Davita's Harp

Channah Chandal survived a pogrom in Russia that killed her sister and grandfather and finds herself in Vienna, a student because her father is ashamed of her. Ashamed because she has been raped, ashamed because he, away, as so often, studying with his Hasidic rebbe, was not there to protect her.

In Vienna, she meets Jacob Daw, who will become a famous writer of short stories, and she sheds her religiosity and wakens to a wider world, an awakening that brings her to America and marriage to a Gentile journalist, Michael Chandal, and conversion to Communism and dedication to the party.

Michael, himself, bears a wound, as a seventeen-year-old, immediately after the First World War, he witnesses the brutal killing of an union activist in a conflict over lumber, from which his family built its fortune. Estranged from them, he embarks on his campaign to right the world, to free the proletariat.

This couple has a daughter, Davita Ilana, from whom's perspective Chaim Potok's wonderful novel unfolds. She is eight at its opening, precociously bright and questioning, being moved from apartment to apartment in Manhattan as her parent's landlords lose patience with their properties being used as sites of noisy propaganda.

But it is an adventurous life, overflowing with purpose yet conflictual, a conflict that is globally deepening. War is about to break out in Spain. A war that is to become the focal point of conflict, by proxy, between Fascists and the Left. You taste the reality of that conflict in the committed - a defining moment as it was for a few - and the wider circle of indifference from the many, especially in 'safe' America.

Alongside this strand of political commitment and this its entrenchment in individual lives, there is the strand of Davita's Jewishness. She is Jewish, according to the Law as her mother is, but what does this, could this mean? Their wandering is brought to an end when Channah's cousin, Ezra Dinn, an Orthodox Jew, and an immigration lawyer, arrange for the family to settle in an apartment he owns. His aunt and her family, also Orthodox, live below, and so Davita finds herself exposed to her Jewish origins and as an inquisitive, often lonely child, displaced by her parents' multiple commitments to campaign and help, goes in search of its meaning and possibilities.

What unfolds is a story of tragedy, Michael will be killed at Guernica whilst covering the war as a journalist, and a returning hope as Channah, disillusioned by Stalin's pact with Hitler, will remarry Ezra Dinn and both Channah and Davita will find a renewed identity within the space of their Jewishness, that itself, has space, often surprising space, to allow for their 'eccentric' interpretations and behavior. This is symbolized by both of them saying the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, as women frowned upon, and for a Gentile, Davita's father, and for a non-family member, Jacob Daw, Channah's friend, and one-time lover especially so.

Potok is a too good writer to imagine that this renegotiation will be easy or ever complete - Davita will at the end, as a graduating thirteen-year-old, be truly discontented with the state of the world and her place in it as both a person and a Jew- but as a realistically optimistic writer, he can always imagine that hope remains.

The sources of hope are manifold. It is there in a real but imperfect community. It is there in a community fashioned by ritual and law, even as that fashioning strains against the wider imperatives of changing humanity. It rests in the imagination - the ability to fashion stories, that if forever incomplete, offers new ways of seeing and potentially being healed - and, it is more than implied, that it will be the making of stories that will Davita's fulfilling vocation. It is embedded in faith - that the world is created good, is broken, and yet can be redeemed - even if the containers of that faith, its institutions, can and will disappoint.

You come away from a Potok novel having tasted a real world, with enfleshed characters, who live in a time and space contained in yet something other, that amidst the messiness of being human there is a golden string, ever being touched upon, drawn in, that leads to heaven's gate, and that heaven enfolds the world.  You come away having stepped into a very particular world - that of Orthodox Judaism - realizing that its struggles and complexities resonate with our own. How does any community with a commitment to the true deal with the reality that truth is always bigger than any and all of our commitments?

I read some of Potok happily years ago when I was at university, and now am finding an enriching reacquaintance that wants to expand the circle of what was then read to other of his works, of which this one, and I am yet to be anything other than delighted.