I studied Talmud with Saul or alone. Alex read novels and wrote stories and poems. I swam and went on long solitary walks through fields and woods, naming aloud the trees I saw, reciting to an occasional rabbit a Talmudic insight I had recently acquired, speaking to the birds that wheeled overhead. I spoke my heart to the world around me. My own immediate world was unapproachable and there was in me the need to speak, for they all saw me studying Talmud and were certain I was following in the path of Saul; and I burned with the shame of my betrayal of their trust. So I justified myself to the listening wind: You see, people have taken the book that I love and have emasculated it. We died for its ideas, and they have drained those ideas of life. Yet there is something in what those people claim; but they cannot have said it all. I stake my life on that. Listen to me, rabbit. The Torah is not the word of God to Moses at Sinai. But neither is it infantile stories and fables and legends and borrowed pagan myths. I love it, bird. I want to find out what it is. Am I crazy? I have to go to the secular world for new tools to find out what it is. My Orthodox world detests and is terrified of those tools. Do you understand? Does anyone understand besides Rav Sharfman? I want to know the truth about the beginnings of my people.
My mother said often that summer that her only consolation now was her children. At the kitchen table in the bungalow, she would lapse suddenly into silence, her face emptying of life. Then she would stir and smile faintly and gaze at me and Alex out of her large brown frightened eyes. I could not bear to look at the fear in them. It was like witnessing dread in the eyes of a child.
She said once, “If only one of them had survived. We could have talked about it. He could have shared it with me. Only one. I do not understand it, Max.”
“The goyim themselves do not understand it, Ruth,” said my father. “Who can understand what cannot even be imagined?” And his face stiffened with the permanent rage he carried within him now against all the gentile world. Through that rage he gazed with absolute indifference upon the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and the termination of the war in the Pacific.
We returned to the city in September. On the afternoon of Simchat Torah, after a night and morning of joyous dancing with the Torah scrolls in our little synagogue, I took Alex away from one of his novels and went with him for a walk in the park opposite our apartment. I told him that in the spring of the coming year I would be taking my ordination test and in September I would begin graduate studies for a doctorate in Oriental studies.
We were walking along the path between the rolling fields of grass. He stopped and gazed at me, puzzled. What did I mean, Oriental studies? he asked.
I explained to him that the study of Bible was part of the Oriental studies departments in many graduate schools.
“You’re going for a doctorate in Bible?” he said. “You’re going to study the Torah with goyim?”
“Jews and goyim.”
He was not angry; he was concerned. “My God, Davey. The yeshiva won’t give you smicha.”
I told him that would not be a problem.
“Is it worth it?” he asked. “You’ll be hurting yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Papa will get angry. You’ll lose all your friends. Is it worth it for stories?”
“What stories?”
“If you keep quiet, no one knows what you think. Why do you have to study it and publish books about it and make a fuss and get everyone upset?”
I stared at him.
“God, Davey, I read Darwin a while ago and it’s all a bunch of Sunday school stories. I get more out of a good novel. Why are you making such a fuss over it? Why don’t you go for a doctorate in history?”
I stared at him and did not know what to say. He prayed every morning, observed the commandments, went through all the motions. He had taken the more common road and I had not even been aware of his journey. And his observance of the commandments—it would probably all begin to disintegrate the day he left home. We had lived together as brothers all these years and neither of us had known of the other’s deepest intentions. It was strange and sad.
“I think you’re nuts,” he said. “But you’re my big brother and I’ll love you anyway. Now can we go home so I can get back to my book?”
He returned to his novel and to his normal routine. I would gaze in astonishment at the seriousness with which he conducted his charade. Sometimes he would hesitate as he put on his phylacteries in the morning and I would turn away, bewildered at my own inability to have seen before my eyes the swift vanishing of my brother’s faith. But he had covered it well; he continued to cover it well. And I said nothing.
One day in the fall I sat with Saul in the park across from the school and told him too. I had seen him that morning rushing to the high school class he taught and had asked him to meet me in the study hall. I wanted to talk to him, I said. We sat in the park and I looked at the river. An autumn wind blew coldly against my face and stung my eyes. I turned to him and told him and watched shock and sadness enter deep into his blue eyes. He drew his coat tightly around him. He listened in silence. I heard the wind in the dying autumn trees and inside my eyes saw the steep drop of the bluff and the path and the descent and the boulder and the sliding of stones and earth to the river below.
He said, very quietly, “You are going out to an evil culture.” He used the traditional Hebrew phrase for a Jew who abandons the tradition and becomes, in the eyes of that tradition, a renegade.
“No, Saul. Please.”
“I knew it would happen, Davey. You were never satisfied with answers people gave you. I knew, I knew. But it hurts.”
I was silent and without defense. For he was right; I was indeed moving away from his world.
We sat for a while looking at the river and listening to the wind. Dimly I saw myself walking with him along the curving paths of the zoo near which we had once lived. I closed my eyes. That had been so long ago; I could hardly remember it now.
