Acts of Faith: A Novel - Softcover

Segal, Erich

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553560700 ISBN 13: 9780553560701

Publisher: Bantam, 1993

Synopsis

They met as children, innocents from two different worlds.  And from that moment their lives were fated to be forever entwined. Timothy : Abandoned at birth, he finds a home--and a dazzling career--within the Catholic Church.  But the vows he takes cannot protect him from one soul-igniting passion. Daniel : The scholarly son of a great rabbi, he is destined to follow in his father's footsteps.  And destined to break his father's heart. Deborah : She was raised to be docile and dutiful--the perfect rabbi's wife--but love will lead her to rebellion.  And into world's the patriarch would never dare imagine.

Reaching across more than a quarter of a century, from the tough streets of Brooklyn to ultramodern Brasilia to an Israeli kibbutz, and radiating the splendor of two holy cities, Rome and Jerusalem, here is Erich Segal's most provocative and ambitious novel to date--the unforgettable story of three extraordinary lives...and one forbidden love.

About this title

About the Author

Erich Segal (1937–2010) began his writing career with the phenomenally successful Love Story. He wrote eight other novels, including The Class, which was an international bestseller and won literary prizes in France and Italy. Doctors reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Segal’s academic focus included Green and Latin literature—subjects he taught at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Oxford.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
Daniel
 
When I was four years old, my father called me into his study and lifted me onto his huge lap. I can still remember the sagging wooden bookshelves filled with tall leather volumes of the Talmud.
 
“All right,” he said gently. “Let’s start at the beginning.”
 
“What’s that?” I inquired.
 
“Well, naturally,”—my father beamed—“God is the beginning—as well as the unending. But you’re still too young to delve into mystical concepts. For today, Daniel, we’ll just start with aleph.”
 
“Aleph?”
 
“Well pronounced,” my father said with pride. “You now know one letter of Hebrew.”
 
He pointed to the second symbol on the page. “And what comes next is bet. So now you can see we are learning the Hebrew aleph-bet.”
 
And so we continued for the remaining twenty letters.
 
Curiously, I don’t remember having to struggle with a single thing my father taught me. It all went straight to my heart and mind from his, and burned there like the eternal light above the Holy Ark in synagogue.
 
The next thing I knew I was reading in Hebrew the first words of my life: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth ...,” which I duly rendered into Yiddish.
 
This German-Hebrew dialect, which first evolved in the medieval ghettos on the Rhine, was still the language of our everyday life. Hebrew was sacrosanct, reserved for reading holy texts and prayers. And thus I repeated the first words of Genesis, “In Ershten hut Got gemacht Himmel un erd.”
 
My father stroked his gray-flecked beard and nodded. “Well done, my boy. Well done.”
 
His praise was addictive. I studied even harder to earn more of it. At the same time, on my father’s part there was a ceaseless upward spiral of increasing expectations.
 
Though he never said it, I knew that he assumed I would absorb this knowledge into the very fiber of my being. By some miracle I learned it all—the holy words, the sacred laws, the history, the customs, the intricate attempts of scholars through the ages to extract God’s meaning from a wisp of commentary.
 
I only wish my father had been a little less proud, because the more I knew, the more I realized how much I still had to learn.
 
I know each morning Father thanked the Lord for his great gift. Not just a son but—as he always put it—such a son.
 
I, on the other hand, was in a constant state of anxiety, fearing I might disappoint him in some way.
 
Father towered over other rabbis, physically as well as spiritually. Needless to say, he also towered over me. He was a large man, well over six feet, with shining black eyes, and while both Deborah and I inherited his dark complexion, unhappily for her, she got his height.
 
Papa cast a long shadow over my life. Whenever I was chided in the classroom for some minor lapse, the teacher always tortured me with comparisons: “This from the son of the great Rav Luria?”
 
Unlike my fellow classmates, I never had the luxury of being able to be wrong. What was innocent for others somehow was regarded as unworthy when it came to me: “The future Silczer Rebbe trading baseball cards?”
 
And yet I think that was why my father didn’t send me to our own school, on the same street as our house. There, I might have gotten special treatment. There, such sins as giggling at the teacher—not to mention tossing chalk at him when he turned to the blackboard—might have gone unpunished.
 
Instead, I had to make the long—and sometimes perilous—journey from our house to the notoriously rigorous Etz Chaim Yeshiva ten blocks north, an institute of learning where the principal was known as the greatest rabbi of the century—the twelfth century.
 
Each school day, including Sundays, I rose at dawn to say morning prayers in the same room as my father, he wearing his phylacteries and prayer shawl, swaying as he faced east toward Jerusalem and praying for our people’s restoration to Zion.
 
In retrospect, this puzzled me—especially since there was now a State of Israel. Yet I never questioned anything this great man did.
 
School began promptly at eight and we spent till noon on Hebrew subjects, mostly points of grammar and the Bible. In our early years we concentrated on the “story” parts—Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, and Joseph’s multicolored coat. As we grew older and more mature—that is, at about eleven or twelve—we began to study the Talmud, the massive compendium of Jewish civil and religious law.
 
The first of its two parts merely sets forth the precepts codified by subject. These contain no fewer than four thousand rules and postulations.
 
I sometimes wondered how my father could retain so much of this inside his head. Indeed, he seemed to know by heart not only the precepts but the commentaries as well.
 
Talmud class was like a junior law school. We began with obligations concerning lost property, and by the end of the semester, I knew, if I happened to come across fruit spilled out on the ground, whether I could keep it or must turn it in.
 
At noon, we all went down to lunch where we could see across the room our female schoolmates, who were segregated for the Hebrew classes. After dessert, always little square bits of canned fruit salad, we sang grace, and the older boys had to rush upstairs to the synagogue to say afternoon prayers before our secular studies began.
 
From one o’clock till half past four, we lived in a completely different world. It was like any New York public school. We began, naturally, by saying the Pledge of Allegiance. At this point, the girls were with us. I suppose some modern sage had decreed that there was no harm in both sexes studying Civics, English, and Geography in the same room.
 
Except on Friday when we ended early for the Sabbath, it was almost always dark when we finally emerged.
 
Then I would wearily head home and, if I managed to arrive intact, I sat down and gobbled up whatever dinner Mama had prepared. Afterward I remained at the table doing my homework, both sacred and secular, until in my mother’s estimation I was too exhausted to go on.
 
I spent very little of my childhood in bed. In fact, the only time I can recall being there more than a few hours was when I had the measles.
 
For all its near-sweatshop regime, I loved school. Our double day was like two banquets of knowledge for my hungry mind. But Saturday was my special Day of Judgment. For then I had to show my father what I had learned that week.
 
He was quite simply the Almighty Power in my life and—just as I imagined the Jewish God to be—incomprehensible, unknowable.
 
And capable of wrath.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0553560700
• ISBN 13: 9780553560701
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 560