The Promise (30 page)

I was sick with cold rage by the time I was done reading it. I came off the bus. A middle-aged Hasid in a long dark beard and a
dark overcoat bumped into me heavily as I walked beneath the sycamores. The brown paper bags he held in his hands tumbled to the sidewalk, spilling out oranges and apples and cans of fruit and vegetables. He apologized loudly in Yiddish and I barely heard him as I helped gather everything up off the ground. He thanked me and went rushing off, holding tightly to the bags. I went up the front steps of the brownstone and into the apartment.

My father was not home. Manya was in the kitchen over the stove. I could smell the Shabbat food all through the apartment. I went into my room and sat behind my desk for a while, then lay down on my bed, then went back to my desk and tried doing some logic problems. I played with the problems for a few minutes, then went into the hall and called Danny. Levi answered. Danny was not home yet. I could feel the phone trembling against my ear. I wished him Shabbat shalom and hung up. I went back into my room and stared out the window at the sunlight on the ailanthus in our back yard. Then I lay down again on my bed. A moment later I heard a key in the front door and I went quickly into the hall and saw my father come into the apartment. He said nothing to me as he put his hat and coat into the hall closet, but I knew by the look on his face that he had read the article. I told him I had read the article and began talking about how I felt. He stopped me with an abrupt and angry gesture of his hand. He did not want to discuss it now, he said. His voice was husky and he sounded as if he was coming down with another of his colds. He went into his study and closed the door.

I came back into my room and sat at my desk and did some more logic problems. The newspaper lay on top of a pile of books on my desk. I read the article again, then put the newspaper into a drawer. I sat there, working on the logic problems. Through the door that connected my room to my father’s study I could hear my father shuffling papers and coughing, a hoarse, dry, rasping cough which with him could mean anything from a minor cold to a serious bronchitis or congestion of the lungs. This is going to be some Shabbat, I thought bitterly.

Danny returned my call later that afternoon and I told him what I had said to Abraham Gordon. He had had Michael in therapy that morning, and Michael had spent most of the hour talking disconnectedly about Rachel and giving Danny angry, knowing glances. In her visits with Michael, Rachel had been urging him to trust Danny and to talk to him, and Michael had apparently begun to realize why her voice was always charged with excitement each time she talked about Danny. Now he wanted to know how well Danny knew his cousin. Danny had been afraid of this all along. He was beginning to think he ought not to be doing any more therapy with Michael. He would discuss it with Altman on Monday. He kept saying over and over again that he should not have become involved with Rachel, that it would be a mess, that he had botched the whole thing, that the experiment was really a wild idea and who was he to try something like that, he was still only a student, he had no right to take a chance like that with someone else’s life—and it occurred to me as I listened to him that Michael had always been more than merely a patient to him: Michael was his first attempt at self-vindication, the first in a long series of efforts he would be making to prove to himself that the pain he had caused his father at refusing to take on the tzaddikate, and the years the tzaddikate would ultimately take from his brother’s frail life, was all worthwhile. He was frightened of making a mistake, frightened of failure—as much because of what it might mean to him as what it might do to Michael. I told him to calm down and stop being hysterical; I had had enough hysteria for one day from Rav Kalman’s article, I said. He hadn’t read the article yet, he said. He had just returned home. Well, it was a beauty, I said, and sitting across the desk from Rav Kalman next Sunday morning promised to be an interesting experience. Calm down, I said again. He had been trying to get Michael to talk by giving him Rav Kalman’s article against my father. Maybe Michael would really talk if he found out about him and Rachel. I was trying to get him out of his black mood and was simply using whatever came into my head without really knowing what I was
saying. There was a long silence on the phone during which I thought of what I had said and realized that it sounded rather ridiculous and waited for Danny to tell me to stick to Talmud and logic and let him do the planning about how to get Michael to talk. Instead, the silence continued. I asked him if he was still there. He said yes, he was still there, but it was getting late, he wanted to take a shower and get dressed. His voice was strangely calm. He wished me a good Shabbos and hung up.

