Anti Semitism
Mr. Potok has written scholarly and popular articles and reviews during
his
publishing career. Mr. Chaim Potok is a novelist, philosopher,
historian,
theologian, playwright, artist, and editor. All of Mr. Potok's
novels explore
the tensions between Judaism and the modern society
(Kaupunginkirasto). Chaim
Potok was born in the Bronx, New York, on 17
February 1929, to Polish Jewish
immigrants, and was educated in Jewish
parochial schools. Mr. Potok undertook a
serious religious and secular
education, first at the Orthodox Yeshiva
University, New York, where he
received a Bachelor of Arts in English (summa cum
laude) in 1950. Mr. Potok
received his rabbinical ordination in 1954 at
Conservative Jewish
Theological Seminary, New York, and finally at the
University of
Pennsylvania, he obtained a Ph.D. in 1965(Buning). "Potok
transforms Judaic
scholarship to drama. Potok explores the tension inside the
religious
community. He fuses his interests in Jewish education and twentieth
century
history, a history that had violently touched his family. This novel
serves
as Potok's primary vehicle for the examination of the modern
Jewish
experience. The genesis and substance of every Potok novel is the
Jewish
religious, historic, and cultural experience in a non-Judaic world.
The
philosophic and ethical views are derived from the Judaic sources.
Potok's
affirmative vision, veneration of life, positive assessment of human
nature, and
pervasive striving for meaning in the midst of chaos, for good in
the face of
evil will be derived from Judaism (Walden 233). It is about
growing up in an
anti-Semitic environment. David, a young Jewish boy, is
growing up in the Bronx
of New York City. David experiences the strains that
modern, assimilationist
America can put upon a deeply religious,
orthodox, sensibility. David grew up on
the streets of New York and
encountered the anti-Semitism that prevailed there
at a certain period of
time. David appears to be exploring the nature of evil in
human affairs.
David learns of scripture or history, what he hears about his
parent's past,
what he endures himself in the way of accident or cruelly all
become aspects
of a single experience-a Jewish experience. In the fourth year of
David
Lurie's life, we enter his life and mind, to see how, through a crucible
of
childhood pain and love, a man's spirit was forged. How a gentle,
frail
little boy became a young man with the terrible courage to pursue his
vision of
the truth at the risk of all that was most dear to him: family
love, friendship
and his passionate identity with the centuries of Jewish
tradition. David Lurie
lives on sunlit apartments on the tree-lined
boulevards of the Bronx. On the
city sidewalks, Davey (David Lurie) is
playing marbles in perfect communion with
Tony Savanola until the
six-year-old Eddie Kulanski, raised to hate
"Kikes," initiates Davey into the
anguishing knowledge that to be a
Jew is to be in peril. David Lurie
learns that all beginnings are hard. He must
fight for his place against the
bullies in his depression-shadowed Bronx
neighborhood and his own frail
health. As a young man, he must start anew and
define his own path of
personal belief that diverges sharply with his devout
father and everything
he has been taught (Amazon). In the Beginning as the title
suggests is a
recapitulation of the Book of Genesis from the Creation to the
flood of Noah.
Many of the dramatic tensions in the novel develop through
David's father
Max. Max Lurie is active in leadership in a society to help other
emigrants
to America. The primary tensions in the novel develop from young
David's
situation in an environment that cherishes the old ways of life
and
Yeshiva study. David become more and more conscious of a need to move
out that
environment into the larger world of non-orthodox, even non-Jewish
intellectual
life move out of it, moreover, with out relinquishing it utterly
(Halio 373). In
almost all of Potok's novels, father-son relationships are
central to our
understanding of the various conflicts that occur. It is the
task of the fathers
to pass on the Jewish heritage to their obedient sons.
Critics have pointed out
that the stress put on the authority of the father
parallels a similar stress in
traditional, patriarchal Judaism on God as
King, Judge, and Father; hence the
high level of respect, based on mutual
love, that the sons display towards their
fathers (Buning). Mr. Bader
(David’s teacher) who guided David in his studies
would welcome David warmly
into his apartment. Mr. Bader and David would sit at
his desk and he would
remind David to be patient (Potok 279). David learned in
his journey to
adulthood that he could not swallow the entire world at one time.
