In the Beginning by Chaim Potok

Author:Chaim Potok [Potok, Chaim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307575548
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2014-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

It had something to do with banks and I did not understand it. Also there was the problem of who would take me to and from school once Saul began to attend the Yeshiva high school in upper Manhattan after this year. There were long conversations into the night between my mother and father. Often my aunt and uncle were there too, in our living room or kitchen, talking. Sometimes they all argued loudly. I could understand nothing about the banks but I remember my father’s enraged voice. One of the banks had been owned by Jews and they had swindled hundreds of immigrants. He stormed against those bank owners, the veins in his thick neck bulging with his bitter fury. At breakfast one morning, while reading his newspaper, he smashed his fist down on the table and shouted, “The stinking bastards!” Then he threw down his paper and went from the room. Alex whimpered. My mother’s face was ashen. I sat frozen to my chair listening to the wild jumping of my heart.

“We have no more money, Mama?” was all I could find to ask when I felt my heart calm enough.

“Finish your breakfast,” she said with a tone of anger in her voice. “You concern yourself with your studies, David. That’s your job. Nothing else.”

And she turned to soothe my brother.

I saw the newspaper in Mr. Steinberg’s candy store. But I was unable to grasp what it was all about. I was happy that someone called Roosevelt had won the Presidency. My father had stood a long time in a line waiting to vote for him. My father disliked standing in lines.

I could not go near my father. He was irritable. He flared with rage under the slightest provocation: a small act of mischief, the faintest indication of disobedience. Once he smacked my brother across the face for dropping his bread to the floor during a meal. I cowered. My brother screamed. My mother shouted. My father stormed from the kitchen.

In the middle of December there was a brief meeting of the board of directors of the Am Kedoshim Society in the living room of our apartment. Six men attended, in addition to my father and uncle. My mother served coffee and tea. I lay in bed and listened to their voices. I could not hear my father’s voice. I do not think he spoke at all during that meeting.

At the end of December the Am Kedoshim Society went into bankruptcy. The little synagogue was closed; there were barely enough people now for a minyan and the rental could no longer be paid. Sometimes on Shabbat my father and I prayed in the large synagogue. Often we stayed home and prayed by ourselves.

My father began to sleep late into the mornings. As the weeks went by, he became increasingly bewildered. Sometimes I would hear him say to himself, “I cannot understand it. What has happened? Nothing I do seems to help.” Once he said to my mother, “Your parents and my parents are the smart ones.

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