Limbo by A. Manette Ansay

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.
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    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 comefrom. 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 blindedas 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