David
would remind himself consistently before a new class at the beginning of
a
school year or about to start a new book or research paper; that all
beginnings
are hard. David would touch his raw nerves of faith, the beginning
of things (Potok
289). Mr. Bader taught other important lessons to David.
Mr. Bader taught that
is it more important to learn the important questions
than it is to learn the
important answers. There are some questions that do
not have good answers. There
are some rich and some poor. How much money a
man makes has nothing to do with
his wisdom or the good he is able to do for
others. David shows us the universal
joys and universal guilts of childhood,
but the special excitements and the
added burdens of a rare spirit and mind
destined for rare achievement and the
cruel choices that such destine demands
of child, boy, youth and man. David
reminisced, "I can remember hearing my
mother murmur those words while I
lay in bed with fever. ‘ Children are often
sick, that is the way it is with
children. All beginnings are hard. You will
be all right soon." (Potok 280)
David bursts into tears one evening
because a passage of a Bible commentary had
proved too difficult for him to
understand. David was about nine years old at
the time. David’s father said
to him " You want to understand everything
immediately? Just like that? You
have only begun to study this commentary last
week. All beginnings are hard.
You have to work at the job of studding. Go over
it again and again (Potok
279). David learned in his journey that a man can not
ignore the given to him
by his life (Potok 131). People exist by the virtue of
the help they give to
one another. Helping people improves the helper person's
life and keeps the
helping person human (Potok 279). Our task is to understand,
to memorize and
to give back what we had learned. "All Beginnings are
hard." Beginning is
sustained through the painful and sometimes repetitious
actions of the story.
David Lurie is now a famous Biblical scholar, now guiding
his young students
on the dangerous tightrope path of iniquity. David Lurie
traveled this path
as a youth, where a misstep might mean hurtling into a bitter
loss of faith.
David is looking back at his own beginning. David Lurie is a
studious,
thoughtful child, whose state as a child of immigrants makes him
more
sensitive to European influences on American life and policy (Amazon).
He is a
precocious reader and brilliant student of the Jewish scriptures. The
accidental
aspect of certain things is heavily underscored (Huapt 232). In
the Beginning,
Potok's altered ego, the brilliant young yeshiva student
David Lurie, undertakes
to bridge the gulf between fundamentalism and secular
humanism, including ugly
aspects of Western anti-Semitism, even at the risk
of losing the respect of his
family, his friends, and all of his teachers but
one (Buning). Moreover, this
quest for identity and authenticity has been
dramatically accentuated in our
century by World War II and in particular by
the Holocaust and the dropping of
the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
These unprecedented atrocities require
a radical review of the human
predicament. Indeed, the traumatic aftermath of
these events, particularly of
the Holocaust, overshadows all of Potok's works.
He is not only concerned
with its devastating after-effects on his characters,
but at the same time
with what theologians and philosophers call the problem of
Divine
Providence or theodicy. Centering on the unanswerable question of how God
can
allow the existence of physical and moral evil in a world supposedly
created
by Him (Buning). It suggests that the author has decided in favor of
religion.
The book has ascetic, stoical, self-punishing tone, established
with its first
line. "All beginnings are hard" and sustained through the
painful and
sometime repetitious actions of the story. From shortly after
birth in the
nineteen-twenties, David Lurie is plagued by chronic sinus
illnesses that prove
to be emblematic of his growing up. David's inner life,
tortured with fears and
bad dreams, is followed through the depression, which
ruins his family. In the
late thirties and forties as the news from Europe
grows more and more dreadful
into David's budding years as a scholar buds,
David learns that curiosity can be
a dangerous enemy of faith. Mr. Potok’s
story cannot be recommended to
everyone. Its prose is simple and smooth, but
a heavy earnestness pervades it
all (New Yorker 193). The book centers on the
conflict between the religious
life and the life of imagination. What "
finally, boils down to be a story
in which its hero must eventually confront-
yes the conflict between orthodox
and modern approaches to the scriptures
(Huapt 373). " All beginnings are
hard." In the Beginning opens as David
Lurie, now a famous Biblical scholar,
now guiding his young students on the
dangerous tightrope path of inquiry he
himself traveled as a youth--where a
misstep might mean hurtling into bitter
loss of faith--looks back at his own
beginning (Potok 1). The story is tied to
scriptural themes with unaccustomed
complexity. I was surprised to see a
reference to the Documentary Hypothesis.
