CHILDREN OF ISRAEL: JACOB FIGURES AND THEMES

IN THE NOVELS OF CHAIM POTOK

by

ALAN MORRIS COCHRUM

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON

December 2010
Copyright © by Alan Morris Cochrum 2010

All Rights Reserved

My thanks go to the faculty and my fellow students in the English Department at UT-

Arlington, especially to my thesis committee members—Dr. Tim Morris, Dr. Tim Richardson,

and Dr. Jim Warren—and to Dr. Margaret Lowry, director of the first-year English program, for

their support and help during my studies and the writing of this thesis. I also would like to thank

my family, relatives, and friends—and of course most especially my wife, Jennifer Cochrum.

November 18, 2010

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 ABSTRACT

CHILDREN OF ISRAEL: JACOB FIGURES AND THEMES

IN THE NOVELS OF CHAIM POTOK

Alan Morris Cochrum, M.A.

The University of Texas at Arlington, 2010

Supervising Professor: Dr. Tim Morris

The twentieth-century novelist Chaim Potok made central to his fiction what he called

“culture war,” juxtaposing his Jewish-American characters’ inner spiritual lives with key

elements of Western secularism. In five of his novels—The Promise (1969), My Name Is Asher

Lev (1972), The Book of Lights (1981), Davita’s Harp (1985), and The Gift of Asher Lev

(1990)—the protagonist comes under the influence of a character who can be styled “the Jacob

figure.” This thesis argues that these characters not only echo various aspects of the biblical

narratives about the Hebrew patriarch, thereby turning him into a meta-character in the novels,

but also embody particular facets of the central culture clash in the individual books.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................iii

ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... iv

Chapter Page

1. CHAIM POTOK AND THE PROMISE……………………………………..………..….. ..... 1

2. MY NAME IS ASHER LEV AND THE GIFT OF ASHER LEV ...................................... 14

3. THE BOOK OF LIGHTS ................................................................................................ 32

4. DAVITA’S HARP ........................................................................................................... 51

WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................................. 72

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION .................................................................................................. 74

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 CHAPTER 1

CHAIM POTOK AND THE PROMISE

Despite the monumental stature in Jewish history of the patriarch Abraham and the

lawgiver Moses, the Jews have not historically been known as Abrahamites or the children of

Moses. Rather, they are the Israelites—the descendants of Abraham’s grandson who originally

was called Jacob and later was renamed Israel. In the Genesis narratives, Jacob is a

multifaceted figure—father, rogue, husband, mystic—who most famously sires the sons who

become the progenitors of the traditional twelve tribes. And in the work of the twentieth-century

Jewish-American novelist Chaim Potok, Jacob reappears, although not in his biblical persona.

Beginning with the 1967 bestseller The Chosen and continuing with a number of other novels,

Potok creates a series of young Jewish protagonists whose conservative religious culture

clashes with elements of the broader Western society. In five of these books—The Promise

(1969), My Name Is Asher Lev (1972), The Book of Lights (1981), Davita’s Harp (1985), and

The Gift of Asher Lev (1990)—the main character comes under the influence of an older man,

often a teacher of some kind, named Jacob (or Jakob) who has a powerful effect on the

protagonist’s life. In The Promise, he is Jacob Kalman, a staunchly traditionalist teacher who

threatens to block a student’s path to rabbinic ordination. In the Asher Lev books, he is the

modernist sculptor-painter Jacob Kahn, the artistic mentor of the young Hasidic title character.

In The Book of Lights, he is the cool-minded academic Jakob Keter, who draws a seminarian

into the esoteric world of the Kabbalah. And in Davita’s Harp, he is the frail Jakob Daw, a war-

wounded teller of cryptic stories who befriends the young daughter of American Communists.

This thesis will argue that the “Jacob figures” are marked by two distinct characteristics

— the first related to their name, the second related to their literary-philosophical function in the

individual novels. In the first aspect, these characters and the plotlines in which they are

1
involved echo various facets of the biblical Jacob narratives to such a degree that the patriarch

becomes something of a meta-character for Potok. (Indeed, critic S. Lillian Kremer sees My

Name Is Asher Lev as “overlaid with biblical allusion” [“Dedalus” 28].) In the latter aspect, the

Jacob figures act as representatives or embodiments of the worldviews that clash in the

individual books. According to Potok, his consistent theme is “culture war”: the face-off between

the West’s secular humanism, with its lack of absolutes, and subcultures (specifically

traditionalist Judaism) that possess unalterable givens (Ribalow 4). “The Promise is about the

confrontation with text criticism,” he says. “My Name is Asher Lev is about a confrontation with

Western art. Davita’s Harp is about the utilization of the human imagination as a way of coming

to terms with unbearable reality” (Kauvar 69). Thus, in The Promise, Kalman embodies the

ultra-Orthodox Judaism that rejects the intellectual tools that Western secularism brings to the

study of religious texts; in My Name Is Asher Lev and its sequel, Kahn is the man whose

ultimate concern is the art of the goyim, not the God of Israel; in Davita’s Harp, Daw crafts for

the title character a series of stories that attempt to deal with upheaval in his personal and

philosophical world. (And in The Book of Lights, Keter is a representative of religion and its

possibility of spiritual illumination over against the science whose quest into the realm of nuclear

physics is responsible for the lethal light of Hiroshima.)

In the exploration of these roles, students and critics of twentieth-century U.S. literature

will gain fresh insights not only into Potok’s literary craft but also into a religious Jewish world

that occasionally has been neglected by American writers and is unfamiliar to many readers.

Kathryn McClymond asserts that “the most critically acclaimed Jewish American writers, almost

without exception,” argue for “either a rejection or a secularization of Judaism” (13). Critics, she

says, generally have focused on “a certain kind of Jewish American experience” typical of the

works of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth (21); for these literary commentators,

the choice is whether to be “a traditional Jew or a secularized American—implying that one

could not be both” (18). Kremer somewhat dismissively speaks of “the constraints of the

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immigration/assimilation theme” and “the popular Roth school of social satire with its cast of

stereotypical suburban Jews composed of domineering mothers, ineffectual fathers, pampered

daughters, and whining sons” (“Post-alienation” 589), as well as of authors “whose Jewish

material enriched only their novels' sociological texture” (575). However, Kremer sees other

writers in whose works “Jewish thought, literary precursors, and history” receive pride of place:

“A significant portion of contemporary Jewish-American fiction is pervasively Jewish in its moral

insistence and its reference to Judaic texts” (571). Chaim Potok, with his tales in which the

study of Talmud and the observance of the commandments are taken as much for granted as

eating and drinking, is this kind of writer—but one whose work, despite its frequent bestselling

status, has been neglected by the academy. Greater attention to Potok’s novels will bring

valuable nuance to the study of Jewish-American literature and also will help readers to

understand communities in which faith is a decisive factor in daily life—an understanding that

becomes all the more important in a world in which religion can wield powerful influence on the

local, national, and even international levels.

The man in black

The Promise, Potok’s second novel, is notable for its juxtaposition of his sympathetic

first protagonist with perhaps the most problematic of all his characters. In The Chosen, the

young Reuven Malter befriends the brilliant and isolated Danny Saunders and passes a subtle,

challenging test of his scholarship and worldview posed by his teacher, Rav Gershenson. As

The Promise opens, he is in the last year of his studies for smicha (rabbinic ordination) at Hirsch

University. A required class brings him into the orbit of Jacob Kalman—a survivor of Maidanek

and a dark star of the Orthodox Jewish academic world who has recently joined the faculty at

the Brooklyn school. Kalman is, on more than one level, a study in black and white. A short,

compact, dark-eyed man with a heavy black beard and a pale countenance, he dresses in a

lengthy black jacket, neatly ironed black pants, black skullcap and black shoes; his shirt is white

3
and starched (105). The crisp shirt and trousers, and their colors, are indicative not only of

Kalman’s sartorial style but also of his approach to scholarship, religion and life:

There was a grimness about him, a wall of stiff, humorless rigidity, an

unbending quality of mind that placed everything it came into contact with into

immediate and fixed categories of approval or disapproval where I knew they

would remain forever. And his criterion of judgment was a rather harsh and

inflexible version of Eastern European Orthodox Jewish law, which he applied

to everything. (322)

Kalman’s hard-line nature quickly becomes clear to his students, but the tension turns personal

when he discovers Reuven’s visits to the non-traditionalist Zechariah Frankel Seminary. Reuven

has been helping his father, David Malter, with research for a book on the Talmud, but he also

has met at the seminary with Professor Abraham Gordon, whose notoriously un-Orthodox

writings have landed him in cherem (excommunication). “Gordon destroys Yiddishkeit with his

books. . . . Such a man is a danger,” Kalman tells Reuven (112). He demands that Reuven

avoid Gordon and the institution as well, declaring: “The school is unclean and its books are

unclean. My students will not go into their school” (114). Thus, the underlying clash between the

teacher’s entrenched views and those of the more liberal-minded student becomes direct.

The publication of David Malter’s book, The Making of the Talmud: Studies in Source

Criticism, exacerbates the conflict. Kalman has Reuven tutor him on the work’s technical

background without revealing his plans to attack David’s views in an Orthodox weekly. Not

surprisingly, Reuven is infuriated: “I had never in my life come across a man who was so

zealous a guardian of Torah that he did not care whom or how he destroyed in its defense. I

had never thought Torah could create so grotesque a human being” (259). Underlying the clash

is the fact that Kalman’s approval is necessary for ordination; Reuven feels himself being forced

into a choice between Gordon’s secularism and Kalman’s ultra-Orthodoxy. Yet Reuven

demonstrates during his oral exams that the Malters’ intellectual tools do not preclude a love for

4
the Jewish tradition, thereby turning the tables on Kalman and leaving him with the options of

approving the ordination or losing a dedicated and brilliant mind to the outside. The teacher

chooses the former. “Your father’s method is ice when one sees it on the printed page,” Kalman

tells Reuven later. “It is impossible to print one’s love for Torah. But one can hear it in a voice”

(340). The two part as impending academic colleagues and contenders in the fight for the

Jewish soul.

The son of Jacob

Reuven is a alternate spelling of the more familiar (to English-speakers) name Reuben,

known to readers of the Bible as the oldest son of the patriarch Jacob. On the basic level of

names, then, Potok casts Kalman as a father figure to the young Malter—but how so? Not

literally, of course, and certainly not in the standard emotional sense. The relationship between

Reuven and David Malter in The Chosen and The Promise is consistently a respectful, loving,

and nurturing one; in a psychoanalytic reading of the latter novel, Sanford Sternlicht remarks

that “without a mother for unconscious combat [Reuven and David] have the warmest, least

inhibited relationship” of the book’s father-son pairs (68). Their emotional ties are evident; each

shows concern for the other when illness or injury strikes. (Reuven’s eyesight is threatened in

The Chosen, and David’s health is a problem throughout the two books.) David also is sensitive

to his son’s personal difficulties. “Little children little troubles, big children big troubles,” he says

upon finding Reuven brooding after a confrontation with Kalman. “When my big Reuven is so

quiet, there are big troubles. Can I be of help to you, Reuven?” (Promise 117) There is no

silence between the two; they get along and communicate well. And not surprisingly for Potok’s

characters, whose concerns often are rather cerebral, their intellectual closeness is a major part

of their relationship. David teaches Talmud in a yeshiva high school in Brooklyn; Reuven

studies with his father and plans to enter the rabbinate. Indeed, one of the climactic passages in

The Chosen has Reuven using his parent’s study methods to solve a knotty problem of

Talmudic interpretation; after Reuven’s bravura classroom performance, Rav Gershenson tells

5
him: “I have been waiting all year to see how good a teacher your father is” (Chosen 251).

