The Chosen

'You sleep like a baby,' he said 'I feel guilty waking you.' I yawned, stretched, and sat up on the edge of the lounge chair. 'That was delicious,' I added, yawning again. 'What time is it?'

'It's after five, sleepyhead. I've been waiting here ten minutes for you to wake up.'

'I slept almost three hours,' I said. 'That was some sleep.'

He clicked his tongue again and shook his head. 'What kind of infield is that?' He was imitating Mr Galanter. 'How can we keep that infield solid if you're asleep there, Malter?'

I laughed and got to my feet.

'Where do you want to go?' he asked.

'I don't care.'

'I thought we'd go over to my father's shul. He wants to meet you.'

'Where is it?' I asked him. 'It's five blocks from here.'

'Is my father inside?'

'I didn't see him. Your maid let me in. Don't you want to go?'

'Sure,' I said. 'Let me wash up and put a tie and jacket on. I don't have a caftan, you know.'

He gri

'Okay, member of the fold. Come on inside with me.'

I washed, dressed, told Manya that when my father came in she should let him know where I had gone, and we went out.

'What does your father want to see me about?' I asked Da

'He wants to meet you. I told him we were friends.' We turned up the street, heading toward Lee Avenue.

'He always has to approve of my friends,' Da

'No.'

'Because I really think we are,' Da

I didn't say anything. We walked to the comer, then turned right on Lee A venue. The street was busy with traffic and crowded with people. I wondered what any of my classmates would think if they saw me walking with Da

Da

'I'm sorry to hear that.'

'How about you?'

'I have a brother and a sister. My sister's fourteen and my brother is eight. I'm going on sixteen.'

'So am I,' I said.

We discovered that we had been born in the same year, two days apart.

'You've been living five blocks away from me all these years, and I never knew who you were,' I said.

'We stick pretty close together. My father doesn't like us to mix with outsiders.'

'I hope you don't mind my saying this, but your father sounds like a tyrant.'

Da

'Doesn't he object to your going around with an apikoros like me?'

'That's why he wants to meet you.'

'I thought you said your father never talks to you.'

'He doesn't. Except when we study Talmud. But he did this time. I got up enough courage to tell him about you, and he said to bring you over today. That's the longest sentence he's said to me in years. Except for the time I had to convince him to let us have a ball team.'

'I'd hate to have my father not talk to me.'

'It isn't pleasant,' Da

'Is your brother going to be a rabbi, too?'

Da

'No special reason. Is he?'

'I don't know. Probably he will.' His voice had a strange, almost wistful quality to it. I decided not to press the point. He went back to talking about his father.

'He's really a great man, my father. He saved his community. He brought them all over to America after the First World War.'

'I never heard about that,' I told him.

'That's right,' he said, and told me about his father's early years in Russia. I listened in growing astonishment.

Da

When his father died, he automatically inherited the position of rabbinic leadership. He was twenty-one years old at the time.

He remained the rabbi of his community throughout the years of Russia's participation in the First World War. One week before the Bolshevist Revolution, in the autumn of 1917, his young wife bore him a second child, a son. Two months later, his wife, his son, and his eighteen-month-old daughter were shot to death by a band of marauding Cossacks, one of the many bandit gangs that roamed through Russia during the period of chaos that followed the revolution. He himself was left for dead, with a pistol bullet in his chest and a saber wound in his pelvis. He lay unconscious for half a day near the bodies of his wife and children, and then the Russian peasant who tended the stove in the synagogue and swept its floor found him and carried him to his hut, where he extracted the bullet, bathed the wounds, and tied him to the bed so he would not fall out during the days and nights he shivered and screamed with the fever and delirium that followed.

The synagogue had been burned to the ground. Its Ark was a gutted mass of charred wood, its four Torah scrolls were seared black, its holy books were piles of gray ash blown about by the wind. Of the one hundred eighteen Jewish families in the community only forty-three survived.

When it was discovered that the rabbi was not dead but was being cared for by the Russian peasant, he was brought into the still intact home of a Jewish family and nursed back to health. He spent the winter recovering from his wounds. During that winter the Bolshevists signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, and Russia withdrew from the War. The chaos inside the country intensified, and the village was raided four times by Cossacks. But each of those times the Jews were warned by friendly peasants and were concealed in the woods or in huts. In the spring, the rabbi a

Eight days later, they left. They bribed and bargained their way through Russia, Austria, France, Belgium, and England.

Five months later, they arrived in New York City. At Ellis Island the rabbi was asked his name, and he gave it as Senders. On the official forms, Senders became Saunders. After the customary period of quarantine, they were permitted to leave the island, and Jewish welfare workers helped them settle in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Three years later the rabbi-married once again, and in 1929, two days before the stock market crash, Da

'They all followed him?' I asked. 'Just like that?'

'Of course. They would have followed him anywhere.'

'I don't understand that. I didn't know a rabbi had that kind of power.'

'He's more than a rabbi,' Da

'My father told me about Hasidism last night. He said it was a fine idea until some of the tzaddikim began to take advantage of their followers. He wasn't very complimentary.'