The Chosen

He sat back on the bed, leaning against the wall. 'They still bother me. These glasses don't help much.'

'Have you seen a doctor?'

He shrugged. 'He said the glasses should do it. I just have to get used to them. I don't know. Anyway, I'll talk to Appleman next week. The worst that could happen is I drop the Course.' He shook his head grimly. 'What a miserable business. Two years of reading Freud, and I have to end up by doing experimental psychology.'

'You never know,' I said. 'Experimental psychology might come in handy some day.'

'Oh, sure. All I need to do is get to love mathematics and rats. Are you coming over this Saturday?'

'I'm studying with my father Shabbat afternoon,' I told him.

'Every Saturday afternoon?'

'Yes.'

'My father asked me last week if you were still my friend. He hasn't seen you in two months.'

'I'm studying Talmud with my father,' I said.

'You review?'

'No. He's teaching me scientific method.'

Da

'No,' I said. Rav Schwarz was my Talmud teacher. He was an old man with a long, gray beard who wore a black coat and was constantly smoking cigarettes. He was a great Talmudist, but he had been trained in a European yeshiva, and I didn't think he would take kindly to the scientific method of studying Talmud. I had once suggested a textual emendation in class, and he had given me a queer look. I didn't think he even understood what I had said.

'Well, good luck with your scientific method,' Da

'I don't know,' I said.

'I've got to go home. What's your father doing in there?' The sound of my father's typewriter had been clearly heard throughout the time we had been talking.

'He's finishing another article.'

'Tell him my father sends his regards.'

'Thanks. Are you and your father talking to each other these days?'

Da

Only now and then. It's not really talking.'

I didn't say anything.

'I think I had really better go home,' Da

I'll meet you in front of your shul Sunday morning.'

'Okay.'

I walked him to the door, then stood there listening to the tapping of his metal-capped shoes on the hallway floor. He went out the double door and was gone.

I came back to my room and found my father standing in the doorway that led to his study. He had a bad cold and was wearing a woolen sweater and a scarf around his throat. This was his third cold in five months. It was also the first time in weeks that he had been home at night. He had become involved in Zionist activities and was always attending meetings where he spoke about the importance of Palestine as a Jewish homeland and raised money for the Jewish National Fund. He was also teaching an adult studies course in the history of political Zionism at our synagogue on Monday nights and another adult course in the history of American Jewry at his yeshiva on Wednesday nights. He rarely got home before eleven. I would always hear his tired steps in the hallway as he came in the door. He would have a glass of tea, come into my room and chat with me for a few minutes, telling me where he had been and what he had done that night, then he would remind me I didn't have to do four years of college all at once, I should go to bed soon, and he would go into his study to prepare for the classes he would be teaching the next day. He had begun taking his teaching with almost ominous seriousness these past months. He had always prepared for his classes, but there was a kind of heaviness to the way he went about preparing now, writing everything down, rehearsing his notes aloud – as if he were trying to make certain that nothing of significance would remain unsaid, as if he felt the future hung on every idea he taught. I never knew when he went to sleep; no matter what time I got to bed he was still in his study. He had never regained the weight he had lost during the weeks he had spent in the hospital after his heart attack, and he was always tired, his face pale and gaunt, his eyes watery.

He stood now in the doorway to his study, wearing the woolen sweater, the scarf, and the round, black skullcap. His feet were in bedroom slippers and his trousers were creased from all the sitting over the typewriter. He was visibly tired, and his voice cracked a few times as he asked me what Da

I told him about Da

He listened intently, then came into my room and sat down on my bed with a sigh, 'So,' he said, 'Da

'I told him at least to talk it over with Professor Appleman.'

'And?'

'He'll talk to him next week.'

'Experimental psychology,' my father mused. ' I know nothing about it.'

'He said there was a lot of math in it.'

'Ah. And Da

'He hates it, he says. He's feeling pretty low. He feels he wasted two years reading Freud.'

My father smiled and shook his head but remained silent.

'Professor Appleman sounds a lot like Professor Flesser,' I said.

Professor Abraham Flesser was my logic teacher, an avowed empiricist and an enemy of what he called 'obscurantist Continental philosophies', which, he explained, included everything that had happened in German philosophy from Fichte to Heidegger, with the exception of Vaihinger and one or two others.

My father wanted to know what it was the two professors had in common, and I told him what Professor Appleman had said about psychology being a science only to the extent to which its hypotheses can be mathematized. 'Professor Flesser made the same remark once about biology,' I said.

'You talk about biology in a symbolic logic class?' my father asked.

'We were discussing inductive logic.'

'Ah. Of course. The point about mathematizing hypotheses was made by Kant. It is one of the programs of the Vie

'Who?'

'Not now, Reuven. It is too late, and I am tired. You should go to sleep soon. Take advantage of the nights when you have no schoolwork.'

'You'll be working late tonight, abba?'

'Yes.'

'You're not taking care of yourseH, you know. Your voice sounds awful.'

He sighed again. 'It is a bad cold,' he said.

'Does Dr Grossman know you're working so hard?'

'Dr Grossman worries a little bit too much about me,' he said, smiling.

'Are you going for another checkup soon?'

'Soon,' he said. 'I am feeling fine, Reuven. You worry like Dr Grossman. Worry better about your schoolwork. I am fine.'

'How many fathers do I have?' I asked.

He didn't say anything, but he blinked his eyes a few times.

'I wish you'd take it a little easy,' I said.

'This is not a time to take things easy, Reuven. You read what is happening in Palestine.'

I nodded slowly.

'This is a time to take things easy?' my father asked, his hoarse voice rising. 'The Haganah and Irgun boys who die are taking it easy?'

He was talking about what was now going on in Palestine.

Two Englishmen, an army major and a judge, had been kidnapped recently by the Irgun, the Jewish terrorist group in Palestine, and were being held as hostages. A captured member of the Irgun, Dov Fruner, had been sentenced to hanging by the British, and the Irgun had a