Kalman perceives the same intellectual influence. “I see you know this method very well,

Malter,” he tells Reuven after the two discuss parts of David’s book. “Your father has taught you

well” (Promise 166–67). Reuven, then, is not seeking a substitute father; he is quite content with

the one he has.

Or is he? Late in the book, as Reuven contemplates the clash of the two worlds in

which he is involved as well as Danny’s impending marriage, he experiences an epiphany. “I

found myself envious of Danny’s solid-rootedness in his world—and discovered at that moment

to my utter astonishment how angry I was at my father for his book and his method of study and

the tiny, twilight, in-between life he had carved out for us”—a realization that leaves Reuven

“frightened and shaken” (257). A similar situation between Abraham Gordon and his disturbed

son, Michael, provides one of the novel’s key plot lines. Unlike Michael, however, Reuven

properly resolves his antagonism toward his father. “I would not have hated you that way,

abba,” Reuven tells his parent after describing an explosive confrontation between the two

Gordons. “We would have talked about it” (361). Still, when David prods him further, Reuven

hesitates before answering—a sign of the angst that his parent has unwittingly caused. Yet

despite the strain, the underlying bond between biological father and son is strong—not frayed

or broken in the ways that would send a young man in search of a replacement.

However, a father can be defined not only as one who “sires” by his own actions but

also as one who does so by the reactions that he causes. David Malter shapes Reuven directly,

in the ways typical of a loving father and also as one who is in intellectual sync with his son.

Jacob Kalman does not do this—the relationship between him and his student certainly is not

loving, and the two of them clearly are not confreres of heart or mind—but he nevertheless is

indirectly responsible for who Reuven has become by the end of The Promise. “A teacher can

change a person’s life,” David Malter says, but “only if the person is ready to be changed. A

teacher rarely causes such a change, Reuven. . . . More often he can only occasion such a

6
change” (118). In his role of character-shaper, then, Kalman truly can be spoken of as Reuven’s

father—or perhaps the proper term might be “anti-father.”

“A man must be forced to choose”

How does this “parental” status work itself out? First, family relationships (in contrast to

friendships) notoriously are those that are not chosen, and this certainly describes the link

between Reuven and Kalman. Neither seeks out the other. Kalman is not Reuven’s ideal

teacher; he takes the Talmud class because it is required. “I wanted no personal relationship

with Rav Kalman,” Reuven thinks, even before the atmosphere between the two becomes truly

fraught (100). Nor is Reuven the “son” whom Kalman would have chosen. Sternlicht suggests

that Kalman, who according to rumor saw his wife and three daughters shot by storm troopers

during World War II (Promise 105), suffers from “unconscious jealousy of David Malter, whose

brilliant son lives” (Sternlicht 69). Although this theory would add an interesting layer to the

father-son issue, it is basically unsupported by the text; when Kalman waxes nostalgic about his

life in Europe, for instance, he recalls a particularly talented student rather than his family

(Promise 293). However, Reuven clearly does not hold such a privileged place in Kalman’s

mind. “I am afraid I really do not know what to do with you, Malter,” he says. “I have never had

such a problem” (168). In The Chosen, Gershenson views Reuven as an asset; in The Promise,

Kalman sees him as an unwanted dilemma. This aspect of unwillingness also surfaces at the

end of the book. “My sons have conquered me,” Kalman muses (340), quoting a Hebrew saying

as he explains to Reuven his reluctant decision to give him smicha: He was persuaded by his

colleagues and his sense of the needs of the post-Holocaust Jewish community (339). The

relationship, then, is metaphorically father-son in part because the personalities involved get the

luck of the draw; as with blood relatives, the two are forced upon one another. Yet Kalman’s

part in the siring of Reuven’s psyche is most directly acted out in his self-appointed role as a

catalyst of clarity.

7
 When the socially awkward student Abe Greenfield comes to a Talmud session

unprepared because he opted to study for a math final instead, Kalman publicly and brutally

rakes him over the coals for his decision. One’s choices reveal one’s character, he says—not

only to the world but to oneself as well. “A man must be forced to choose,” he tells Greenfield.

“It is only when you are forced to choose that you know what is important to you” (147). Yet this

face-off with Greenfield is merely one round in the all-too-serious game in which Kalman is

engaged with those around him, including Reuven. Kalman wants to push others to see what

they are and, in his view, what they should be. “Do you know yourself, Malter? Where do you

stand?” he asks. “Do you stand with true Yiddishkeit, or do you stand perhaps a little bit on the

path of Gordon?” (168) For this believer, the former is clearly distinct from the latter.

Kalman easily might be seen as a closed-minded inquisitor, a member of the religious

thought police, an intellectual blackmailer. “I cannot give smicha to someone who does not

stand with true Yiddishkeit, no matter how great a Gemora [Talmud] student he is,” he informs

Reuven (168). For Kalman, when it comes to ordination, scholarly expertise in the tradition is

not enough—one’s attitude toward the tradition is all-important. Reuven perceives clearly his

teacher’s black-and-white attitude. “He’s telling me to take a stand,” the young man says to his

father. “I’m either with him or against him. All or nothing. I’m disgusted with the whole business”

(189). Indeed, Kalman’s version of Judaism and scholarship holds no attractions for Reuven; he

sees it as hysterical (235), characteristic of the Middle Ages (194), and “musty . . . with the

odors of old books and dead ideas and Eastern European zealousness” (257). Hatred for this

man who has made his and his father’s existence miserable comes easily to Reuven (206).

Yet even as the battle lines are drawn, Reuven betrays a certain understanding of the

forces that drive his teacher. The symbolic clothing to the contrary, Reuven knows that there is

more to Jacob Kalman than his black-and-white approach to life and Torah; although he bears

certain hallmarks of the fanatic of faith, that is not all of the story. This quasi-empathy is

suggested after a conversation with his teacher. “The Hasidim are not the only ones who guard

8
the spark,” Kalman says. “I too have an obligation” (168). Walking later through a cold, dark

Hasidic neighborhood, Reuven reflects on that metaphor and the situation around him:

I . . . thought how these remnants of the concentration camps had changed the

face of things. They were the remnants, the zealous guardians of the spark. . . .

[M]en like Rav Kalman who were not Hasidim felt swayed by their presence

and believed themselves to be equally zealous guardians of the spark, and no

one at Hirsch would fight them because the spark was precious, it was all that

was left after the blood and slaughter, and you dimmed it when you fought its

defenders. (183–84)

It is difficult to say whether the last part of this passage—“the spark was precious, it was all that

was left after the blood and slaughter, and you dimmed it when you fought its defenders”—

represents merely the feelings of the majority at Hirsch or those of Reuven as well. The former

interpretation is perhaps more likely, but the latter is certainly possible; if this is the case, these

musings reflect a certain understanding on Reuven’s part of the complexity and ambiguity of the

cultural battle. Reuven’s feelings about the Hasidim and their sympathizers are mixed, as the

novel makes clear; however, as a witness of the Holocaust’s horror from afar, he understands

the vulnerability of Judaism’s spark and the problematic nature of a pitched battle over it.

It is in Reuven’s interactions with the young Michael Gordon, whose father has been

bitterly criticized by Kalman and those like him, that Reuven most clearly indicates a certain

understanding of his nemesis. When Michael asks him why he doesn’t abandon a school that is

“full of spiders and cobwebs and old men who cheat you,” he counters: “They’re not evil. If they

were evil it would be easy to get out of the school. They’re very sincere” (208). Reuven thus

acknowledges that the ultra-Orthodox are not simply seeking power over their fellow believers;

rather, this is a fight for principle. As critic Edward A. Abramson observes about the novel, even

“those characters who exhibit fanaticism are seen to be fanatical in the service of deeply held,

honorable beliefs . . .” (38). David Malter, beleaguered by conservative yeshiva colleagues,

9
sees the battle in part as an overprotective reaction to the Holocaust and tells Reuven that “it is

different when you understand it. There is less of the—hatred” (Promise 294–95). The son

appears to take in the lesson. “Rav Kalman is an angry person,” he tells Michael:

But he suffered. He lost his whole world and people who are suffering

sometimes take out their suffering on others. They defend what the ones they

loved died for. They become angry and ugly and they fight anything that’s a

threat to them. We have to learn how to fight back without hurting them too

much. (352)

Reuven thus demonstrates that he has come to a nuanced, truly adult view of this man. He has

not changed his opinion of Kalman’s actions—they are pugnacious, “angry and ugly,” and

should be actively opposed. At the same time, Reuven understands not only that much of this

springs from suffering but also that even though fighting is necessary, a scorched-earth policy is

not. (In this, he deliberately rejects the tactics of his professor, who is “so zealous a guardian of

Torah that he did not care whom or how he destroyed in its defense” [259].)

In this way, then, Jacob becomes the father of Reuven. True, he does not sire the

younger man in either body or soul; Kalman does not reproduce himself. However, by pressing

his student to make a choice between what he sees as the genuine Yiddishkeit that he himself

defends and the heresy/apostasy of David Malter and Abraham Gordon, Kalman creates in

Reuven a more profound self-awareness. At story’s end, Reuven is what he is in part because

of Jacob Kalman—which is one way of defining fatherhood. In a sense, Reuven still inhabits

“the tiny, twilight, in-between life” that his biological parent whittled out (257); he approaches

texts as a Western secularist might but is guided by those texts in a traditional manner. He is

neither in Gordon’s nor Kalman’s camp. Yet he now owns that interstice more fully; during his

oral examinations, he persuades Kalman (barely but successfully) that he can be trusted to

pass on and guard the tradition—that in his hands, his method of study is a tool rather than a

10
weapon. Ironically, even against his own judgment, Jacob Kalman has succeeded in his mission

of bringing about clarity; he has helped bring Reuven to a greater understanding of himself.

A deceptive stranger in a strange land

Jacob Kalman, then, echoes the role of his biblical namesake as the father of Reuven;

yet this is not the only way that he does so. One of the best-known stories about the Hebrew

patriarch is his theft of the blessing from his twin brother, Esau, who is the firstborn and the

favorite of their father. The elderly Isaac sends out Esau to hunt some wild game in preparation

for the bestowal of the blessing. At the instigation of his mother, who favors the younger twin,

Jacob takes some well-prepared goat meat, impersonates his sibling, and fools the blind old

man into giving him the blessing instead (Tanakh, Gen. 27). And like his ancestor, Kalman

proves himself capable of connivance. When David Malter’s book on the Talmud is published,

Kalman persuades Reuven to tutor him in the volume’s scholarly intricacies, among them its

use of Greek. Only later does Reuven discover—ironically, through his father—that his teacher

has been engaged to write an attack on the book. After the publication of the two-part review,

which Reuven finds “vicious and sarcastic” (234), Kalman is unapologetic: “Tell me, Malter, who

else should I have gone to in order to have your father’s book explained to me? I did not want to

attack your father for things he did not say. I wanted to understand clearly what he wrote. I went

to his son because the son of David Malter understands his father’s writings, and I know the

son” (259). By concealing (or at least not revealing) his motives, Kalman enlists Reuven’s help

in an attack on his own parent. In Kalman’s eyes, the end justifies the means. Unlike his biblical

forebear, the latter-day Jacob does not lie outright, nor is he pursuing personal gain; even

Reuven acknowledges that he acts out of theological conviction (259). Nevertheless, a “family

resemblance” is at work in that the latter-day Jacob, like the one of old, is willing to mislead in

pursuit of his goal.

