The Chosen

Chapter 11

For the first two months of that school year, Da

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 Arde

It was a cold, bitter winter in New York, bleak with the news of the fighting in the Arde

The Battle of the Bulge ended about the middle of January, with the newspapers reporting seventy-seven thousand Allied casualties and one hundred twenty thousand German casualties.

Throughout the entire month of that battle – from the middle of December to the middle of January – I did not see Da

So it waited. It waited through my midyear exams and through the first two weeks of February, when I managed to get to Da

My father and I were overjoyed, and even Da

'It is the end of Hitler, may his name and memory be erased,' Reb Saunders said to me that Shabbat afternoon. 'Master of the Universe, it has taken so long, but now the end is here.'

And he trembled as he said it and was almost in tears.

Da

Da

On the Thursday afternoon of the second week in April, I was sitting at a meeting of the student council. The meeting had started pleasantly enough with the usual reading of the minutes and committee reports, when Davey Cantor burst into the room. looking as though he was crying, and shouted breathlessly that someone had just told him President Roosevelt was dead.

He was standing by the door of the classroom, and there was a sudden movement of heads as everyone turned and gaped at him in total astonishment. I had been in the middle of a sentence, and I turned, too, remaining on my feet next to my desk, and I heard myself saying angrily that he had a hell of a nerve barging in here like that, he wasn't being one bit fu

'It's true!' he shouted, crying. 'Mr Weinberg just told me! He heard it on the radio in the faculty room!'

I stared at him and felt myself slide slowly back onto my desk.

Mr Weinberg taught English. He was a short, bald man, with no sense of humor, and his motto was 'Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see.' If Mr Weinberg had told Davey Cantor that President Roosevelt was dead… I found myself in a sudden cold sweat. Someone in the room giggled, someone else moaned, 'Oh, no!' and our faculty advisor stood up and suggested that the meeting be adjourned.

We left the building and came out onto the street. All the way down the three flights of stairs I wouldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. It was like God dying. Davey Cantor had said something about a cerebral hemorrhage. I didn't believe it. Until I got to the street.

It was a little after five o'clock, and there was still sunlight.

The late afternoon traffic was heavy. Trucks, cars and a trolley choked the street, waiting for the comer light to change. I crossed quickly, ran for the trolley, and made it just as the light changed. I found a seat next to a middle-aged lady who sat staring straight ahead, weeping silently. I looked around. No one in the trolley was talking. It was crowded, and it became more crowded as it went along, but there was only the silence inside. I saw one man put his hands over his eyes and just sit there like that for a while. I stared out the window. People stood around in small groups on the sidewalks. They didn't seem to be talking. They just stood there, together, like an animal herd bunching up for protection. An old gray-haired woman, walking with a child, held a handkerchief to her mouth. I saw the child look up at her and say something, but I couldn't hear it. I found myself crying too, and felt a gnawing emptiness, as though I had been scraped clean inside and there was nothing in me now but a terrible darkness. I was feeling as though it had been my father who had died.