“Saul.”
He looked at me, the sadness dark upon his thin narrow face.
“I’m trying to do two years of Talmud in one. Will you help me if I need it?”
“Sure,” he said. “Of course I’ll help you, Davey. What does one thing have to do with another? I’ll study Talmud with you any time you want.” He was quiet a moment. Then he shook his head. “Why does it have to be Bible, Davey? Can’t you go for anything else? Why Bible? You’ll hurt Yiddishkeit, Davey. You’ll affect lives.”
“I don’t love anything else enough to want to invest my life in it.”
He was silent. Then he asked, “Will you publish?”
“Yes.”
“Books and papers?”
“Yes.”
“About this piece of the Torah being from this date and that piece from that date? Things like that?”
“Yes.”
Again he was silent. He gazed at a cluster of leaves blowing in the wind around our feet. Then he looked up at me with defiance.
“It’s the Torah of Moses, Davey. With all my heart I believe that. If you teach anything else, you destroy it.”
I did not respond. A moment later he rose.
“I’ll help you with Talmud any time you want, Davey. I have a faculty meeting in a few minutes.” He hesitated. “Be careful what you write, Davey. It’s the Torah of God to Moses that you’ll be writing about.”
He walked slowly away in that stooped shuffling gait of his, bent forward slightly, his eyes upon the ground before him. I sat and looked at the river. It shone like cold silver in the pale afternoon sun. I shivered in the wind.
All through that winter I studied Talmud. From time to time I asked Saul for help. I would go to his apartment and we would study together in his room. I was studying the tractate Chullin, which deals with the dietary laws and the laws of ritual slaughter. It is a difficult tractate and he had already mastered it. He was very helpful to me. But as the weeks went by I began to notice a cooling of the relationship between
us. There were fewer intimacies volunteered by him; he appeared reluctant to give me the names of girls I might date. I do not know if he was fully aware of the slow drawing away from me that I felt him going through: no more of his easy dipping into the midrash; no more jokes and light gossip about members of the high school Talmud faculty. I had chosen to move out of that world; he was simply reacting naturally to my self-inflicted estrangement.
At the same time, Alex began to move toward me. Often deep into the night, with our lights off and the winter winds gusting along the street, he would share with me his dreams. He wanted to teach English literature; he wanted to write poems and novels. He hungered for the world he felt was being denied him by his tradition. He mocked what he called Jewish totems and tabus. He had read two books by Freud, one book on anthropology, and a work on comparative religion. And On the Origin of Species by Darwin.
“That one knocked me out, Davey,” he said into the darkness.
“When did you read it?”
“About half a year ago. It really knocked me out. Six days of creation. Sure.”
“Didn’t you read the Rashi on that? He says—”
“I know what Rashi says. I know all the answers. You think because I read novels I’m a jerk?”
“I don’t think that, Alex.”
“I know all the questions and I know all the answers. The questions are better than the answers.”
I stared into the darkness and did not respond. I had traveled a parallel road and had taken a different turn. I understood what he was saying and had no answers as yet to give him. And so we would talk into the night, softly, as if we had become comrades in a secret revolt.
My mother did not fully recover from the news of the destruction of her family. She was able to return to the store in the fall but she was no longer the cheerful business lady she had affected to be in the past. She had lost weight and could not seem to regain it. Her nightmares grew less frequent. I would find her often staring out the window at the street, the sunlight on her pale drawn face, and I knew she was gazing upon memories of sunlight on trees and a distant love that the world had ground to dust.
I came over to her once as she stood by the living room window and kissed her cheek. It was winter. Snow lay deep upon the street and blew in white gusting waves through the air.
“We would play in it,” she murmured. “I loved the snow.”
“I was always afraid I would get sick in it,” I said.
She looked at me and smiled faintly. “Are you afraid of it now?”
“No, Mama.”
“I’m glad.” She gazed out the window, her gaunt face momentarily serene. “David loved the snow,” she said. “He would write messages to me in it and they would freeze in the wind and my sisters and brothers would come by and read them and point to me and laugh. Don’t we love the snow, my David?”
“Yes,” I said. “We love the snow.”
In the early spring I told my father. I chose an April night when Alex was at an English seminar and my mother was visiting my aunt. My father sat in the living room, reading his Yiddish newspaper. I was at my desk, staring in blind panic at my folio of Talmud and seeing nothing. I heard him shuffling the pages of the newspaper. I felt myself shivering, felt the coldness in the palms of my hands, felt strangely weak as if I were about to come down once again with the illness that had plagued all the growing years of my life. I could not do it; I could not tell him. Then, strangely, there rose before my eyes the image of Rav Sharfman waiting for me at the end of the bridge. I saw him, tall, dark-suited, in that battered dark hat he always wore, waiting for me. I came up to him and he turned. A dark light burned in his eyes, a passion carefully controlled and revealed to few. Good morning, Lurie, I heard him say. You like to walk? I also like to walk. And I rose and felt him walking with me into the living room where my father sat in his easy chair, his tall black skullcap on his head, reading his Yiddish newspaper. In the cage the canary perched in silence on one leg, rocking gently, a roundish ball of yellow feathers. It was a warm night. The window was partly open. A wind stirred the curtains.
