The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

Had my father been well at that time, I would have talked to him about it, but he was in the hospital, recuperating slowly, and I didn’t want to upset him with an account of Danny’s reading. He was upset enough as it was with his own reading. Whenever Danny and I came to visit him, we found newspapers strewn all over his bed. He was reading everything he could find that told of the destruction of European Jewry. He talked of nothing else but European Jewry and the responsibility American Jews now carried. Occasionally he spoke of the importance of Palestine as a Jewish homeland, but mostly he was concerned about American Jewry and the need for teachers and rabbis. Once he asked Danny and me what we were reading these days, and Danny answered honestly that he was going through Freud. My father sat in his hospital bed, propped up on pillows, looked at him, and blinked. He had grown very thin—I hadn’t thought he could ever get any thinner than he had been before his heart attack, but it seemed to me he had lost at least ten pounds—and he seemed to become easily upset by little things. I was frightened for a moment, because I didn’t want him to get involved in an argument with Danny about Freud. But he only shook his head and sighed. He was very tired, he said; he would talk to Danny about Freud another time. Danny shouldn’t think that Freud was the final word in psychoanalysis; many great thinkers disagreed with him. He let it go at that, and went back to talking about the de...