The Chosen (23 page)

My father and I followed the war news very carefully, and there were now many more New York Times maps on the wall of my room. From the fourth to the tenth of July there was a violent battle in the La-Haye-du-Puits area. A panzer counterattack west of the Vire was smashed on the eleventh of July, but the American drive toward St-Lô was stopped by German parachute corps. Caen was finally captured, and then on the eighteenth of July St-Lô fell. A war correspondent triumphantly announced that the lodgements area from which the Allied Armies would soon launch their major offensive into the heart of occupied France was now adequate and secure.

My father and I listened to the news broadcasts, read the Times, and studied the maps. It seemed to us that, despite the many announcements of victories, the war was going very slowly. My father looked grim as he studied the war maps that showed the Allied advance between D-day and the third week of July. Then the weather in France changed, and the war seemed to have come to a complete halt, swallowed by endless rain.

In the beginning of the third week of July, my father’s research for the article he was writing made it necessary for him to travel to the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan. There were manuscripts there which he needed for the purpose of checking variant readings of the Talmudic passage on which he was working. So every day that week right after lunch he took the subway to Manhattan, and I went alone to the library to be with Danny. That was the week Danny began to read Freud in German, It was difficult for him at first, and he admitted it openly. Not only was the language still a problem but also the terminology and ideas he encountered were strange and bewildering to him. This wasn’t Graetz on Jewish history, he told me, or Minkin on Hasidism, or Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and Dickens. It wasn’t even the Ogden and Rugel psychology books he had been reading. This was primary source material, research papers based on direct experimental data, involved theoretical constructions utilizing a complex vocabulary and containing a wealth of original ideas—and he was breaking his head on it.

I listened to him talk and felt a little awed by it all. Five or so weeks ago, he had talked of the unconscious and of dreams almost as a child talks about his first tricycle. Now he was talking about direct experimental data and involved theoretical constructions.

He spent the first part of that third week in July leafing through a collection of Freud’s writings—to get a taste of the material, he said—while I sat opposite him, trying to make my way through the first volume of Principia Mathematica and finally giving it up as too difficult and settling for a rereading of the article my math teacher had recommended in the Journal of Symbolic Logic—it was called ‘Conditions Affecting the Application of Symbolic Logic’, and I understood it a lot better this time—and for a book on logic by Susanne K. Langer. The first sections of the book were a little too easy for me, but the final chapter on logistics, in which she showed how Principia Mathematica provides a basis from which the concepts, operations, and relations of arithmetic and other branches of mathematics may be derived, I found to be very exciting.

By Thursday, Danny’s side of the table was piled high with books, and he was looking thoroughly unhappy. He was sitting there, twisting an earlock and biting his lower lip, his face a mask of frustration. It was impossible, he said finally. The whole thing was ridiculous and impossible; he wasn’t getting anywhere. It wasn’t so much the German itself anymore as the technical terminology. He wasn’t making any headway at all. Not only that, but he had begun to use English translations of the German works he had been reading, and they did nothing but confuse him even more. He showed me where in one translation the German word ‘Unlist’ had been translated as ‘pain’, in quotation marks, and the word ‘Schmerz’ had been translated as ‘pain’, without quotation marks. How was he supposed to know what the translator had had in mind when he had used ‘pain’ with and ‘pain’ without quotation marks’ And look at the word ‘Besetzung’, he said angrily. What did it mean to translate it as ‘investment’ or ‘charge’? And what good did it do to translate it as ‘cathexis?’ What did ‘cathexis’ mean? ‘Angst’ was ‘anxiety’

‘Furcht’ was ‘fear’, ‘Schreck’ was ‘fright’. How was he supposed to know what the difference between ‘fear’ and ‘fright’ was? He wasn’t getting anywhere, he would probably have to drop the whole thing; who did he think he was anyway trying to read Freud at the age of fifteen? He went home angry and disgusted, his face a picture of bewildered frustration.

