Grandma Krier subscribed to a number of religious magazines and bulletins. She kept years’ worth of back issues piled up in the utility bathroom, where we left our muddy boots before coming into the house. The cat box was there, too, along with sacks of litter and kibble, chicken feed from the mill, and, if there were new kittens, they slept with their mama on a blanket in the shower stall. People rarely used this bathroom, preferring the tidier one inside the main part of the house.
When I was in grade school, I spent many rainy afternoons curled up with or without kittens on the floor of the shower, reading through mildewy stacks of the Catholic Digest. Every issue was packed with miraculous falls and dramatic cures, illustrated with brightly colored disaster scenes. Skiers clung to broken ski lifts. Helicopters spiraled to the ground. An IV hung above a hospital bed, its occupant wrapped like a mummy.
Dear Jesus, What Should We Try Next? the captions read. Lord, Help My Baby. There Was Nothing We Could Do For Mom But Pray.
As I got older, it occurred to me that each of these stories was really the same one. The reading I’d done in grade school had prepared me to accept this, yet I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t something better out there. I’d long ago exhausted the children’s corner at our local library; by the time I’d finished fifth grade, I’d read anything worth reading on the Young Adult shelf as well. Yet the main fiction section of the library overwhelmed me—how did I go about choosing one or two books out of so many? The summer before I started junior high, I came up with a system: I’d wander the aisles until I found a row of books that had all been written by the same author. My theory was that anyone who had published that much had to be good. I’d pull one at random and take it home.
But these books, too, were disappointing, though their covers alluded to an excitement earthier than anything the Catholic Digest ever promised. Well-muscled men in torn shirts clutched beautiful, swooning women in their arms. A knife or a gun was usually close by; horses sometimes figured into things as well. Many of these novels seemed to take place during the Revolutionary War, though others featured rebellious slaves, settlers confronted by ketchup-colored Indians. A few were set in medieval times. Now and then, a vampire or a dragon cropped up, which required a stabbing or slaying. Ho hum. I found myself skipping pages, skimming for words like bosom or loins: the sex scenes, if not original, could often be instructive, although they had a way of dissolving into abstracts just at the point where my curiosity peaked.
Desperate, I turned to the books tucked away in my mother’s hope chest. The hope chest was the only thing in the house, perhaps the only thing in my mother’s entire life, which she’d asked my brother and me not to touch, using adult words like privacy and respect, so we’d understand how important this was to her. We promised and then, of course, we riffled through it as soon as we got the chance, indignant at the thought that she might try to keep secrets from us. The chest, I realize now, contained little; the bittersweet truth was that my mother had nothing to hide. Still, we rolled our eyes at the poetry she’d written to my father during their courtship, fingered the baby clothes she’d sewn for us, stared at the photographs of her father, our dead grandfather. We giggled over a little songbook in which my Uncle Don had printed neatly: Sylvia is a fly. Beneath it were a few musty-smelling paperbacks from her college English classes. These we’d passed back and forth uneasily, if they were pornography.
I choked on Daisy Miller but relished Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and, especially, An American Tragedy. I lingered over the word disrobe, which I’d had to look up in the dictionary, and then I read the scene again and again. How was it, I wondered, that a single word could be more titillating than strings of adverbs? How could I dislike Clyde Griffiths so and, yet, feel sorry for him too? How was it I could finish a book’s final chapter and find myself left with more questions than I’d had at the beginning? Difficult questions, too. I sucked each one like an unfamiliar brand of hard candy, not certain if I liked the flavor, yet unable to spit it out. The characters stayed with me in a ghostly kind of way, especially those I hadn’t agreed with, hadn’t fully understood. I found myself thinking about them off and on throughout the day, the way I thought about people I actually knew. And yet, I wasn’t sure how reading about such people, real people, made me feel. I wasn’t sure if it wasn’t, just maybe, a slightly immoral thing to do.
Until now, everything I’d ever read—from the Bible to books assigned in school—had reinforced what I’d been taught to believe: good people get rewarded; bad people get punished. Once you knew who was who, you could stop reading if you wanted. You could figure out, from that point on, how the book was going to end. Even my well-thumbed copy of the Lives of the Saints had started to leave me cold. Despite the wonderfully gruesome tortures, you knew from the start that Faith would triumph, so what was the point of reading further?
