and saw my mother. She had on her light green housecoat. Her face was pale and dim; her hair was combed out and long.