That was not a good Shabbat—neither for me nor for my father. My father remained in his study until a few minutes before it was time to leave for the synagogue. He shaved and dressed hurriedly and we walked along the Williamsburg streets through crowds of Hasidim in long coats and fur-trimmed caps on their way to their various tiny synagogues. I listened to their Hungarian Yiddish. Walking to and from our synagogue every Shabbat was becoming an increasingly uncomfortable experience for me. It was like moving back through centuries to a dead world that came to life once every seven days. It was a strange enough experience being on those streets during the week. But on Shabbat, when I could feel them making the very air tremulous with exultation, when I could see them in their respective garbs, most of them in fur-trimmed caps, some in dark suits, some in white knickers, all of them walking quickly, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone, sometimes the father accompanied by a troop of male children—on Shabbat it was particularly strange and I felt myself to be an uncomfortable outsider who had somehow been transported to a world I once thought had existed only in the small towns of Eastern Europe or in books about Jewish history. They were my own people, but we were as far apart from one another as we could possibly be and still call ourselves by the name
“Jew”—
and I had never felt as distant from them as I felt that evening walking along Lee Avenue with my father on our way to the synagogue where we prayed.

My father said nothing to me as we walked. His cough seemed worse and inside the synagogue it was a quite audible counterpoint to the service. Many of my father’s colleagues prayed in
that synagogue and after the service they crowded around him, expressing their anger at Rav Kalman’s article. I caught snatches of conversation that puzzled me. My father must not give in, someone said. He must not permit it to be withdrawn, someone else said. Names which I did not recognize were mentioned with tones of contempt. I stood aside and listened and wondered what was going on. As we walked back I tried to ask him what he was not supposed to give in on, but he would say nothing. We were not quite two thirds of the way home before I began to put it all together and realized that Rav Kalman’s articles had not been upsetting my father nearly as much as what had been going on in his school.

“They want you not to publish the book,” I said as we turned into our block.

He looked at me with annoyance and coughed raspingly. “They want,” he said, his voice hoarse and filled with anger and contempt. “What they want and what I will do are two different things.” I had never heard him so full of rage. “No one will ever dictate to me what I may and may not publish.” He coughed again and wiped his lips with a handkerchief. It was night now, but I could see the rage in his eyes by the dim light of a lamp post. “No one,” he said. “No one.”

“What’s going on?” I asked. We were walking up the front stairs of our brownstone.

“We will talk about it later,” he said. “After the meal. I do not want to upset Manya.”

We sat in the living room later that night and between ugly spasms of coughing my father told me that during the past two years four new Talmudists had been taken into the school. They had come from Europe after the war and had been hired by the new headmaster of the school, a man who had himself come from Bergen-Belsen. Slowly over the past few years the make-up of the faculty had begun to change. The original group of teachers was being replaced. The new ones were fiercely Orthodox. One of the new Talmudists had gotten hold of an advance copy of my father’s
book and had read it and shown it to the others and to the headmaster. There had been a furor. The book was dangerous. My father had been warned that its publication might jeopardize his position in the school. His old colleagues had lined up on his side against the newcomers. There had been meetings, plots, counterplots, bitterness, vituperation, insults in the corridors. And Rav Kalman’s articles had served to fuel up the raging factions. The fight had come to the attention of the board of directors. There had been a meeting of the board last Sunday, and it too was split into opposing factions. The bitterness had been simmering quietly beneath the surface calm of the school during the past few years. My father’s book had brought it all out into the open. And it was ugly.

“They can’t fire you for the way you teach. You’ve got tenure in that school.”

“Tenure,” he said bitterly. “Reuven, do you know what it is to teach in a school where people despise you? What does it mean to have tenure when the air you breathe is poisoned?”

“What are you going to do?”