No one had ever actively discouraged me from reading. No one had ever actively discouraged me from drinking coffee, either. A cup now and then, with plenty of milk and sugar, was absolutely fine for a child. Too much, however, risked stunted growth or discolored teeth. Too many books risked bookishness, which led to acting too big for your britches or, worse, putting on airs—a tendency toward which I already leaned. And, too, reading the wrong book—like visiting somebody else’s church—could lead to confusion that over time might crack the foundation of even the soundest faith.
If my mother noticed me reading on the couch, that was fine, but if I was still there an hour later, mouth open, immune to the world, she was quick to find something else for me to do. Something that involved, say, a pair of my father’s old BVDs soaked in lemon Pledge, or the vacuum cleaner. Nothing irked her more than the sight of me lying around the house with a book, except, perhaps, when she caught me and my brother watching “the boob tube” without permission. Our house was in a neighborhood teeming with other kids: Why not go outside and play? What about a game of tennis at the junior high athletic field across the street? Weed the garden. Fill the bird feeder. Or, shovel the sidewalk. For Pete’s sake, do something.
Even I could see that reading was a kind of mental nap, the sort of activity the Bible called sloth, a habit that led nowhere. At the time, I was planning to become a heart surgeon, much to my father’s delight. It was his suggestion that I look for books about medicine, doctors, sickness. This was an idea my mother liked, too. Ask the librarian to recommend something, she said.
The librarian did.
For the rest of the summer, I read books about crippled children with heroic personalities. The particulars of each story varied, but the general plot was always the same. A child with a birth defect is born into an unsuspecting family. (Variation: an innocent child suffers an injury, or develops a rare disease.) At first, the family is left reeling from the blow. Relatives and well-meaning friends suggest that the child be institutionalized. Doctors throw up their hands and walk away. But, thanks to the power of faith (variation: positive thinking and perseverance), the family rallies around the child, discovering in the process that instead of a tragedy, this child is the greatest blessing of their lives. Shortly thereafter, a miracle occurs. The child who would never be able to walk, walks. The mute girl speaks. The boy who the very best specialists insist will never recognize his mother, looks up at her one day and smiles.
Again, I skimmed, this time in search of medical details. I learned about cerebral palsy, spina bifida, muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, leukemia. I liked to imagine myself stricken with one of those diseases: how brave and cheerful I’d be! Of course, I’d offer up all my sufferings to the Poor Souls in Purgatory, and when I died, these liberated souls—I imagined them as flat, white disks, sort of like fancy dinner plates—would meet me at heaven’s gate. God, moved by this display, would ask me if I needed anything from earth to be more comfortable with Him in the afterlife, and I’d eloquently make a case for admitting animals. These daydreams were far more satisfying than the stories that had inspired them, and I was happy enough to return the books when school started again in the fall. There, in sixth-grade English, our first reading assignment was Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt.” I liked the story well enough, but I’d read it the year before. Already, I knew by heart everything I was supposed to write about it, everything the teacher wanted me to say.
A month or so after school had started, I was walking home one day when a rummage sale caught my eye. I loved rummage sales. I loved walking up a stranger’s driveway, looking in the garage, snooping around their stuff. I loved pawing through the mismatched china, chipped figurines, and vacation souvenirs. Usually, I glanced through the water-stained paperbacks, historical novels, romances, all the covers I recognized. But today, I saw a different sort of book, a fat hardback with a glossy jacket. It was called The Chosen. Something about its cover brought to mind the books in my mother’s hope chest.
I picked it up.
I almost put it down because I couldn’t pronounce the author’s name—Chaim Potok? (I sounded it out: Chame Poh-tick?) But the plot had to do with a friendship between two Jewish boys, and now I knew I would have to read this book because I’d just met a Jewish a girl named Roberta, who had been my desk partner at the beginning of the year. I had liked Roberta because she played the violin, and because she wasn’t embarrassed to admit she was good at it. We’d even made plans to learn Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro together. But she and her family had stayed in Port for only a month before putting their house back on the market and returning to Milwaukee, where they’d come from. It was just “too difficult,” Roberta had said, and I’d nodded as if I understood. The truth was that before I’d met Roberta, I’d always thought of Jews as Bible story people, like David and Goliath, or Jonah and the whale—people who, like angels, had lived long ago. Every year at Easter time, there was a moment of silence during Mass in which we “prayed for the Jews, who were the chosen people.” As I prayed, I’d imagine people wrapped in flowing white bed sheets, wearing sandals and halos made from pipe cleaners and glitter—the costumes we kids wore on All Saints’ Day when we paraded into the church to the hymn “When the Saints Come Marching In.”