A final way in which Kalman’s life echoes that of the patriarch is his status of exile. The

biblical Jacob spends much of his adult life in Haran, far from Canaan (Gen. 27–33). Originally

11
sent away both to avoid death at his brother’s hands (his mother’s motivation) and to marry a

proper wife (his father’s instructions), Jacob eventually spends twenty years in the employ of his

uncle Laban. Yet his stay is not altogether happy. After arranging to marry one of his cousins,

he is famously tricked into marrying her sister as well, and his business dealings with Laban

also turn sour: “As you know, I have served your father with all my might,” he tells his wives,

“but your father has cheated me, changing my wages time and again” (Gen. 31:6–7). In similar

fashion, Jacob Kalman is an often bewildered and unhappy exile from his homeland. Once an

influential teacher in what is now Lithuania, he spent two years in the Polish concentration camp

of Maidanek during World War II and later lived in Shanghai before moving to the United States

(104–05). But “there was little about America he seemed to like,” Reuven notes (107), including

the lack of rigor in much of American Judaism: “A Jew travels to synagogue on Shabbos in his

car, that is called Yiddishkeit,” Kalman rants. “A Jew eats ham but gives money to philanthropy,

that is called Yiddishkeit. A Jew prays three times a year but is a member of a synagogue, that

is called Yiddishkeit” (109). When confronted by a colleague who says, “It is a different world

here!,” he barks: “It is a corrupt world! I will not be changed by it!” (265) More poignantly, he is

fearful about pogroms in the wake of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy case. “He had been in

the country about two years,” Reuven thinks, “and he still didn’t understand what it was really all

about” (303). Like his namesake, Jacob Kalman finds himself a stranger in a strange land.

A guardian of the spark

As pointed out previously, Potok characterizes The Promise as concerning the

confrontation of traditional Judaism with the tools of textual criticism (Kauvar 69), which is a

stand-in for Western secularism. In the broader sense, the novel is about the confrontation of

two Judaisms, each of which claims to be a valid version—indeed, one of which claims to be the

only valid version. At one end stands Abraham Gordon, who ironically bears the name of the

original party to the divine covenant but who has rejected traditional theism. (In one of the

novel’s flashes of humor, he says, “Sometimes I wish there were a personal God. . . . I would

12
have someone to shout at” [284].) Raised in Orthodoxy, he now is engaged in a naturalistic re-

interpretation of the faith—revelation is no longer a viable concept; religion is a human

construct; God is merely “a lofty human idea . . . an abstract guarantor of the intrinsic

meaningfulness of the universe” (63–64). At the other end stands Jacob Kalman, not merely

Orthodox but fiercely so, a full-bearded and black-garbed guardian of the holy spark. David

Malter and Abraham Gordon are only two of the targets of his zeal; he often turns his classes

into savage lectures on the corrupt American culture or even the university’s internal doings:

Students and teachers were attacked by name. A projected college course in

Greek mythology was canceled because he labeled it paganism. A student was

almost expelled because he caught him outside the school without a hat. . . .

[H]e waged a vitriolic campaign against girls sitting together with boys in the

yeshiva auditorium. The whole year was like that. (107)

One might expect a scholar or believer with strong convictions to adopt a certain take-no-

prisoners approach to the field of his profession or faith. Kalman does this, and in a rather

ruthless style—but he also employs the same tactics in student-related affairs that others

probably would shrug off or simply grumble about. This signifies a particularly rigid mind-set that

helps make Kalman a striking embodiment of a calcified Old World Judaism against which

Reuven defines himself. At one point in the novel, the younger man muses: “I would enter

Abraham Gordon’s world if I was forced into taking a stand. The world of Rav Kalman was too

musty now with the odors of old books and dead ideas and Eastern European zealousness”

(257). Such is the clash that Potok sets up for Reuven: On one side, Gordon and his

intellectually free but overly humanistic philosophy; on the other, Kalman and the believing but

restrictive forces of ultra-Orthodox theology. Thus the Talmud teacher, in addition to echoing the

themes of fatherhood, deception, and exile in the Jacob narratives in the Bible, also plays a vital

role in the culture clash that is key to The Promise and much of Potok’s other work.

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 CHAPTER 2

MY NAME IS ASHER LEV AND THE GIFT OF ASHER LEV

If Jacob Kalman is the “anti-father figure” of The Promise, Jacob Kahn is the more

traditional father figure of My Name Is Asher Lev. Indeed, Kahn is in some ways the anti-

Kalman. Unlike the vociferously Orthodox and very Eastern European defender of the faith,

Kahn is an assimilated Russian Jew who has left behind much of his background. In The

Promise, the Jacob figure represents the highly conservative center of the traditional Jewish

culture that faces off with Western secularism, symbolized by modern textual criticism. In My

Name Is Asher Lev, the Jacob figure is on the opposite side: Kahn represents the world of

Western art, a sphere whose principles conflict sharply with the Hasidism of the book’s other

principal characters; he is the painter-sculptor who fashions a conflicted Jewish artist.

The novel’s first-person opening sets up the clash in memorable fashion: “My name is

Asher Lev, the Asher Lev . . . the notorious and legendary Lev of the Brooklyn Crucifixion. I am

an observant Jew. Yes, of course, observant Jews do not paint crucifixions. As a matter of fact,

observant Jews do not paint at all—in the way that I am painting” (3). Looking back as a young

adult whose name is tied to a scandalous piece of art, Asher sketches the paradox of his life:

“Real” Jews do not paint, much less paint crucifixions—yet he is one, and does, and did.

Like many youngsters, Asher begins to draw in childhood: “I can remember, at the age

of four, holding my pencil in the firm fist grip of a child and transferring the world around me to

pieces of paper . . .” (5–6). Unlike many children, he is preternaturally talented. “This is a six-

year-old boy?” his uncle Yitzchok murmurs as he gazes, startled, at drawings of himself; this

nephew, he remarks, is a “regular Chagall” (31). Most important, unlike most children, Asher

provokes a fierce antagonism with his art. He and his parents are Ladover Hasidim (a sect that

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Potok modeled on the real-life Lubavitchers [Ribalow 17]); his father, Aryeh, is a professional

emissary for the Ladover leader, the Rebbe. To Aryeh, art is a waste of time, or worse. “Asher,

you have a gift,” he says at one point. “I do not know if it is a gift from the Ribbono Shel Olom

[the Master of the Universe] or from the Other Side. If it is from the Other Side, then it is

foolishness, dangerous foolishness, for it will take you away from Torah and from your people

and lead you to think only of yourself” (109). Such are Aryeh’s priorities and his understanding

of how they can be honored—not merely that God and one’s people come first, but that the

pursuit of art has no contribution to make to these pursuits. Asher’s youth becomes an

increasingly fierce tug of war: on one side a boy in the grip of an overpowering desire to capture

and interpret the world on paper and canvas, and on the other a man who has dedicated his life

to Torah and the Ladover and now faces rebellion and incomprehensibility in his own offspring.

Further complicating the conflict and making it even more poignant is the situation of

Rivkeh Lev, the nurturing and supportive woman who finds herself torn between the husband of

her youth and the child of her bosom. Her spouse’s compulsive traveling makes her enormously

anxious (her beloved brother died in an accident while traveling for the Rebbe), and her son’s

exploration of his undeniable talent (including the drawing of nudes as well as Jesus) engenders

perplexity and consternation in her as well as fury in Aryeh. She buys art supplies for Asher but

also pushes him to do better at his neglected studies—a recurring concern of Aryeh’s. “Papa

yells at you because he doesn’t think you’re raising me [correctly]?” Asher asks, and Rivkeh

replies: “Your father thinks I’m encouraging your foolishness” (174). The mother is caught

between father and son, wanting to support both and agonized because of it.

The artist as a young man

The conflict changes irrevocably at the behest of the Rebbe, who when Asher is

thirteen years old declares that the boy will study under an artist. The impact of this intervention

is clear to Asher. “My father carried his burden of pain all through the celebration of my bar

mitzvah,” he recalls. The decision was not to be questioned; their leader was the “representative

15
of the Master of the Universe. . . . My father’s right to shape my life had been taken from him by

the same being who gave his own life meaning—the Rebbe” (197). Yet while stressing to Asher

the obligation to honor his parent, the Rebbe also tells him: “One man is not better than another

because he is a lawyer while the other is a painter. A life is measured by how it is lived for the

sake of heaven. . . . But there are those who do not understand this” (192). The Rebbe does not

question Aryeh’s love for Asher but rather his view of how to deal with him. Sternlicht argues:

“The young must rebel, and they must win. . . . If one of the young is lost either to life or family

or community it is tragic. So rebellion must be allowed to a degree” (79). Hoping to save Asher

for the Ladover community, the Rebbe chooses to override Aryeh’s judgment in the hope that

Asher’s rebellion can be ridden out and the boy’s talent nurtured within acceptable limits.

The Rebbe’s chosen ally is Jacob Kahn, a former associate of Pablo Picasso—a

modernist painter-sculptor whose father admired the Rebbe’s father, a non-practicing Jew who

still cannot quite leave the Ladover world behind. In the first extended conversation between the

younger artist and the older one, Kahn gives Asher a preview of his apprenticeship that is drill-

sergeant blunt. “This is not a toy,” the crusty old man growls. “This is not a child scrawling on a

wall. This is a tradition . . . . And I will force you to master it. Do you hear me? . . . Only one who

has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or to rebel against it” (Name 213).

Asher’s artistic eye can hardly be improved, but his ability can be honed—in composition, in the

creation of tension, in “how to handle rage in color and line. You draw with too much love,” Kahn

says (215). In fact, he views Asher as something like a promising piece of stone. “All artists are

selfish and self-centered,” he says. “I am taking you on because I will derive pleasure in molding

your greatness. . . . I will work with your faults and flaws and genius, as Michelangelo worked

with the flaws and power of the marble that became his David” (216). In this world, the

presuppositions are not Jewish—its values and concepts are “goyisch and pagan” (213). To

Kahn, art is a moral universe unto itself: “The Rebbe asked me to guide you and to keep you

16
from evil ways. . . . I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art

and what is bad art” (216).

In the ensuing years, Asher remains observant; he prays, he fasts, he follows the

kosher laws; but his thoughts and actions increasingly are colored by the world of Western art.

He draws nude models (229–31); he participates in the shop talk of Kahn and his artistic

colleagues as an equal (278–79); he cuts off his long earlocks (299); he works on a painting

with curious “madonna and child” echoes (246); on a trip to Florence, he becomes fascinated by

Michelangelo’s Pietà depicting Jesus, Nicodemus, Mary Magdalene, and the Virgin Mary (310).

Finally, driven to capture his mother’s pain at being caught between husband and son, he paints

her as crucified between figures of his father and himself, thereby becoming “an observant Jew

working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into

which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment” (330). His parents are appalled,

and the Rebbe reluctantly exiles him to Europe. “You have crossed a boundary,” the Ladover

leader says sadly. “I cannot help you. You are alone now. I give you my blessings” (367).

The artist as an older man

The Gift of Asher Lev picks up the story twenty years later. Asher is a highly successful

painter living in southern France, but now there are questions about artistic repetition and

inertia. The critics find sharp words at an exhibit, and even his old mentor is concerned,

remarking: “you do it too easily, Asher Lev. You are too comfortable. There is no sweat in your

armpits” (3). Then his uncle Yitzchok Lev dies unexpectedly, and Asher and his family—his

wife, Devorah, his daughter, Rocheleh, and his son, Avrumel—fly to New York for the funeral.