When I got to Danny’s house that Shabbat afternoon, I found him in an ugly mood. He was waiting for me outside. He greeted me with a curt nod of his head and muttered something about not really being in the mood for Talmud now but we had to go up anyway. He was very quiet during the first few minutes of the Talmud battle, and though I tried to make up for his silence by increasing the volume of my own enthusiasm, I could see that Reb Saunders was becoming more and more annoyed by his son’s lack of participation. Danny was tense and edgy, his face still masked by frustration, his mind obviously not on what we were discussing. He’s probably eating himself up alive over Freud, I thought, hoping his father wouldn’t lose his temper. But Reb Saunders remained patient and left his son alone.

In the middle of a heated debate over an impossible passage in Kiddushin I heard Danny take a sudden loud breath, as if he had been punched in the stomach. Reb Saunders and I broke off our discussion and looked at him. He was staring down at the Talmud, and smiling. His face had come to life, and there was a light in his eyes. He jumped up from his chair, circled the room, then sat down again, and Reb Saunders and I just sat there, staring at him. Something is the matter? Reb Saunders wanted to know. There is a joke in the Talmud we did not see? What was so funny? Danny shook his head, still smiling, bent over the Talmud, and began to give his version of the passage. His voice trembled a little. There was a pause when he finished, and I thought for a moment that Reb Saunders would again ask his son what had been so funny. Instead, I heard him sigh a little, then offer a passage from the Baba Bathra that contradicted Danny’s explanation. We returned to the battle, and Danny more than made up for his previous silence.

He was quiet as he walked me part of the way home that night, and when we got to the synagogue where my father and I prayed he muttered something about seeing me in the library the next day, then turned and went quickly back.

When I got to the library the next afternoon, I found him seated at his table. There were three books open in front of him. He smiled broadly and waved me to a chair. He had worked out a method of doing Freud, he said, and it seemed to be going all right, so far. He pointed to the three books. One was a volume of Freud’s early papers, he told me. Some of them Freud had written together with Josef Breuer, a Viennese physician; others he had written alone. Another was the Cassell’s German-English Dictionary. The third was a dictionary of psychological terms edited by someone called Warren. The Freud volume was open to a paper entitled ‘Ein Fall Von Hypnotischer Heilung’. Fall meant ‘case’, he said. The rest of the title I could figure out for myself from my Yiddish, he told me.

‘I forgot what it was like to study Talmud.’ he said excitedly. ‘Talmud is so easy for me now, I don’t remember what I used to go through when I first started it as a kid. Can you study Talmud without the commentaries? Imagine Talmud without Rashi. How far would you get?’ .

I agreed with him that I wouldn’t get very far at all.

He had been going at it all wrong, he said, his eyes bright with excitement. He had wanted to read Freud. That had been his mistake. Freud had to be studied, not read. He had to be studied like a page of Talmud. And he had to be studied with a commentary.

But Danny didn’t know of any commentaries on Freud, so he had settled for the next best thing. He had needed something that would explain Freud’s technical terminology, that would clarify the various shades of meaning the German words had and he had found this dictionary of psychological terms. He was reading Freud now sentence by sentence. He didn’t go on to the next sentence until the prior setence was perfectly clear in his mind. If he came across a German word he did not know, he looked up its English meaning in the Cassell’s. If the Cassell’s gave him a translation he didn’t understand, one that wouldn’t fit the meaning of the sentence, he looked the English word up in the psychology dictionary. That psychological dictionary was his commentary. It had, for example, already explained to him the technical difference between ‘fear’ and ‘fright’. It had also explained the term ‘cathexis’. It was working. He had already studied two and half pages that afternoon.

Was Freud worth all that effort? I wanted to know.

Freud was a genius, Danny told me. Of course he was worth all that effort. Was symbolic logic worth all my effort?

I had nothing to say to that, except admit that he was probably right.

So I continued reading the Langer book, while Danny bent over the table studying Freud. He shuffled pages impatiently whenever he had to look something up in one of his dictionaries. The sounds of the shuffling pages were loud in the silence of the library..