The chosen people. The Chosen. Though I didn’t know the word allusion, I recognized the concept with a little thrill of pleasure. I dug a quarter out of the pocket of my jeans, paid for the book, and started reading as I walked home.
Nothing in my life thus far could have prepared me for the world I was about to enter. The Chosen begins with a baseball game in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, shortly after America’s entry into World War II. Danny, the oldest son of a Hasidic rabbi, is batting for the Hasidic yeshiva’s team; Reuven is pitching for a progressive Orthodox yeshiva. Early in the game, things turn ugly, and when Danny hits the ball directly at Reuven, Reuven refuses to duck. The ball shatters his glasses, and he is nearly blinded as a result. Danny visits Reuven at the hospital, and the two boys become friends. It’s a friendship that revolves around learning, around books, around intellectual challenges, and I quickly realized that the verb study, in this world, didn’t mean simply opening some books for an hour or two after supper. Danny and Reuven devour books, discuss them, argue about them, even as they reach for more. And their families seem to think that this is all perfectly normal. In fact, kids are expected to spend practically every waking hour analyzing religious texts and pondering heady mathematics. But when Danny starts to study psychology, he must keep this a secret from his religious father, for it is Danny’s birthright, as the oldest son, to become a rabbi. Soon it becomes clear that the ideas he’s encountering—those of Freud among them—can only lead him away from his faith.
Now here was something I recognized, a fear I’d been raised with, one that occupied a powerful cornerstone of my consciousness. To lose your faith was worse, I believed, than anything, even death. Why would Danny risk it? I read and reread all the scenes in which he and Reuven study together. I tasted the sweet, unfamiliar diction of their daily lives: tzaddik, gematriya, apikorsim, tzitzit. I lingered just as ardently over the names of great philosophers—Kant, Spinoza, Aristotle, names that I’d never heard before, names that the context of the prose made clear were not by any means obscure. Too much, too much, I could not absorb it all, and yet I couldn’t stop reading, couldn’t make myself stop to breathe, digest. I noticed that there were quite a few political arguments between various characters, and that these arguments were sprinkled with words like Zion and Israel—words I recognized from the Bible—but I couldn’t figure out what they meant in this context, or what, exactly, was at stake. I recognized the name of President Roosevelt. I recognized the name of Hitler. Neither of these names meant anything significant to me. Roosevelt had led the United States; Hitler had led Germany. But who, exactly, were the Allies? The United Nations? What was a “European Jewry”? It was all very confusing, and whenever I hit a long passage about the war, I skipped it, eager to get back to Reuven and Danny, their personal stories, their studies, their friendship.
How can it be that, at the age of eleven—a sixth-grade student—I knew so little of history, even less of politics, nothing at all about the Nazis? In our small, predominantly German community, there’d been little discussion of either world war. We studied Alexander the Great. We studied the Ottoman Empire. At one point, I remember memorizing a long poem that began “I hope the old Romans had painful ab-domens; I hope that the Greeks had toothaches for weeks; I hope the Egyptians had chronic conniptions; I hope that the Vandals had thorns in their sandals…” But what I remember best is how we studied the Civil War. We couldn’t get enough of hearing about it. It was better than a bedtime story. We, the virtuous North, had fought the evil South—and won! And we’d done so simply out of the goodness of our hearts, to free the helpless Negroes.
At one point, a guidance counselor came to our classroom, and we played a special game in which half the class got a blue pin to wear and the other half got a red pin. The people with the red pins had to do whatever the blue pins said. Then the guidance counselor said, “Switch!” and the blue pins got to boss the red pins around. We loved it! We begged to do it again!
“Now you know what it was like to be a slave,” the guidance counselor said. “It’s hard to understand, in this day and age, how anyone could treat another human being that way.”