The tension between Asher and Aryeh has stabilized but still simmers under the surface—“A

sophisticated man,” the son muses, yet the “boundary of his artistic appreciation was the kitsch

of a calendar scene” (39–40). Soon, however, new problems emerge. Asher discovers that his

genial uncle, who was supportive of his nephew’s work during his youth, had put together a

sizable collection of modern art: Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, René Magritte, Henri Matisse,

17
Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Chaim Soutine, and Asher Lev as

well (51, 53). His uncle’s family is uncomfortable enough with both Asher and the collection—his

pietistic, rancid-souled cousin Yonkel labels the latter as “idol worship” and “a desecration of the

name of God” (62)—but the situation sours even further when it emerges that Yitzchok’s will

names Asher as the collection’s trustee. Infuriated, Yonkel assaults his cousin in the middle of

the Ladover synagogue and bloodies his nose, shouting, “Destroyer of Israel! Stand back from

him!” (167) Asher thus continues to be a locus of turmoil for his family.

His parents, enjoying their first lengthy stay with their grandchildren, press Asher to

remain in New York for a while, but he is determined to return to France as soon as possible.

“They’re trying to suck me back in, and then they’ll kill whatever I’ve got left,” he tells his wife.

“We’re going home, Dev. We came for my uncle’s funeral, not for mine” (74–75). Yet he is

persuaded otherwise by the Rebbe, who in public and private makes cryptic remarks about the

importance to the Ladover community of “three” and “the third” (22). Eventually Asher realizes

that the aging, childless Rebbe wants Aryeh, his chief aide, to don the mantle of leadership

upon his death—but only if Asher will allow Avrumel (the third in the Levs’ male line) to remain

in New York and eventually succeed his grandfather, thus ensuring a clear line of succession

and saving the Ladover from internal chaos. Asher is angry—“What kind of God creates such

situations?” he asks (365)—but in a strangely symbolic dance at a Simchas Torah celebration,

he yields: “. . . I felt all the eyes in the crowd looking at me and all the eyes of all the generations

of Ladover looking at me . . . and I reached up and lifted Avrumel over my head and handed him

to my father . . .” (363–64). Asher’s brethren thus conquer him; the artist gives up his son for the

community.

Another son of Jacob

As in The Promise, the father theme in My Name Is Asher Lev begins with the names.

Like Reuven/Reuben, the Asher of the biblical accounts is a son of Jacob. Reuben is the

patriarch’s firstborn, the child of his first wife, Leah; Asher is the eighth son, the child of the

18
concubine Zilpah (Gen. 29:32, 30:12–13). The relationship between the biblical Jacob and

Reuben is thus more “legitimate” than that between Jacob and Asher. Ironically, the reverse is

true in Potok’s novels: The fictional Asher is a truer son of his Jacob figure than the fictional

Reuven is of his. In The Promise, Kalman essentially “sires” Reuven in a negative sense,

repelling the latter rather than reproducing himself theologically and scholastically. In contrast,

Kahn hands on his artistic techniques, knowledge, and worldview to the title character of My

Name Is Asher Lev, thereby perpetuating his professional and philosophical DNA.

Further, the father-figure motif is more straightforward in the later novel because of the

nature of the parent-child relationship. In The Promise, this theme is fairly subtle because the

bond between Reuven and David Malter is strong; it is only late in the novel that stresses

emerge, and even then Reuven assures his father that a rupture would not have occurred

(Promise 361). The possibility that Reuven will choose his teacher over his parent is never a

real one. Writing about Asher and Aryeh, S. Lillian Kremer asserts, “Aside from their

disagreement about the importance of art, Asher respects his father; admires his selfless

devotion to Jewish survival . . . . [and] celebrates his father as a creative force” (“Dedalus” 31).

However, the relationship between the two is strained almost from the beginning; when Jacob

Kahn arrives on the scene, he and Aryeh (or rather their ways of thinking and living) clearly are

rivals for Asher’s loyalty. “I know your father,” the adult artist tells the young one in their first

conversation. “He will become my enemy” (194). And ultimately, the namesake of the biblical

Jacob proves to be the “true” father of Asher Lev. Sternlicht would question this assertion;

paraphrasing critic Henry Ahrens, he argues that Aryeh’s professional absences and lack of

sympathy for Asher send him searching for another father but that the aging and egocentric

Kahn cannot provide “the intimacy that only a loving father in a home can provide. Thus Asher

fails in his quest for a father” (Sternlicht 81). However, this overplays the emotional connection

between the two artists. There is no indication that Asher weighs his relationship with Kahn and

finds it wanting; although stresses sometimes develop between the two, they are resolved.

19
Placed between the literal father of his upbringing and the figurative father of his artistic soul,

Asher eventually casts his lot with the latter. “A choice tells the world what is most important to a

human being,” Jacob Kalman says in The Promise (147). When Asher faces the choice

between his artistic vision (by creating and then showing the crucifixion painting) and his familial

and spiritual heritage (which would have pressed him not to paint it, or at least not to exhibit it),

he tells the world that the former is more vital. He thus proves himself to be the spiritual son of

Jacob Kahn rather than Aryeh Lev.

A man and two women

Kahn also emulates his biblical namesake in his personal life. The patriarch Jacob is

known as part of one of history’s most famous love triangles. Upon fleeing to his uncle’s family,

he encounters Laban’s two daughters. The older Leah has “weak eyes”; the precise meaning of

this is unclear, but not so the description of the younger Rachel, who is “shapely and beautiful”

(Gen. 29:17). Jacob is smitten with Rachel, for whom he agrees to work seven years. However,

on the wedding night, Laban sneaks Leah into the bed instead; after an angry Jacob confronts

his father-in-law, Laban blithely tells him that custom does not allow the younger to marry before

the older. Nevertheless, at the price of another seven years of service, Jacob gets the bride of

his heart as well, thereby ending up with two wives (Gen. 29:14–30).

Potok’s fictional Jacob also has a pair of women in his life, one of them more alluring

than the other. Anna Schaeffer is Kahn’s art dealer. “She was of medium height, matronly, with

an oval face, sharp blue eyes, and short silvery hair,” Asher sees when he meets her. “She

wore a dark-blue wool dress and a long necklace of white beads” (Name 207). Kahn is a

vigorous seventy-two at this point in the novel, but Anna seems to be the younger of the pair. As

perhaps befits her long-term association with the artist, she displays a certain protectiveness

toward Kahn. “Many have hurt him,” she tells Asher. “He is like a monk. There are so many

things he does not understand” (210). The connotations are almost maternal. However, Anna is

quite capable of taking Jacob in hand if she feels the need. Midway through the artist’s opening

20
harangue to Asher about the nature of his world, the dealer takes him aside; when they return,

Kahn softly says, “Anna has scolded me severely for my bluntness” (215). In contrast to her

earthy client, she is well-dressed, well-spoken, sophisticated, urbane—a creature of the salon

rather than the studio. At an ornate black-tie exhibit of Kahn’s work, the uncomfortable artist

grumpily declares: “I wish I had Picasso’s gall and could stay away from these things. They

destroy me. A few more of these and I will never make it to eighty” (269). Anna, on the other

hand, is quite at home, calling the affair “a grand success . . . . a magnificent day” (269).

Despite their differences, the two work well together; in fact, Asher will recall Anna as Kahn’s

best friend (Gift 106).

The other woman in the artist’s life is Tanya Kahn, his wife. “She was a shy quiet

woman with short white hair and soft brown eyes . . . . and she spoke English with a heavy

Russian accent,” Asher recalls (Name 252). Those “soft brown eyes,” a phrase that recalls the

description of Leah as having “weak eyes,” stand in contrast to Anna’s sharp blue ones. Asher’s

view of her seems to change later (or perhaps Tanya herself does)—he sees her as “a woman

of striking appearance, high cheekbones, silver hair drawn back into a bun, dark-eyed,

aristocratic” (Gift 274). She is more than fifteen years younger than her husband (Gift 273), and

perhaps about the same age as Anna, but the latter’s worldliness gives the art dealer a younger

air. Like Anna, Tanya is quite capable of rebuking her spouse; when he says, “Ambivalence in

art is like piss in coffee,” she curtly remarks: “Old age should not become an excuse for

vulgarity” (Gift 276). When present in a scene, Tanya often is part of the background as her

husband and his protégé talk. She is something of a laconic, contented babushka, a woman

who shares her creative spouse’s life despite showing no artistic tendencies herself. At the

black-tie exhibit, Asher sees her “smiling and talking calmly to a woman in diamonds but looking

as if she would rather be reading one of her Russian or French books” (Name 269). She is

simultaneously part of Jacob Kahn’s world (as witness her presence at the show—indeed, she

is more at ease than he is) but distanced from it; she would prefer to be off in a quiet corner.

21
 These two women—one a part of his professional life, the other a part of his personal

life—are both integral to Kahn’s existence; in that sense, his situation echoes that of his biblical

forebear. Yet unlike the Jacob of the Bible, the Jacob of My Name Is Asher Lev does not create

an emotional or sexual triangle fraught with angst and rivalry. The Genesis account says flatly

that the original Jacob “loved Rachel more than Leah” (29:30), and the latter clearly senses this.

She accuses her younger sister of stealing her spouse (30:15), and after one pregnancy she

says with heart-tugging hope, “This time my husband will become attached to me, for I have

borne him three sons” (29:34). Indeed, the two siblings essentially engage in a baby-making

contest for Jacob’s favor, even dragging in their handmaidens in an early form of surrogate

motherhood. In contrast to this domestic strife, Jacob Kahn orders his life more wisely. There is

no hint of unfaithfulness involving Anna, nor does Tanya show any jealousy toward her. At one

point, Kahn suffers one of his occasional fits of depression while summering in Provincetown,

Massachusetts; a couple of days later, Anna arrives (presumably from New York) and goes off

with Tanya. After some time, the art dealer leaves, and Tanya remarks: “He is better. Anna has

a way of helping him” (Name 262). The fact that the art dealer comes all the way to Cape Cod

(seemingly at Tanya’s behest) to rally Jacob’s spirits, that she apparently has done this before

(“Anna has a way of helping him”), and that the wife is unperturbed by the other woman’s arrival

indicates a relationship among the three that is both intimate (although not in the sexual sense)

and lacking in tension—two qualities that do not necessarily go together. Although the fictional

Jacob and the biblical one both are involved in triangles of sorts, the existence of the former is

far less contentious than that of the latter.

Surrounded by the work of his hands

Two basic issues of human existence are mortality (“How long will I live?”) and legacy

(“What can I create? What will I leave behind?”). In both areas, Jacob Kahn proves to be similar

to his Hebrew ancestor, whose awareness of age and death emerges particularly in the latter

part of Genesis. When Jacob’s sons need their younger brother Benjamin to accompany them

22
to Egypt at the order of a demanding Egyptian official, Jacob cries: “If he meets with disaster on

the journey you are taking, you will send my white head down to Sheol [the realm of the dead] in

grief” (Gen. 42:38). Jacob, who erroneously believes that Benjamin’s sibling Joseph died years

ago, pleads against his sons’ request on the ground that he is an old man who already has

been bereaved and could not survive another such blow. Later, when the family discovers that

the Egyptian official is actually the long-gone Joseph, Jacob says, “My son Joseph is still alive! I

must go and see him before I die” (Gen. 45:28). When they arrive in Egypt, Jacob tells Pharaoh

in answer to a question: “The years of my sojourn [on earth] are one hundred and thirty. Few

and hard have been the years of my life, nor do they come up to the life spans of my fathers

during their sojourns” (47:9; brackets in orig.). The patriarch believes, with good reason, that he

has little time left and must take advantage of it, and although his statement to the Egyptian

monarch has a ritualistically self-deprecatory ring, his mortality clearly weighs heavily upon him.

