Read Online Old Men at Midnight by Chaim Potok - Free Book Online Page A

family—with her mother’s marriage to Ezra Dinn, an immigration lawyer who had offered help to Jakob Daw in his battle with U.S. Immigration.
    The next afternoon she came to his final seminar in the series. His bags were packed and he was ready to leave at its conclusion for his next university appearance. As she accompanied him outside the building she asked him if he’d ever written anything about his early life.
    He said no, but there are stories he could tell, stories about
his
Red Cavalry, stories about a war doctor. “But I would never put anything in writing.”
    “Then your stories will die with you.”
    “So they will. Who needs stories of yet another Jew?”
    “I need them. Without stories there is nothing. Stories are the world’s memory. The past is erased without stories. When you get a chance, at least write about the war doctor.”
    “I will not take that chance.”
    He hailed a cab, threw in his bags, climbed in, sat down, and was driven off.
    About the end of December she received a package from him containing stories and accompanied by a letter.
    “Dear Ilana Davita—I had not wanted to write these, but hearing your words made me change my mind. These are the first stories, and are true to the best of my ability to recapture things.”
    The second stories followed within weeks. After a hiatus of a few months, she received the third and final stories.

2
    I grew up in a religious home in the ukraine, and during the First World War the army of the Tsar put me into a labor battalion. Probably because I was a Jew and those in command didn’t trust us to be proper combat soldiers. That was all right with me, I wasn’t eager to be in the front lines fighting the Germans. We loaded boxes of artillery shells onto wagons, and for a while I even drove one of the clattering wagons—it was always heavily laden and had a team of four strong horses—back and forth between the loading area and the front through marshland and along dirt roads. In a bad rain the horses slipped and strained and sometimes our wagons sank to their axles in the mud. One morning the Germans shelled us as we raced through a bog, and when the barrage lifted, only eighteen men were left. I was among them.
    All around me in the marshy terrain lay pieces of soldiers and horses. I sat in shallow water leaning against the head of a wiry black mare and met the gaze of its dead eyes. There was a ringing in my ears and a trembling in my arms and legs. Through the ringing I thought I could hear the wailing of the wounded, though it may have been the cold autumn wind blowing past my ears. It made me sad to see our ammunition wagons in ruins, with shells spilled everywhere. Many of the boxes containing English artillery shells had exploded in the barrage, which is why so many were killed. I felt bad because there was a shortage ofammunition in the three lines of our trenches. Later that day the division retreated and I thought we were to blame for that and they would say it was the fault of the cowardly Yids.
    They then made me an officers’ orderly in a quartermaster battalion and I tended to their boots and uniforms and brought them lunches and suppers and sometimes cared for their horses. The officers used the foulest language, cursed their men, and were often drunk. Sometimes they beat the men with their swagger sticks and even with the knout, calling them lazy and stupid and wishing them dead. Nights they spent with women of the village where we were billeted. One morning many of the officers rode off to a division meeting and later we heard the rumbling of a distant thunder and some of the officers came galloping back in a sweat and we quickly packed up everything and joined a big retreat.
    Retreating along dusty roads and barren fields, I heard men muttering to each other that the Yids were the reason for the success of the German army in Poland. I tried to find out-of-the-way places where I could put on my tefillin and pray the Morning