He coughed and wiped his lips. “The book will be published,” he said grimly. “No one will ever tell me what I may publish. Then we will see what
they
do?”

“But they can’t fire you.”

“No. But there are enough ways to make life unpleasant for a teacher so that he will leave without being fired.”

“You’re going to leave your school?”

“First the book will be published. Then we will see.”

“You can’t leave the school. They’ll win if you leave.”

“Reuven,” my father said quietly. “They may have won already. It is impossible to argue with them or to attempt to convince them of another point of view. They know only the lives they led in Europe and the beliefs their families died for in the concentration camps. No one will change them. They are strong and inflexible and they will mold Orthodoxy to their own ways. They have probably won already.” He was silent then, and his eyes regarded
me intently from behind their steel-rimmed spectacles. “It is not a new quarrel, Reuven,” he said softly. “I do not know if that is much of a consolation to you, but this is a quarrel that has been going on a long time. The Gaon of Vilna had a student called Menasheh of Ilye. This student was one of the greatest Talmudists of his time. He also studied mathematics and astronomy and philosophy and was even something of an inventor of new machines. But he taught Talmud in the method developed by the Gaon. No one would ever dare challenge the Gaon if he interpreted a Mishnah in a way that went against the Gemora or the Rishonim. But whenever Menasheh of Ilye attempted to teach in this manner, he was persecuted by sincere pietists—and sometimes by those who were not so sincere but were merely foolish. He was sent away from many teaching positions as a result of his method. And his method was not nearly as radical as mine. He simply did not have all the manuscripts of the text of the Talmud which we have today. He was an amazing man. He suffered terribly at the hands of others. So this is not a new quarrel, Reuven.”

I told him it didn’t make me feel one bit better to know that.

“I did not think it would,” he murmured. “I merely mentioned it because I have always had a great affection for that man. I used to hear stories about him when I was young. He—his reputation had a great influence upon me. My father’s father had been his student and talked of him often to my father. And my father talked of him to me. I feel I know him well. But I did not think I would ever be reliving a part of his life. That is the way the world is, Reuven. Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.” He stopped and coughed into his handkerchief and wiped his lips and his eyes. “I am tired. Let us have some tea and go to sleep. You did not tell me what you and Abraham Gordon talked about today. Let us go into the kitchen and have some tea and not talk any more about my yeshiva and its quarrels. And do not look so gloomy, Reuven. The problems will work themselves out.”

But he did not sound as if he believed the situation would resolve
itself; he sounded grim, and the earlier anger was still in his voice, though considerably subdued now. He knew there would be a major conflict when the book was published, and he seemed quite prepared to do his share of the fighting. He was being challenged in the single most important area of his life—his scholarship and his writing—and he would fight.

We sat in the kitchen and drank tea and talked about my conversation with Abraham Gordon and then went to sleep. In the morning his cough was worse and I went to the synagogue alone. When I returned I found him in bed. He had no fever but the cough was very bad and I was afraid it would begin to affect his heart so I persuaded him to let me use the phone—something we did not normally do on Shabbat—and called his doctor. Dr. Grossman came very quickly and pronounced it a bad cold and told my father to stay in bed at least through Sunday. My father said he had a faculty meeting Sunday afternoon. The faculty would have to meet without him, Dr. Grossman said. Unless, of course, my father was interested in a good case of pneumonia. Was my father interested? He was not interested. Then he was to stay in bed. What was all this fuss about his book? Dr. Grossman wanted to know. He had seen a copy of
The Jewish Guardian
. Who was this Rav Kalman anyway? A guardian of the faith, I said. My father gave me a warning look. What a fuss he was making over the book, Dr. Grossman said, closing his bag and putting on his hat and coat. The bearded vigilantes were out in force these days. I said there were a few vigilantes without beards running around Washington. Politics and religion always brought out the best in people, Dr. Grossman said. I was to make sure my father remained in bed and to call him in case he developed a fever. He wished us a good Shabbos and went out of the apartment.