Similarly, Jacob Kahn is all too aware of passing time. When he initially takes on Asher

as a student, he tells the teenager that he will work with him for five years. “I am seventy-two

years old,” he says. “I do not have five years to give to anything that is less than a marble for a

David,” comparing Asher to a potential masterpiece of sculpture (216). (Interestingly, the subject

of Michelangelo’s statue was a descendant of the biblical Jacob—another instance of the Jacob

theme.) As the apprenticeship proceeds, Kahn remains aware of his biological clock. Just

before the fit of depression from which Anna helps rescue him, he walks with Asher and

remarks, “I would like not to die too soon. There are many things I still want to do. I would like to

live beyond eighty.” But moments later, looking at the afternoon sunlight of Cape Cod, he

seems daunted by the weight of his past and the impossibility of capturing what he sees and

wants to express. “Even Monet could not do it. And he had the greatest eye of all,” he says

(260). A black mood swallows him—but it lasts only a few days, and then he returns to the

easel. “I will make it past eighty,” he declares, “if I can keep from thinking too much about the

past” (262). Like his ancestor, Jacob Kahn feels the burden of his years—but the artist wrestles

23
with the burden, not dying until he is almost one hundred (Gift 273). His life expectancy

becomes a wry, recurring motif over the years as he debates whether he will or will not reach a

particular age, or enjoy reaching it. “Sometimes I think it is not wise to grow too old,” he muses

amid the ascendancy of a nihilistic art movement that he detests. “But I am not aware that we

are given a choice in this matter” (Name 286). Neither the biblical nor the fictional Jacob is

eager to die; one has a long-lost son to see, and the other has work yet to do. Yet both also are

aware of the disadvantages of a long life.

Further, the two men are alike in their deaths. The patriarch Jacob passes away in

Egypt, an alien land, but (presumably because he was the father of the highly positioned

Joseph) his death is treated as that of a great man. The Egyptians mourn him for seventy days,

and when Joseph takes the body to Canaan for burial, along with him go “all the officials of

Pharaoh, the senior members of his court, and all of Egypt’s dignitaries . . . . Chariots, too, and

horsemen went up with him . . .” (Gen. 50:3–9). The funeral procession is that of an important

figure. Kahn, a Russian Jew by ethnicity, also dies in a land not his own (France) and is treated

as a great man, but not because of his blood: “The windows of great French cathedrals

shimmered with his luminous colors and forms. His sculptures adorned public places in a dozen

European cities” (279). The French have reason to remember and honor their resident artist,

and so they do. His funeral is attended by the national minister of culture and the mayor of Nice;

also present are “painters, sculptors, writers . . . . curators, dealers, printmakers, radio reporters,

television crews, journalists” (279). Prominence crowns both Jacobs upon their deaths, although

only with Kahn is that predictable.

In addition to worries about mortality, Jacob Kahn displays an implicit concern with

legacy that also can be detected in his forebear. For the biblical Jacob, this embodies itself in

progeny. In ancient Hebrew culture, childlessness was a major disgrace—a problem faced by

Jacob’s grandmother Sarah as well as his wife Rachel. The propagation of the family line was

so important that the Law of Moses called for the brother of a man who died sonless to marry

24
the widow; the “first son that she bears shall be accounted to the dead brother, that his name

may not be blotted out in Israel” (Deut. 25:5–6). (This institution of “levirate marriage” actually

figures in Potok’s fourth novel, In the Beginning.) The patriarch Jacob famously sires twelve

sons as well as at least one daughter, Dinah (Gen. 30:21). In the narratives, the driving force

behind this manic going-forth-and-multiplying is the rivalry between Leah and Rachel; after the

latter’s handmaiden delivers a son, Rachel declares: “A fateful contest I waged with my sister;

yes, and I have prevailed” (Gen. 30:8). The family continues to swell because the two wives

keep the game going. Yet one can hardly imagine that Jacob’s ego, or his desire to establish a

great house, had nothing to do with the increase; otherwise he certainly could have rejected at

least the ongoing involvement of the two concubines. And seventeen years after the reunion

with Joseph in Egypt, he calls his sons together, bestows a parting word to each, and dies,

perhaps literally encircled by the family he has created (Gen. 49).

Potok’s text hints that Jacob Kahn, too, feels the tug of legacy. When Asher first visits

the artist’s studio, Anna remarks that she has often asked Kahn for a particular pair of large

bronze sculptures. “But he parts with very little now,” she notes. “He says he wants in his old

age to be surrounded by the work of his hands” (Name 211). Her remark evokes a side of the

sculptor that finds comfort not merely in the knowledge that he has created something lasting

but in the visible, tangible signs of it—the artistic counterpart of the twelve sons, the living

results of Jacob’s generative power, physically surrounding the patriarch at his death. Kahn also

knows how precarious even the life of his artwork can be. Formerly a resident of France, he was

forced to flee the German threat of World War II. “Once in a while, he remembers the sculptures

he left behind in Paris when we ran from the Nazis,” Tanya tells Asher in explaining her

husband’s bout of depression. “They melted it all down. Ten years of sculpture” (261). The

Kahns’ four-year-old daughter died of influenza in Paris (272); the now-childless Jacob’s artwork

is the mark that he will leave on the world, and he does not view it casually. With the products of

25
his hands and his musings on his age, then, the artist reflects the concerns with mortality and

legacy shared by the patriarch.

Of the four fictional Jacobs under consideration, Kahn perhaps bears the closest

resemblance to the biblical figure, and thus is the clearest pointer toward what the patriarch

becomes for Potok: a meta-character, an overshadowing presence in the five novels. Father,

deceiver, leaver of legacies, companion of multiple women—the fictional namesakes repeat all

of these aspects of the original Jacob. And just as that Jacob became responsible for the

existence of those known as the Israelites, so his novelistic descendants are key to the lives

and natures of Potok’s protagonists, who are children of their particular Israel. In Jacob Kahn’s

case, that role consists of his shaping of Asher’s artistic soul.

Artist and Ladover

As stated previously, Kahn’s function in My Name Is Asher Lev—his significance fades

considerably in the sequel—is that of an avatar of the Western secular culture that Potok sees

as clashing with the core of traditional Judaism. Paralleling the familial tug-of-war involving

Asher, Aryeh, and Rivkeh is a philosophical one involving Aryeh, Jacob, and Asher. Just as

Rivkeh is the rope wrenched between Asher and Aryeh in their contest for her support and

attention, Asher is tugged from one direction by Aryeh and from the other by Kahn in their bid

for his loyalty. The clash begins to flower even during Asher’s first visit to Kahn’s studio. “In the

entire history of European art,” the artist says, “there has not been a single religious Jew who

was a great painter” (213). In similar fashion, Anna Schaeffer hesitantly tells the religious

teenager: “Art is not for people who want to make the world holy. You will be like a nun in a

bro— in a—theater for burlesque. Do you understand me, Asher Lev? If you want to make the

world holy, stay in Brooklyn” (209–10). In Crown Heights, religious observance and holiness are

vital concerns; in Kahn’s studio and the wider artistic world, they are not. Telling the teenager

that he has a responsibility and asking him what he thinks it is, Kahn reacts angrily when Asher

quotes a piece of Talmudic wisdom, learned from Aryeh, that Jews are responsible for one

26
another. “As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the

truth as you see it,” the old man snaps. “Do you understand? An artist is responsible to his art.

Anything else is propaganda” (217–18). Thus, one of the first assertions of Asher’s new teacher

is that he must think of himself primarily not as a Jew who is bound to others of his people but

as an artist who is bound to his craft and his personal vision. Significantly, the denigrated view

is not merely an ethical commonplace. It comes from the Talmud, a foundational source of

Jewish thought and practice; further, Asher learned this aphorism directly from his father. Kahn,

therefore, is not merely pushing Asher to reconstruct his basic identity but at the same time

implicitly questioning the authority of both Talmud and parent.

Kremer enlarges on this idea of Kahn as an instructor in artistic ethics; his name, she

says, “suggests kohen, signifying membership in the priestly class of Israel, and Lev represents

the Leverite [sic] group which assisted the priests in the sanctuary” (“Dedalus” 33). Thus, Kahn

is a member of the artistic Aaronic priesthood, guiding Asher the painterly Levite in the correct

rituals and right paths—rebuking him, for instance, when the young man tucks his earlocks

behind his ears for what Kahn sees as the wrong reasons (“Dedalus” 34). Kremer’s idea

insightfully implies that Art is a rival deity for Asher’s affections, with Kahn playing the part of

cult leader—a depiction with which Aryeh certainly would agree. However, the comparison

between the names is somewhat forced at best, and the wordplay involved, which ironically

uses kohen to describe someone devoted to an alien “god,” is rather un-Potokian. (“I find it

difficult thus far to be fashionably comedic or ironic about the world,” Potok writes in an essay.

“Nor have I ever been especially interested in mirror-games with words . . .” [“First” 105].)

In his initiation of Asher into the artistic world, Kahn also draws him toward a distinctly

non-Hasidic view of the human body. Asher notes that “out of modesty the women of our group

never wore short-sleeved garments” (7), and the married women wore wigs over their hair for

the same reason (6). His parents “never embraced in my presence” (10), nor did they swim

27
while summering by a small lake in the Berkshires (53). When Asher copies paintings of nudes

in a museum prior to his apprenticeship, his father is furious:

[D]idn’t I know that the body was the gift of the Ribbono Shel Olom; that the

Torah forbade us to treat it without modesty; that such drawings were vile, that

they followed in the ways of the goyim; that Jews, Torah Jews, would never

think of drawing such things? The body was a private and sacred domain. To

display that privacy in a painting was disgusting. (173)

The Hasidic view is not that physical love and the body are contaminated but that they are not

public property—they are, in a sense, holy. However, the naked body is a longstanding subject

of art in the Western tradition, and a few months into Asher’s lessons, Kahn asks him to draw a

beautiful young woman. Speaking “gently but with tense insistence,” he describes the human

body as “a glory of structure and form” that turns the artist into “a battleground between

intelligence and emotion, between his rational side and his sensual side”—a struggle

responsible for artistic masterpieces. “To attempt to achieve greatness in art without mastering

this art form is like attempting to be a great Hasidic teacher without knowledge of the Kabbalah,”

he argues (229). When Kahn looks at the body, he sees not “a private and sacred domain” but

rather “a glory of structure and form”—not something that should never be displayed publicly but

rather something that begs not to be shrouded. (And in his effort to convince Asher of this, Kahn

proves that he is not merely a talented artist—his reference to his listener’s Hasidic background

demonstrates that he also is no mean rhetorician.) The appeal succeeds, although after the

session the teenager feels “hot and irritated and unclean” (231). (Potok’s word choice of

unclean, with its resonances in Jewish law, instead of dirty can hardly be an accident.) As Asher

notes, “I drew her again the following Sunday, and it was easier. I drew her again the Sunday

after that, and it was easier still” (231). Thus he slips from a world where even copying a picture

of a nude woman is reprehensible into a world where creating such works from life (and then

exhibiting them in public) is expected and even seen as necessary.

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 Yet what marks the victory of the world of painting over the world of Hasidism—what

completes Asher’s journey to the art side of the Force, so to speak—is the display not of naked

bodies but naked souls. Even before Asher’s foray into nude studies, Kahn blasts a painting of a

bullying classmate that he sees as ambivalent and timid: “If you hate him, paint your hatred or

do not paint him at all. One must not paint everything one feels. But once you decide to paint

something, you must paint the truth or you will paint green rot” (226). It is this attitude—the

whole truth or nothing—that guides Asher when he is moved to capture his mother’s fearful

waiting for her traveling spouse and son and her painful suspension between the two of them.