This is an explanation of how the first
five books of the Bible were written.
I learned about the Documentary Hypothesis
in my Hebrew scripture class. This
is a very complex biblical criticism in the
middle of a novel. It does have
references to Torah and Talmudic study, so
non-Jews and seculars ones might
have to look something Despite of the resulting
fullness and complexity, the
author has mis-estimated. His patterning is too
careful, too insistent. When
every small episode or description is made
thematically relevant, there is a
loss of the spontaneity that Mr. Potok's fluid
associative mode of
reminiscence seems to require. He proceeds too cautious, as
through fearful
of spilling a drop of his meaning. An incidentally effect is
make Jewishness
seem an exhausting full time condition imposing a conversational
style that
moves only between the gnomic and wry. The most important aspect of
the
miscalculation is that within the larger context the author has created,
his
hero is insufficiently interesting (Irwin 413). Most of Potok's novels
can be
seen as the fictional sites of cultural confrontation and how that
confrontation
affects the people involved in them. The cultural confrontation
is between a
minority immigrant Jewish subculture and the 'umbrella' culture
(as the author
himself calls it) of Western secular humanism. It is Potok's
particular gift as
a novelist and storyteller to have subjected these rather
abstract areas of
cultural expression to novelistic treatment and to have
made them available to
the common reader. He writes about these modern
achievements with great
enthusiasm and succeeds remarkably well in making
them exciting for us, however
complex they actually are. Yet, he is not blind
to the darker aspects of Western
civilization, particularly since its history
is fraught with an anti-Semitism
that reached its greatest intensity in the
Holocaust (Buning). This novel about
a Jewish brain box puzzling at the
irrationality of history turns out
unexpectedly moving. Kept off stage and
reflected in miscrosm, the street corner
humiliations, the tough gangs of
goyim forcing copies of social justice on
Semitic looking schoolboys
offer much more controllable leverage on our
emotions. It is this careful
focus which ensures that the conclusion works. With
five million dead in
Europe and a race about to make a new beginning, a decision
to abandon
orthodox Jewish study and see what goyische learning has to offer
might seem
less than a climax. It is a measure of Mr. Potok's plausibility
and
characterization that the act (viewed as treachery by the community)
comes
across as a necessary, heroic and loyal to a deeper Jewish tradition
(Barnes
373) The mythic elements are superbly manipulated Potok has, at
last, come to
grips with the implicit in all of his previous work: the
problem of sustaining
religious faith in a meaningless world. He offers no
easy resolution. Lurie (the
narrator) at the end of the novel is still
searching for the truth. That is what
makes "In the Beginning" so powerful.
It successfully re-creates a
time, a place, and the journey of a soul. Its
ultimate ambiguity is a perfect
reflection of the response of an intelligent
religious sensibility to life (Nissenson
321). Personally, I found this
book to be dull. It was the same thing over and
over. It did not hold my
attention. It seemed centered on a boy named David who
was sickly with some
mysterious illness that could not be cured. The illness was
never named. In
spite of the illness, the child was bright and intelligent. He
was ahead of
his peers when he started school. He had self-taught himself to
read both the
English and Hebrew alphabet. It is centered on a Jewish boy
learning how to
interact with his parents. It seemed that it was a sequel to
another story
and it assumed one knew and understood the previous story even
though it was
not narrated. It assumes you know and understand the history of
the
1930-1940's. There is one thing that I did find good about the book is
that
it seems to be writing about the conflicts of pursuing your dreams when
every
one else is trying to derail your efforts. The story makes you feel
that you
actually know these characters even though his characters may come
from a
culture totally alien to the
reader.
Bibliography
http://www.amazon.com "A review of "In the
Beginning" The New
York, vol. LI, no. 39 November 17, 1975, pg. 193-194
Author's comments,
http://www.lasierra.edu/~ballen/potok/potok.unique.html#begin
Barnes,
Julian; "Zion Tamers" in New Statesman, vol. 91, no. 2351,
April 9, 1976,
pg. 478, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 26, Gale Research
Company
Book, Tower, Detroit, London (1999) pg. 373 Biographical Data,
http://www.lasierra.edu/~ballen/potok.biographical.html