The Chosen stayed with me like a country I had visited, a place I’d stayed just long enough to be disoriented, shocked, by what I saw upon my return home. I thought about Danny and Reuven when my history teacher raised the map at the front of the classroom, and burst into tears at the sight of a grotesque vulva chalked on the blackboard beneath. I thought about it in the art room when Lewis Dolittle sucked a mouthful of water from the spigot, and spat it in the face of a particularly quiet girl for no reason other than meanness. I thought about it in math class, where we were reviewing long division yet again; I thought about it when our principal called me out of class to reprimand me for requesting permission to take a foreign language class with the eight graders. Awfully big for my britches, wasn’t I? Well, he wasn’t about to put up with this nonsense! No ma’am, I could take a foreign language when I got to eighth grade like the rest of my classmates. Who did I think I was, acting as if I were better than everyone else?
I thought about The Chosen walking home after school, leaving by the side door to avoid the popular kids, cutting through the clouds of cigarette and pot smoke released by the stoners. I even thought about it at the piano where, usually, nothing could distract me. I understood, for the first time, what literature could be: an opportunity to live beyond yourself, to be bigger and brighter than you’d ever hoped to be. To see your face reflected back, framed within a broader context. To stare at that reflection, and begin to dream.
“Is everything all right at school?” my mother said.
“Everything’s fine,” I said.
I decided that I would teach myself to study the way Reuven and Danny studied. I would make study part of my daily life, like prayer, like practicing the piano.
I had a desk in my bedroom. It was white, with baby blue drawers and gilded drawer pulls. It didn’t seem like the kind of desk Reuven and his father would have used, but I figured it would have to do. First thing Saturday morning, I cleaned out the drawers, wiped the top with Windex. I set out a single, pristine notebook, a couple of freshly sharpened pencils, and my copy of The Chosen. Then I set about hunting down the dictionary. I discovered it with the Scrabble board, in the cupboard underneath the wet bar, where we kept the rest of the household’s intellectual property: the Bible, the World Book Encyclopedia, a guide to seashell identification, and my father’s plastic label-maker. The dictionary’s cover was missing, and the front pages were lined with Scrabble scores, but its insides were intact.
When I had my desk set up, I paged through The Chosen and made a list of the scholars and philosophers Danny and Reuven had mentioned. Then I stuck the list in my pocket, put on my coat, and headed for the library. I hadn’t bothered writing down the names of any fiction writers; I was done with such frivolous study. I was going to dedicate myself to psychology, religion, and mathematics. But when I opened the card catalogue, I discovered there were no books by Freud in our library. There were no books by Aristotle, or Spinoza, or Kant; there was no copy of Principia Mathematica. Reuven had been reading a book on logic by Susanne Langer: no listing. Danny had been upset by a writer named Graetz: nothing. It crossed my mind that I could simply study the Talmud. But when I asked at the desk, the librarian, without changing expression, said that she’d never heard of such a book. Who’d written it again? she said, and I said I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was like the Bible, that nobody had written it.
God, the librarian informed me, had written the Bible.
I wandered back to the card catalogue. Briefly, I considered reading the Bible, but it seemed too ordinary, too familiar; I wanted to start with something that would shake me up, the way Freud had shaken up Danny. It occurred to me that Chaim Potok might have invented the books he’d mentioned in The Chosen, the way he’d invented Danny and Reuven. But no—I knew that Freud, at least, was real. He was the guy who’d figured out that what girls really wanted were penises. Even I knew that. It didn’t seem to me that I’d ever wanted a penis, though I could clearly remember a group of us girls teasing Buddy Burmiester because we could have babies and he couldn’t. This had been in fourth grade. We’d taunted him until he cried. But maybe things had been different in Freud’s day.
Not that I was going to be able to read him and find out for myself.
I thought as hard as I could, riffling through the flotsam and jetsam of six years of public school education. Somewhere in all that, there had to be another name I might look up, someone whose writings I might study. I looked up Alexander Graham Bell. I looked up George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. There was a book about Benjamin Franklin, but that had been checked out. Think, I told myself sternly. And then I came up with another name, one that had even been mentioned in The Chosen.
Adolf Hitler.