He is initially at a loss for an aesthetic framework for his subject. Then one presents itself to

him—one alien to his spiritual world, one that will horrify and enrage his community, but one that

he feels driven to employ. “No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment,” he

argues to his invisible listeners. “But if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way” (326).

He paints his mother symbolically semi-crucified in a window, the kind of window at which she

often waited for Aryeh to return from his journeys, and in the picture he places telephone poles

suggestive of crosses. But the painting is not enough, and he creates a companion piece, one

that makes the crucifixion explicit and adds flanking images of Asher and Aryeh. “Yes, I could

have decided not to do it,” he acknowledges. “Who would have known?” (328) His answer is

that he would have, and that by not making his vision explicit, he would have committed artistic

fraud.

Oddly enough, this course might not appeal to Asher were it not for the standards with

which his parents imbued him. Abramson writes:

The values fostered in his home by both his mother and father are brought to

bear upon the values of the creative artist: honesty, completion of what one has

begun, integrity, and the acceptance of the need to push oneself to the limits of

one’s ability in order to achieve the maximum possible. (79)

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Asher is sensitive to the incomplete nature of his artistic project because of the emphasis during

his upbringing on completing the unfinished (particularly his mother’s insistence that she

somehow continue her dead brother’s work for the Rebbe). Ironically, Asher’s family makes

possible the very act that estranges him from it. When the two crucifixion paintings eventually

are exhibited, his parents and the rest of the Ladover are stunned. “Your naked women were a

great difficulty for me, Asher,” the Rebbe says. “But this is an impossibility” (Name 366). What

ultimately forces Asher’s exile from Ladover Brooklyn, then, is not his revealing of bodies but his

insistence on revealing his soul, his feelings, his vision of reality—an insistence that the artist

must place this above all other considerations, including his closest relationships. One critic,

noting Asher’s overall “selfish behavior toward his parents,” describes him as “one of the least

sympathetic of Potok’s protagonists because he struggles less with his own anguish than with

his need to express his artistic gift at whatever cost” (“Chaim Potok” 182). The author himself

corroborates this view; when Elaine M. Kauvar suggests that “Asher’s aesthetic rebellion has

got a very dark side to it, a hostile side,” Potok replies, “Absolutely” (79). In the wake of his

estrangement from his parents and his exile from his New York community, Asher will continue

to be an observant Jew—but he will be an artist who is a Ladover, not a Ladover who is an

artist. He is ultimately a son of Kahn.

The Jacob figure of My Name Is Asher Lev, then, essentially takes the child of another

man as his symbolic heir—an act that contains echoes of the rivalry between the biblical Jacob

and Esau, a man who saw his brother appropriate what should have been his. Jacob did not

merely steal the patriarchal blessing meant for his twin brother; another familiar story is his

barter for the older son’s birthright. In Gen. 25:29–34, a ravenous Esau comes in from the

outdoors and requests some of the lentil stew that Jacob is cooking. Jacob, smelling an

opportunity, asks for Esau’s birthright in exchange—a demand to which the latter inexplicably

agrees. “Thus did Esau spurn the birthright,” the biblical narrator comments (25:34), apparently

weighing the older brother’s actions and finding them wanting. After Jacob later successfully

30
impersonates Esau, Isaac tells his favored son, “Your brother came with guile and took away

your blessing,” leading Esau to cry, “First he took away my birthright and now he has taken

away my blessing!” (27:35–36) Jacob twice takes what originally belonged to his kinsman, just

as his fictional descendant acquires an “heir” at the expense of another Jew. One of Potok’s

figures even indicates that such actions are characteristic of artists. In adulthood, Asher

becomes subject to visions—of his uncle Yitzchok, of Kahn, even of Pablo Picasso, whom he

generally refers to simply as “the Spaniard.” In one such vision, Picasso remarks: “You know

what a painter really is, Lev? A painter is a collector who wants to create a collection for himself,

and he does this by painting himself the pictures he loves by other artists” (Gift 192). In this

character’s view, painters take what is made by others and reshape it according to their desires.

This is precisely what Jacob Kahn does; playing the collector and shaper of artistic genius, he

takes the creation of another “artist”—Aryeh—and makes his own version of it. Kahn, then, is

both a clear embodiment of the Western artistic tradition as well as a character who in multiple

ways echoes the life and ways of his biblical namesake.

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 CHAPTER 3

THE BOOK OF LIGHTS

Light clarifies—it makes visible, it reveals, it differentiates. It is thus ironic that Potok’s

fifth novel, one that is marked by “[p]ervasive light imagery” (Sternlicht 108), should focus on a

young man whose life is not one of clarity, one that is riven by ambivalence and hesitation. A

certain intellectual and creative energy characterizes Reuven Malter, Danny Saunders, and

Asher Lev—they want to receive ordination, do great things in psychology, master the world of

art. Such is far less the case with Gershon Loran, the protagonist of The Book of Lights. And

just as Gershon is something of an anomaly when compared to the main characters of The

Promise and My Name Is Asher Lev, so too is Jakob Keter, the Jacob figure of Lights, when

compared to his counterparts in Potok’s other novels. The other Jacobs are visceral beings:

Kalman in his seething zeal, Kahn in his earthy creativity, Jakob Daw of Davita’s Harp in his

world-weary fragility. In contrast, Keter is detached, cool, intellectual. And where the Jacob

figures of the other novels often find resonance with their biblical namesake primarily in the

latter’s interactions with other human beings, Keter’s role in The Book of Lights evokes the

Jacob who dreams of the stairway to heaven and wrestles with the mysterious heavenly figure

who changes his name to Israel—one who has struggled with the divine.

Waiting for light

Gershon Loran sometimes seems to exist in a mist of ambivalence, randomness,

brokenness. Orphaned at age eight in 1937 when his traveling parents are cut down by Arab-

Jewish gunfire in the Holy Land, he is raised by the aunt and uncle with whom he happened to

be staying at the time. Their only son dies in World War II when Gershon is an adolescent, and

chaos and death also manifest themselves in the lives of others around him: “The world seemed

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a strangely terrifying place when you really thought about it” (5). Yet one night on the roof of his

apartment house, he sees a dog giving birth.

Life was being created before his eyes. He trembled, soared, wanted to shout

and weep, and remained very still. . . . He felt all caught up in the life of heaven

and earth, in the mystery of creation, in the pain and inexhaustible glory of this

single moment. . . . [H]e reached up and brushed his hand across the sky and

felt, actually felt, the achingly exquisitely cool dry velvet touch of starry heaven

upon his fingers. (6)

Gershon later finds no trace of dog or puppies, but the vision haunts him. “He felt he would be

changed in some extraordinary way if it ever returned. He began to wait for it” (7). By his teens,

then, this young Jew is marked by a desire for insight into the mystery of life but also by a

curious passivity—having experienced something wondrous, he awaits its return rather than

actively seeking it. He attends a traditionalist yeshiva, high school, and college; he receives

rabbinic ordination but is still adrift. “He did not know what he wanted to do. He had majored in

mathematics but could not see himself going on to graduate school. He could not see himself

teaching or doing anything” (7). In the summer of 1950, as the Korean War is breaking out, he

enters the Riverside Hebrew Institute, a non-Orthodox seminary in Manhattan; a year later, he

finds himself under the tutelage of the newly arrived scholar Jakob Keter, an expert on Jewish

mysticism.

A recent widower, Keter is tall and almost bald, with “a sharp straight nose and bright

clear gray eyes and thin lips. His face was clean-shaven, pinkish and curiously unlined. He

seemed of no definite age, certainly not the fifty-five he was known to be” (10). No wrinkles, no

beard, no unkempt hair, no bleariness of eyes—Keter’s appearance is almost artificially clean of

line. It is as if the smooth body reflects the cerebral soul within, for although Keter’s specialty is

Kabbalah, he is no emotional visionary; “he taught only the history of mysticism and the reading

of texts, textual analysis, a dry and technical method of study. Also it turned out that he was a

33
dry teacher with a mirthless razor intelligence. . . . To come unprepared to his class was to court

a low-voiced, German-accented public flaying” (9). Keter finds Gershon unprepossessing: “An

aura of melancholy radiated from his pale and delicate features like some dark nebula. . . .

Gershon’s jacket and trousers were unkempt, ill fitting; he badly needed a haircut; there was dirt

under his fingernails” (10–11). Yet twice his are the only papers to receive an “A”; as Gershon

reads aloud in class, he finds himself “slowly warming to the words and the web of images they

were spinning before his eyes. . . . toward the end he was no longer aware of the passage of

time” (11)—a reaction curiously similar to Keter’s when the professor reads his first paper. For

Gershon, a light is dawning, slowly; the study of Kabbalah touches something in him that

nothing else has.

Soon, however, the ivory tower is shaken. The students learn that because of the lack

of Jewish military chaplains, their acceptance into their senior year will be predicated on their

agreement to serve a term in the armed forces. (“We’re going to be drafted into the voluntary

chaplaincy corps?” Gershon asks in dismayed irony [38].) Gershon’s entry is delayed after he

unexpectedly receives a fellowship for graduate work set up by the family of Arthur Leiden, an

urbane friend and fellow student who is obsessed with his physicist father’s role in the

development of the atomic bomb. Yet even given Gershon’s emerging knack for Kabbalah,

enthusiasm is still a stranger to him. “He wondered how long it would take him to do a

dissertation with Keter. . . . It seemed an interminable travail, and he felt no force impelling him

to undertake it. Was that what most people did—drifted uncertainly into a patch of world to

which they offered with doubting hearts much of the fire of their lives?” (88–89) Gershon’s motto

is not “Carpe diem.” Rather, the day seems to seize him; like the title character in the movie

Forrest Gump, he surfaces amid events rather than deliberately diving into them. He spends the

ensuing months studying Kabbalah at Keter’s apartment and languages at Columbia University;

“I feel like a Zwischenmensch,” he tells Karen Levin, a young woman with scholarly ambitions

whom he wants to marry. “A word I’m coining. Remember it. A between-person. I don’t belong

34
anywhere. Not Columbia, not the seminary, not Brooklyn” (114). Again, Gershon feels afloat,

disengaged. And when the fellowship time runs out, he dons his Army uniform and, after a ten-

day journey, finds himself in Korea.

Light in the East

After he arrives, a young man greets him with grateful relief: “I never thought we’d get a

Jewish chaplain this far up north. Boy. Welcome” (131). But the country itself is not as cordial as

some of its human occupants. “He slept in a cot in a crowded Quonset, and in the night the oil

stove died, and he had in his life never believed such cold could exist” (132). These initial

experiences foreshadow much of his stay. The landscape is inhospitable—cold so severe that

soldiers drink antifreeze in their efforts to keep warm (137), heat so brutal that they swim in

polluted streams to cool off (176), flooding so swift that it fills a riverbed (and nearly swamps

Gershon’s jeep) in almost the blink of an eye (158–59). Yet in large part, the people around him

warm to him:

He had thought little about the things he had done here; mostly he had tried to

live with his books and records and letters. Yet now in this summer a clear and

palpable resonance of regard echoed around him. . . . In ways mysterious to

him others were seeing in him what he could not see in himself: a strength he

knew he did not have, a certainty he knew he was far from possessing. This

was his battalion. These were his men. (171–72)

Gershon’s life again is marked by the seemingly accidental; his interactions with others and his

fulfillment of his duties appear unremarkable to him (and, for that matter, to the reader), but they

nevertheless strike a chord with his fellows.