I sat down in the easy chair across from my father and asked if I could interrupt his reading. There was something very important I wanted to tell him, I said.
He put down his newspaper and removed his steel-rimmed reading glasses. The light of the floor lamp fell across his thick shoulders and balding head. He was in his fifties now but he looked older, ravaged by his endless wars with the world. In moments of relaxation such as now, when he felt no need to hold himself a warrior, the cruel gouging of age was clearly discernible in the lines in his face, in the folds around his eyes, in the fleshiness that had once been a trim square face. He blinked wearily and yawned and rubbed his eyes. He wore a white shirt open at the neck, dark trousers, and brown slippers. Curls of gray-brown hair lay in the opening of the shirt, ending abruptly with the white skin at the base of his neck. He yawned again, pointed to the newspaper, and said that Truman might yet be a good President after all; he knew how to make decisions; he knew how to deal with the Russians; he was not the weakling and the simpleton people had thought him to be. Did I want a glass of coffee? he said. Maybe we could go into the kitchen.
I did not want any coffee, I said. I wanted to talk to him.
He looked at me then and his small gray eyes narrowed a little. A vague guardedness began slowly to enter him as if he were drawing together all the various parts of himself. He straightened himself in the easy chair; some of the fleshiness disappeared from his face as his prominent jaw with its marked underbite stiffened. He looked at me, and waited.
I had half hoped that Saul or Alex might have made some allusion to my plans, thereby easing my way somewhat. But it was clear they had said nothing. I would have to do it all myself.
I told him I had been thinking about what I wanted to do after I received ordination.
He looked at me and sat up quite straight and folded his muscular arms across his chest. He waited. Behind me I heard the curtains stirring in the warm wind that blew in through the open window.
I told him I had been thinking about it for months, as a matter of fact for almost a year. I did not want to teach in a yeshiva, I said. I wanted to go on for a degree in a university.
His eyes narrowed till they seemed closed. I saw a sudden flaring of his nostrils. Still he remained silent.
“A degree in Bible,” I said, speaking English and using the English word. “I want to study Bible.” I had already applied to a university, I said. I was waiting for an official answer. But I had been promised acceptance.
“You did this behind my back?” he said, his face stiff.
I did not reply.
“What kind of a son does this behind a father’s back?” he asked. He was not angry; he seemed hurt but strangely calm. I was frightened by that calm; I had expected an immediate raging reaction to my words.
I told him I had not known what to do or when to tell him. I had been frightened, I said. I apologized for doing that behind his back. I had felt the need to have it done before I spoke to him, I said. I had wanted to speak to him about a certainty, not a possibility, I said.
“You were frightened to tell me?”
“Yes.”
“I frighten you?”
I lowered my eyes and did not respond. The canary, awakened by our words, stood on both legs now on its perch.
“I am sorry I frighten you,” he said. “Even so, you should not have gone behind my back.”
I apologized again.
He waved aside my words with a brusque movement of his arm. “I am not interested in hearing your apology.” He leaned forward in the chair. “Tell me what it means to study Bible in a university. Your teachers will be goyim?”
“And Jews.”
“The Jews are observers of the commandments?”
“I don’t know. They may be. I’m not certain.”
“It is unimportant to you that they may not be observers of the comman
dments?” His voice, capable of ringing loudness, was low and calm. “You will study the Torah with goyim and with Jews who are like goyim? What do they know of the Torah?”
“They know a lot, Papa. They—”
“How can a goy who believes in Jesus or in nothing teach a Jew the Torah? How can a sinful Jew teach the Torah?”
“They’re great scholars, Papa. They teach a new method.”
“Scholars,” he said, in English, his voice rising slightly and edging into contempt. “Scholars.” He muttered something in Polish which I did not understand. Then he said abruptly in Yiddish, “You are searching for truth, yes?”
I stared at him.
“Yes, I know. You are searching for truth. You will turn over the whole world in your search for truth. My brother David used to tell me he was searching for truth. He did not care what precious ideas he threw aside once he thought them untrue. I did not like that about my brother David. He was gentle in everything except the use of his mind. No, I did not like that. It is as much a curse to be born with too much brains as too little.”
“Papa, I don’t want to throw anything aside.”
“No?” he said. “You already have. You are going out to an evil culture. You have entered the world of the goyim.” He said it calmly and with studied sadness as if he were reporting a battle casualty to a superior officer. “You do not want to throw anything aside. What more could you throw aside than the Torah?”
“I’m not throwing the Torah aside, Papa.”
“No? Then why are you going to a university to study it? What you learned with Mr. Bader and in the yeshiva was not enough? You are not satisfied with that as the truth?”