Why was that name so familiar? I had a vague grade school memory of a group of boys marching around on the playground, kicking their legs and shouting Heil Hitler! until the teachers made them stop. The name triggered a sense of power and importance. I knew that Hitler was a German, like Freud, like me—my father’s maternal grandparents and my mother’s paternal grandparents had been born in Germany—and like almost everybody in our small community. I knew from reading The Chosen that he’d been on the losing side of World War II, a war that, according to one of my aunts, had been “greatly exaggerated.” She’d said this at my grandmother’s house, in front of a number of my aunts and uncles, and I could tell from the beat of silence that followed that she’d said something inappropriate, something—maybe rude? I couldn’t tell. At any rate, it was clear that nobody wanted to talk about it. Everybody smiled until the conversation turned to something else.
I pulled out the H drawer, flicked through the cards. I was in luck. Adolf Hitler had written one book, Mein Kampf, translated into English as My Struggle. Our library had a copy.
The expressionless librarian checked me out.
I began the book as soon as I got home, looking up words I didn’t know and copying definitions into my notebook. It was rather dry going, but I kept at it, and I didn’t let myself skip ahead, for I knew from reading The Chosen that there were times when Reuven, and even brilliant Danny, had spent entire days on one paragraph. I believe there was an introduction of some kind, and in my mind’s eye, there are reproductions of a few of Hitler’s landscape paintings—but I may have superimposed some later memory, something I saw in a college course, over this earlier one. I do believe I learned a few things about art. I learned about the death of Hitler’s mother. I sensed that neither topic was the point of the book, but I couldn’t tell what was coming, where all the rambling observations were leading. It was certainly different from the novels I’d read. At last, I stopped reading and went over my list of vocabulary words: one, I think, was oratory. Then I planned out my assignment for the next day.
I had studied for one hour—an hour I usually spent at the piano.
I had hoped that, during the night, things I hadn’t understood about the book would come clear. Instead, I found my second session even more challenging than the first. I began to flip ahead, I couldn’t help myself, and encountered a brief scene in which Hitler is walking down the street and sees a Jewish man walking toward him. Just like that, he knows the man is “vermin.” I looked up “vermin,” copied down its definitions: noxious or objectionable animals or insects, including rats and worms and parasites; objectionable, filthy persons.
Hmm, I thought. The man must have done something to make Hitler angry. But, studying the little scene again, I found nothing in the text but a description of the man’s face.
A strange, uneasy feeling swept over me. I pushed it away. Surely, I must have missed something. Surely there must be some rational explanation for what Hitler believed. That was why it was important not to skip ahead. I sighed. There was nothing to do but reread the book from the beginning and catch whatever it was. So I began again. It was a Sunday afternoon; the house was still. My brother was down in his basement room. My father had gone to the office. My mother was taking a nap. Sounds seemed louder than usual: the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the thrum of the heat kicking in, the click in my throat whenever I swallowed.
What had the Jewish man done? Why couldn’t I see it?
Again, I began to skip ahead, unable to follow the sentences. Again, I came to the section in which the word “vermin” appeared. Hitler, I thought. Adolf Hitler. I thought about the boys on the playground, the expressions on the teachers’ faces when they’d made them stop chanting and shouting. An expression that was guarded and thin-lipped and close. The expression they got whenever somebody used a bad word, or if somebody asked a question that nobody wanted to answer. The expression I’d seen at my grandmother’s house on the day that my aunt had said World War II was “greatly exaggerated.”
I reached for my copy of The Chosen and began flipping through it, skimming for the word “Hitler,” searching out the very pages I’d skipped—pages that had to do with the war. Six million Jews slaughtered, I found. Gas chambers. Hitler’s ovens. The words sounded cartoonish, like something Wile E. Coyote might think up. Like something out of a nightmare. Like something a crazy person might do.
Fear seized the back of my neck as if it were a black-gloved hand. I jumped up and sat down and jumped up again. Then I shoved My Struggle into the bottom of my backpack. I carried it out of my room, down the stairs and through the foyer, where I shoved it to the back of the coat closet with the stack of newspapers for recycling.
The next day, after school, I took it back to the library. I threw out the notebook with the vocabulary words; I put the dictionary back in the cupboard. That was the year I increased my piano practice from one to two hours each day. That was the year I decided I didn’t want to be a heart surgeon anymore. I certainly didn’t want to be a scholar or philosopher. I stopped going to the library. I didn’t read another book, beyond what a teacher assigned, for the next ten years.
Vermin: even now, that word holds it power, moves from my mouth like some living, whiskered thing that brushed against me in the dark.