His days are interrupted by visions—of his aunt and uncle (138), of his parents’ graves

(220), of Arthur and his family (148–49), of Keter (172), of his former Talmud professor, Nathan

Malkuson (194–95), and sometimes of the two academics together (198–99). And he is

badgered by a sinister “silken voice”:

35
 When in all the history of your species have you ever produced so vast and

panoplied a parade of great minds across so large a portion of your planet in so

short a time as you did in the first decades of this century? . . . How you trusted

them. What heritage have they given you to hold in your hands? . . .

Do you flee from the shadows of the giants of your century, the great ones

whose lights blind the eye and whose faults numb the heart? . . .

You are the bereaved children and grandchildren of a broken century. There

are no more dreams. There is nothing to wait for. Nothing. (305–07)

The Kabbalah speaks of light, but Gershon also hears the voice of darkness, of the Other Side,

a whisper that tempts him to despair in the face of his smallness in comparison to the great

minds of his time and in the knowledge of the brokenness and chaos in his world.

Korea changes Gershon Loran, but Japan, where he takes his leaves, alters him even

more. “He . . . thought of the waterfall roar he had heard the day before. Sound and sight had

yielded a single vivid representation of power and beauty; it had freed him from himself . . . . He

was being taught the loveliness of God’s world by a pagan land” (249). And aside from the

physical beauty that greets him, he also encounters a culture that knows nothing of his own. “I

was taught when I grew up that the Jewish religion made a fundamental difference to the world,”

he tells a Christian soldier. “You know what I mean. Well, more than half the world is on this

side of the planet. They don’t even know what Judaism is, and they’re perfectly and marvelously

content without it” (247). Sighting a bespectacled old man in a hat and coat swaying in prayer at

a shrine, Gershon asks his companion: “Do you think our God is listening to him, John? . . . If

He’s not listening, why not? If He is listening, then—well, what are we all about, John?” (248) In

Japan, Gershon encounters an implicit challenge to his culture and theology—this is a world

that knows not the God of Israel yet sails on, placidly and even beautifully.

However, the country’s tug on Gershon is nothing compared to its pull on Arthur Leiden,

who unexpectedly appears in Korea as his former roommate’s fellow chaplain. The first time

36
they re-encounter each other, he repeatedly asks Gershon about the possibilities of traveling to

the islands. “He will certainly want to go to Japan,” Arthur’s physicist father tells Gershon in

poignant self-accusation. “He will want to see the handiwork of his parents” (232). In a climactic

journey, he accompanies Gershon on a journey to that land as well as Macao and Hong Kong.

“He had journeyed the farthest distance he could from his own world,” Gershon reflects in Hong

Kong, thinking: “They had entered the city that lay on the overlapping rims of two warring

cultures, each seen as barbarous by the other. This was a between-world. He wanted to look at

it” (276). Gershon, by his own description, is a between-person (114), not fully rooted anywhere;

in Hong Kong, he encounters an echo of himself. The two young men visit Kyoto, the exquisite

city that (Gershon later discovers) Arthur’s mother had helped save from nuclear eradication

and that Arthur greets “with all the tender and gentle adoration one brings to a first love” (312).

They journey to Hiroshima, where a shaken Arthur prays at the monument to the bomb victims.

“He stood there now and began to recite the words to the Kaddish. Gershon listened to the

awesome words of the prayer for mourners—the public sanctification of the name of God; the

affirmation of meaning in the very presence of the most unassimilable of darknesses—and a

coldness of terror brushed against the back of his neck” (334).

They return to Korea, and shortly thereafter Gershon receives word that Arthur has died

in a plane crash on yet another flight to Japan. A few weeks later, Gershon’s tour ends; after

reaching America, he returns to the roof where he saw the dog, and as his friend did shortly

before, he says Kaddish: “This is for you, Arthur . . . . so we can somehow mend the world or

hold it together and then have it broken again in new acts of creation” (368). Although Gershon

cannot articulate the exact rationale for some kind of action in the face of chaos, death, and the

threat of meaninglessness, he understands its necessity (369). And despite the possibility that

Jakob Keter will be too much for him, he decides to take up his studies once more. “He did not

think he had made a mistake,” he reflects after he meets his teacher in Jerusalem. “He would

37
know soon enough” (370). Gershon is open to the possibility of meaning, even in the face of the

silken voice’s warning and in the shadow of the intellectual giant who is taking him on.

Teacher in exile, brethren in conflict

The Promise, The Book of Lights, Davita’s Harp, and the Asher Lev novels have a

thoroughly American flavor. All the protagonists are Americans; The Promise takes place

entirely in the United States; almost all of Davita’s Harp does so; much of The Book of Lights

and the Asher Lev books is set there. Yet, strikingly, all of the Jacob figures come from the Old

World. Jacob Kalman made his name in Lithuania before coming to New York; Jacob Kahn is of

Russian extraction; Jakob Daw hails from Vienna; Jakob Keter’s background is German. This

underscores the parallel to the biblical Jacob, who spends two decades away from Canaan; like

him, his fictional namesakes are men far from their birthplaces. In Lights, this is underlined in an

early episode that strongly echoes Kalman’s savaging of Abe Greenfield in The Promise. When

Arthur comes unprepared to Keter’s class, he receives a tongue-lashing:

In Berlin I read five times the amount I ask you to read each week. Five times.

Are all Americans so lazy or is it merely the Americans in this school? . . . If I

required that you read Kant or Hume, you would no doubt do your reading. This

is the literature of your own people. You have so much contempt for it, Mr.

Leiden? (Lights 39)

Keter sees in Arthur’s neglect a disrespect for his heritage. In The Promise, Kalman berates

Greenfield for giving other studies priority over Talmud, and he later tells his class: “In Europe I

had a student who was a great mathematician. But he never came to class unprepared. . . . I do

not expect that my American students will be like my students in Europe. But I expect that

everyone will come to the shiur [class] prepared. If there is a choice, I expect everyone to

choose the Gemora” (157). In both books, the foreign-born teacher sees a slackness in young

Jewish scholarship compared to that of his homeland, a fact that underlines their exiled status.

38
 Keter’s life echoes that of his biblical forebear in other ways. Both have lost a spouse; in

Genesis, Jacob’s wife Rachel dies while giving birth to Benjamin, the last of the twelve sons

(35:16–18), and Keter is described as “recently widowed” when he arrives at the Riverside

Hebrew Institute. However, a far more prominent Jacob theme in Lights is Keter’s ongoing

dispute with one of his fellow Jewish scholars. The biblical Jacob is well-known for the strife

between him and Esau. As discussed previously, the scheming younger twin acquires his

brother’s birthright and blessing, and even after he spends two decades in exile, one of his chief

concerns upon his return to Canaan is his sibling’s possibly violent reaction. “Deliver me, I pray,

from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau,” he asks God; “else, I fear, he may come

and strike me down, mothers and children alike” (Gen. 32:12). The conflict between the two

overshadows much of the biblical narrative. Similarly, one of the recurring factors in Potok’s

novel is the clash between Jakob Keter and Nathan Malkuson, a professor of Talmud. Of

course, this fight is philosophical and spiritual rather than familial and (potentially) physical, but

it is still evocative of the internecine struggle between Isaac’s two sons.

The conflict first emerges during and after an elevator ride taken by Gershon and

Malkuson. The professor—like Keter a clean-shaven man in his fifties, but shorter and with

“silvery hair and cold blue eyes” (17–18)—spots the titles of some books that Gershon is

carrying. “Much better you should study Talmud,” he says. “This is such foolishness. You wish

to become a scholar of foolishness?” (18) Later, in his office, the academician muses:

Surely they knew that Talmud was the only consistently honorable subject

worthy of study in Judaism; it alone affected one’s life, one’s daily behavior. . . .

To uncover the original smoothness and clarity of an ancient passage of

Talmud . . . . Smooth, clear, coherent, with a depth that was three-dimensional

and lovely. Not the murkiness of Kabbalah with its bizarre flights of fancy, its

God of divine nothingness, its emanations and angels and numerology and

dark magic that bordered on oriental paganism. (19)

39
Malkuson has a pragmatic streak; he believes that Jewish study should concentrate on that

which guides Jewish life, and Kabbalah clearly falls outside this circle. But Keter has his own

views. In a dispassionate discourse on Kabbalah as an academic discipline, he tells his

students that in contrast to those who would see the subject as either “nonsense” or “an

untouchable sanctity,” he sees it as central to the culture:

It is the heart of Judaism, the soul, the core. Talmud tells us how the Jew acts;

Kabbalah tells us how Judaism feels, how it sees the world. . . . I do not tell you

to believe it, I ask only that we understand it, that it not be lost to scientific

inquiry. What right does any talmudist have to consign to—how do you say

it?—to oblivion two thousand years of a Jewish way of thinking? (22–23)

To Keter, Malkuson is less pragmatic than reductionistic; he believes that his colleague is too

dismissive of a component of theology, thought, and history that is admittedly “irrational,

illogical” (22), but nevertheless key to the Jewish soul. According to one critic, the face-off

between these elements of Judaism is actually signaled in Gershon’s rooftop encounter: “The

vision of pups being born . . . represents the entrance of fertile Cabala mysticism into a world of

strict Jewish law” (“Chaim Potok” 181). However, the suggested symbolism does not survive

scrutiny. If anything, the puppies do not emerge into “a world of strict Jewish law” but rather one

of decay and chaos. The roof where Gershon sees the dogs is “sodden” and “smelly,” covered

with “cracked and reeking tar paper” (Lights 6); the house beneath is in such poor repair that it

is the subject of neighborhood conversation (3). There is certainly an element of mysticism in

the rooftop scene, but Torah and Talmud make not obvious appearances.

Potok may have subtly signaled the eventual winner of the contest between Keter and

Malkuson in their very names. Abramson argues that the monikers echo Kether and Malkuth,

the first and tenth of the primordial rays of light, aspects of the divine, that are known in the

Kabbalah as the Sefirah. In this system of thought, Kether occupies an “almost supreme

position,” Abramson says: “The terms used to describe it—‘King,’ ‘creation,’ ‘knowledge’—and

40
the quality of containing ‘all which will eventually flow forth from it’ gives it, and the teacher with

whose name it is associated, great stature” (120). In contrast, Malkuth is associated with

passivity and the created world and occupies a lower position. As Abramson concedes,

Malkuson’s personality is not particularly passive (and thus the symbolism has its limits), but he

clearly is this-world-oriented (120). Abramson’s view is supported by Malkuson’s practicality—“A

Jew molded his life according to talmudic law,” the professor muses, and clearly scholarship

should focus on such matters rather than “foolishness” (Lights 19). Thus, the association of the

professors’ names with hierarchically situated Kaballistic elements, Kether’s occupying a higher

place than his colleague’s, hints at who will come out on top.

Despite this rivalry, the tug-of-war between the two remains polite—at least in

Gershon’s mind, for Keter and Malkuson appear frequently in his visions. In one of the first,

Gershon sees the two walking in the New York night. Keter remarks, “I am a threat to you, my

friend, am I not. You would like our world to be smooth and rational, would you not. . . . The

irrational completes us” (25–26). Malkuson is unconvinced; he accuses Keter of exaggeration

(“You have taken a tiny tributary and made of it a mighty river”) and argues that his colleague

will be unable to consolidate his hold on Gershon’s interest: “I will wager you will yet lose him.

. . . He is too intelligent for Kabbalah” (26). Gershon thus becomes a point of contention

between the two men, but it is a low-key contention, for even in the vision the two remain civil.