On Thursday, I told him that my father and I would be leaving next Tuesday morning for the cottage near Peekskill where we always stayed in August, and I gave him two books I thought he might like to read. One was The Making of the Modern Jew by Milton Steinberg, the other was The Thirteen Letters of Ben Uzziel by Samson Raphael Hirsch. He thanked me and said he would read them. When my father and I left for Peekskill on Tuesday morning, Danny had completed the first paper and was started on the second, entitled ‘Die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen’.

We had agreed not to write to each other:… probably out of an unspoken feeling that two boys our age writing one another when we were only going to be separated for a month was a little childish—and I didn’t see him again until after Labor Day.

My father and I returned home the day after Labor Day, and I called Danny immediately. His mother answered and told me she was delighted I had had a good vacation but she was sorry, Danny wasn’t home, he had gone with his father to visit a family friend in Lakewood. Danny called me later that evening, happy to hear I was back. He had missed me, he said. How was the trip to Lakewood? I wanted to know. Miserable, he said. Had I ever sat in a bus with my father for hours and not exchanged a single word of conversation, except for a short discussion about a passage of Talmud? No, I told him quietly, I had never had that kind of experience. I always talked to my father. I was lucky, he said. I didn’t know how really lucky I was, he added, a little bitterly.

We chatted for a while, and agreed to meet in the library the following afternoon. I found him at his table, looking a little pale, but happy. His tufts of beard had grown a bit thicker, he blinked his eyes a little too often, as if weary from all his reading, but otherwise he was the same, everything was the same, and it was as though we had not seen each other for, at most, a single night of dream-filled sleep. Yes, he had read the two books I had given him. They had been very good, and he had learned a lot from them about the problems of contemporary Judaism. His father had thrown some poisonous looks at him when he had taken them into the house, but the looks had disappeared when Danny had somehow gotten up the courage to tell him that the books had come from Reuven Malter. He would give them back to me tomorrow. He had also read a great deal of Freud, he said. He had finished almost all of the first volume, and he wanted to talk to me about a paper of Freud’s called ‘Die Sexualitaet in der Aetiologie der Neurosen.’ It had been something of a shock to him to read that, he said, and he had no one else to talk to about it except me, he didn’t want to discuss it with my father. I said fine, we could talk about it on Shabbat when I came over to his house.

But somehow we never got around to talking about it that Shabbat, and on Sunday morning we were both back in school again. The year—the real year of a person going to school—began and for a long while I had no time at all to think about, let alone discuss, the writings of Sigmund Freud.

For the first two months of that school year, Danny and I were able to get together regularly only on Shabbat afternoons. Only once did we manage to see each other during the week. I had been elected president of my class, and I found myself suddenly involved in student politics. The evenings that I might have spent with Danny I spent instead at student council or committee meetings. We talked frequently by phone, though, and neither of us felt our friendship was suffering any. But we never got around to discussing what he was reading in Freud.

During November, I managed to go over to his house one evening in the middle of the week. I brought him half a dozen books on Jewish subjects that my father had suggested he read, and he thanked me for them gratefully. He looked a little weary, but otherwise he was fine—except for his eyes, which tired easily, he said. He had been to a doctor, but he didn’t need glasses, so everything was really all right. I asked him how he was coming along with Freud, and he said, looking uncomfortable, that he was rarely in the library these days, there was too much schoolwork, but he did manage to read a little of Freud now and then, and it had become very upsetting.

‘One of these days I want to have a long talk with you about it,’ he told me, blinking his eyes.

But we had no real opportunity for any long talk. The Shabbat day grew shorter and shorter, my schoolwork seemed endless, and student politics took up every moment of my spare time.

And then, in the middle of December, just when it seemed that the war would be over very soon, the Germans launched a major offensive in the Ardennes region, and the Battle of the Bulge began. There were reports of frightful American casualties—some newspaper said that two thousand American soldiers were being killed and wounded every day.

It was a cold, bitter winter in New York, bleak with the news of the fighting in the Ardennes, and at night, as I sat working at my desk, I could hear the radio in the kitchen where my father would be sitting with his war maps, following the news.