The Chosen

'What's this about dreams?' I asked.

'It's true,' he said. 'Dreams are full of unexpressed fears and hopes, things that we never even think of consciously. We think of them unconsciously deep down inside ourselves, and they come out in dreams. They don't always come out straight, though. Sometimes they come out in symbols. You have to learn to interpret the symbols.'

'Where did you find out about that?'

'In my reading. There's a lot of work been done on dreams. It's one of the ways they have of getting to a person's unconscious.'

I must have had a strange expression on my face, because he asked me what was the matter.

'I dream all the time,' I told him.

'Everyone does,' he said. 'We just don't remember a lot of them. We repress them. We sort of push them away and forget them, because sometimes they're too painful.'

'I'm trying to remember mine,' I said. 'Some of them weren't very pleasant.'

'A lot of times they're not pleasant. Our unconscious isn't a nice place – I call it a place; it isn't a place, really; the book I read says it's more like a process – it isn't a nice place at all. It's full of repressed fears and hatreds, things that we're afraid to bring out into the open.'

'And these things rule our lives?'

'According to some psychologists they do.'

'You mean these things go on and we don't know anything about them?'

'That's right. That's what I said before. What's inside us is the greatest mystery of all.'

'That's a pretty sad thing to think about. To be doing things without really knowing why you're doing them.'

Da

I stared at him and felt a shock of coldness move inside me. 'You're studying German?'

He seemed surprised at my reaction. 'What's wrong with studying German? Freud wrote in German. What are you looking at me like that for?'

'Aren't his writings translated into English?'

'Not all of them. Besides, I want to read a lot of other things in German that haven't been translated yet. What's the matter with you? You've got the fu

I didn't say anything.

'Just because Hitler speaks German doesn't mean that the language is corrupt. It's the most important scientific language in the world. What are you looking at me like that for?'

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'It just seems strange to me, your studying German.'

'What's so strange about it?'

'Nothing. How are you teaching yourself?'

'There's a grammar book in the reference library. I'm almost done memorizing it. It's an interesting language. Very technical and precise. It's amazing the way they put nouns together. Do you know what the word for" mysterious" is in German?'

'I don't know any German.'

'It's geheimnisvoll. It means "full of secret". That's what the subconscious is, geheimnisvoll. The word for "sympathetic" is teilnahmsvol – literally "full of part-taking". The word for charity is Niichstenliebe -literally, it means-'

'All right,' I said. 'I'm impressed.'

'It's quite a language. Yiddish is a lot like it. Yiddish was originally Middle German. When the German Jews came into Poland, they brought it with them.'

'You mean in the thirteenth century, when Poland encouraged the Jews to come in?'

'That's right. You know about that?'

'I didn't know about Yiddish being German.'

'My father doesn't, either. At least, I don't think he does. He thinks Yiddish is almost holy. But it's really from Middle German.'

I was going to ask him what the Middle meant in Middle German, but I decided not to push the conversation any further. I was upset enough as it was about his learning German. And it had nothing to do with Hitler, either. I kept remembering what my father had told me about Solomon Maimon. It all sounded so weird. I almost had the feeling I was talking to Maimon's ghost.

We talked some more about Graetz's version of Hasidism, and then somehow we got onto the subject of Da

Finally, we decided it was getting late, and we started down the wide marble staircase. When we were about halfway down the staircase to the second floor, Da

It was cloudy and seemed ready to rain, so we decided to take a trolley car back rather than walk. Da

I told my father about it over the supper table.

'What does Da

My father's eyes went wide behind their spectacles.

'He was very excited about it,' I said. 'He was talking about the unconscious and dreams. He was also reading Graetz on Hasidism: 'The unconscious and dreams,' my father muttered. 'And Freud. At the age of fifteen.' He shook his head gloomily. 'But it will not be possible to stop him.'

'Abba, was Graetz right in what he said about Hasidism?'

'Graetz was biased, and his sources were not acurate. If I remember correctly, he calls the Hasidim vulgar drunkards, and he calls the tzaddikim priests of Baal. There is enough to dislike about Hasidism without exaggerating its faults.'

I met Da

My father told me that night that there had been a serious question in his mind about how ethical it was for him to give Da

'How would I feel if someone gave you books to read which I believed might be harmful to you?'

I asked him why he had done it.

'Because Da