Limbo by A. Manette Ansay Page A

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 madeclear 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 forweeks; 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!
    â€œNow 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.”
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    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 blackboardbeneath. 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?