(“Shall we stop off somewhere for a coffee?” Keter asks his colleague [26].)

This contest between the two men underlines the Jacob-Esau connection in an oblique

and implicitly humorous fashion in an episode involving Gershon and Malkuson. A few hours

before Gershon’s comprehensive examination for his Talmud class—an appointment that he

faces with great apprehension—he again finds himself in an elevator with Malkuson. The

professor casually questions him about the relationship between thoughts and contracts and

about a story in the tractate Avodah Zarah (thus surprising Gershon: “One was not asked about

tales in a Talmud test,” he thinks [78]). Malkuson then says, to his student’s astonishment, “You

41
have just taken your comprehensive. Good afternoon, Loran” (79). Gershon’s candidacy for the

scholastic Leiden Award is looming in the background, and Malkuson’s actions certainly can be

seen as nothing more than a somewhat dubious way of providing a boost to the family’s

preferred recipient. But given the implicit contest between Keter and Malkuson for Gershon’s

academic soul, this somewhat amusing incident also has echoes of the birthright episode in

Genesis 25. As mentioned previously, this narrative describes how Jacob’s brother casually

gives up his status as the firstborn in exchange for a quick meal. As a defender of Talmud, the

principal focus of traditional Jewish scholarship, Malkuson is in a sense the “firstborn,” the

owner of the cultural birthright as compared to Keter, who focuses on the less-reputable

Kabbalah. The examination gives Malkuson the opportunity to assert this right vigorously, to

ensure in Gershon’s instance that priorities are maintained. Instead, he gives a perfunctory test.

(In contrast, Keter examines Gershon far more thoroughly.) Thus, in the scholarly tussle

between the two men, Malkuson yield his “birthright” to his ethnic kinsman—the Jacob figure.

Like Esau of old, he is strangely uninterested in maintaining his cultural prerogatives.

Upon Gershon’s graduation and acceptance of the Leiden Award, Malkuson concedes

to his colleague. “Loran forsakes the Torah for the Kabbalah,” he says. “You have won the

wager, Keter" (112). However, the latter says merely, “We will wait a little longer before

declaring the winner” (112), and indeed the discussion continues—in Gershon’s visions in

Korea. The two men appear in the succah that Gershon designs for the Sukkot festival and offer

to study with him. (“A little Talmud cannot hurt,” Keter says, to which Malkuson replies: “Not

nearly as much as a little Kabbalah” [199].) They reappear in Gershon’s hotel room during one

of his trips to Japan. Malkuson seems unhappy with Gershon’s Kabbalistic choice of devotional

study: “You read the Zohar as a commentary on the Torah portion? Rashi, Ibn Ezra, the

Midrash—all are inadequate?” (249) Warning Gershon about Japan’s spiritual seductiveness,

he says, “This is a beautiful world, Loran. Beware of its allure. The Mishnah is clear on the

matter of paganism”—to which Keter replies, “The Mishnah is old. We need a new Mishnah”

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(250). The secularist Kabbalah expert is less concerned with a potential drift toward heterodoxy

than the Talmudist. Just as strife forms the background of the biblical story of Jacob and his

brother, so the conflict between Jakob Keter and his academic/ethnic kinsman forms part of the

backdrop of The Book of Lights. Yet whereas the twin brothers of Genesis eventually reconcile,

the intellectual combatants of Potok’s novel may still keep fencing.

Ascending to heaven

Two of the better-known stories about the biblical Jacob have supernatural overtones.

During his journey from Canaan to Haran, Jacob stops for the night and, with a stone for a

pillow, has a dream: “a stairway was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and

angels of God were going up and down on it” (Gen. 28:12). (The word here rendered stairway is

classically translated as ladder in the King James Version.) God appears to Jacob and identifies

himself as the deity of his grandfather Abraham and his father, Isaac; he promises Jacob the

land on which he is lying as well as numerous descendants and says that humanity will be

blessed through his offspring. “Remember, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and

will bring you back to this land,” God says. “I will not leave you until I have done what I have

promised you” (28:15). An unsettled Jacob declares: “This is none other than the abode of God,

and that is the gateway to heaven” (28:17). In this narrative, the Hebrew patriarch glimpses a

connection between the divine and earthly realms, a place of descent and ascent, and is

reminded of God’s continuing involvement with the house of Abraham.

The second familiar story occurs years later, as Jacob is returning to Canaan with his

family. One night Jacob wrestles until daybreak with a mysterious stranger who, when Jacob

does not relent, injures the Hebrew’s hip and demands to be released. “I will not let you go, until

you bless me,” Jacob replies (Gen. 32:27). The stranger then declares: “Your name shall no

longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human, and have

prevailed”—the new name being connected to the Hebrew for “striven with beings divine” (32:29

and footnotes). Jacob later says, “I have seen a divine being face to face, yet my life has been

43
preserved” (32:31). Once again the patriarch interacts with the supernatural world, this time not

merely conversing with but physically striving with (and in some sense prevailing against) the

being whom he encounters, and being renamed as a result.

Given Keter’s first name and his prominence in a novel that deals with Kabbalah, one

might expect the professor’s experiences to somehow parallel those of his namesake—yet

Keter is no mystic. However, he is a scholar of mysticism. For him, Kabbalah is not something

to be lived out, but it also is not something to be forgotten or neglected; rather, it should be

studied and analyzed. (As has been pointed out, this is the heart of his dispute with Malkuson.)

Further, it is under Keter’s influence that Gershon truly delves into the study and experience of

visions. Early in the novel, Malkuson notes Gershon’s lack of interest in Talmud. “You are

without éntheos,” the professor says. “You know what that means in Greek? No? You are

without the feeling of possession by the divine. There is no fire [for Talmud] burning in you” (18).

Keter, however, helps to stoke in Gershon an éntheos for Kabbalah. Instead of being subject to

visions, Keter is the subject of visions, and Gershon becomes the person who sees strange

sights and strives with beings supernatural and human.

In the biblical Jacob’s vision of the stairway, God says, “I will not leave you until I have

done what I have promised you.” Ironically, Jakob Keter becomes a kind of God figure to

Gershon, occasionally appearing to the chaplain in Korea as if to remind him that he is not

alone. “This is not a place for Jews,” one of Gershon’s colleagues remarks upon his arrival

(130), and Keter’s intermittent presence provides him with a certain ethereal companionship.

Yet this presence is not guaranteed. Just before Gershon’s trip to Hong Kong and Macao, he

experiences a nighttime vision of Keter. “There is a chance I may not accompany you,” the

professor tells him. “It is a descent that may not only be difficult but also menacing” (267). (Why

this is the case is not clear, although critic Sanford E. Marovitz’s work suggests a possibility.

Commenting on the frequent appearances of birds in the book, he says that “their noted

absence or death”—which Gershon notices at Hong Kong’s harbor (Lights 277–78)—is

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“ominous” [Marovitz 76]. Thus, Keter may be hinting at some spiritual barrenness in Hong Kong

that constitutes a barrier to him.) Despite this, however, the professor does appear briefly during

a dinner party in Hong Kong, although he does not enter the room (Lights 284–85). The Jacob

figure’s accompanying of Gershon, then, can be seen to correspond to God’s promise of

presence to the biblical Jacob.

A notable parallel between Gershon and Jacob the biblical visionary comes just before

the former leaves for Korea. Having bid farewell to Keter and seeing the past year of study as “a

murky, indistinct betweenness,” Gershon stands on the roof where he saw the dog giving birth:

The sky seemed cold, as if its galaxies and debris mirrored an ancient

abandonment. No one could really climb the transcendent heaven now. The

rabbinic mystics with their strange ascents—a different time, a different place.

. . . If he were to climb now, attempt the ascent, storm the palaces with all the

things he knew, he would perhaps see the Throne. Yes. And upon it would be

the Essence of all Being—encased in dark shrouds of melancholy. (123–24)

Jacob sees a stairway to heaven after leaving his family and beginning a journey to a faraway

land. Gershon has bid farewell to his academic “father” and is about to travel to Korea—but

rather than touching the heavens, as he once did on this same rooftop, he feels the impossibility

of such an experience. “No one could really climb the transcendent heaven now”—the times

have changed. And even if he were able to make his way through the supernatural realm to the

divine seat, there he would encounter not glory but “shrouds of melancholy.” At this point,

Gershon is an anti-Jacob, one who has waited for a recurrence of ecstasy but is instead

plodding through a gloomy night of the soul.

Finally, just as the Jacob of Genesis wrestles valiantly with a supernatural being,

Gershon also contends with a messenger from beyond. While studying a Polish text dealing

with “the sitra achra . . . the demonic realm of evil,” Gershon has a vision in a library: “The doors

flew open, and death entered the room in the form of an impenetrable icy blackness. . . . It felt

45
wet and it encompassed him and he was left entirely without sight and it was icy and smelled of

cold raw earth” (46). Late in the novel, a “silken voice” from the Other Side speaks to him in the

darkness of the early morning. “They cast vast shadows, your century’s giants,” whispers the

voice. “From whom do all of you flee—Karen to Chicago, you to the rim of the world, Arthur to

Hiroshima? . . . How far will all of your generation flee to escape the shadows cast by the

parents of your century?” (305) The picture is bleak, and Gershon sees truth in the words

despite their source. The voice suggests a pact: “In truth, we are all you have left if you wish to

attempt new answers. . . . There is already so much of me in your Kabbalah. . . . Consider me

with care as you journey through your broken century” (308). In the face of his parents’ long-ago

death, his professors’ intimidating intellects, and the destruction that Arthur Leiden’s father and

others helped wreak with the atomic bomb, Gershon is tempted toward despair. Then, after he

has returned to America in the wake of Arthur’s death, he finds himself again on the apartment

roof, and in a trance he hears the silken voice and that of Arthur. Bending the messenger of the

sitra achra to his will, he forces it to say “amen” to his Kaddish for Arthur (368). The silken voice

is not finished, however: “You will go to [Keter], and he will eat you alive. . . . He will break you.”

But Gershon is uncowed. “No, he won’t. Others stronger than him have tried,” he says. “You”

(369). Although Gershon is an anti-Jacob in that he sees no possibility of an ascent to the

heavens, he parallels his ancestor’s experience in wrestling with the supernatural and

successfully demanding a “blessing.” Not only does the silken voice say the “amen” to

Gershon’s recitation of the Kaddish, but Gershon also is able to declare that the messenger has

failed in its attempt to break him. Thus, the biblical Jacob’s mystical experiences find echoes not

only in Keter, the Jacob figure of the novel, but in Gershon as well.

“Very different sorts of light”

In The Promise, Jacob Kalman represents the ultra-traditionalist Judaism that opposes

the secularism-prone tools of Western scholarship; in the Asher Lev novels, Jacob Kahn is the

citizen of the world of Western art whose values stand at odds with those of the Hasidim. In The

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Book of Lights, Jakob Keter has the distinction of simultaneously participating in two

dichotomies. In terms of Gershon Loran’s inner life, he is the counterpart of Nathan Malkuson;

he represents the world of Jewish mysticism versus the world of Jewish rationality, the

Kabbalah over against the Talmud. Yet he himself is not a mystic; indeed, he is a secularist.

Keter argues for the place of mysticism in Jewish scholarship; he represents it as a lawyer

might a client. But somewhat less obviously, Keter also is the counterpart of Charles Leiden.

Leiden is one of the Jewish physicists whose work culminated in the atomic bomb and its use

on Japan—a fact that overshadows the life of his son Arthur and severely strains their

relationship. The contrast between Keter and Leiden is suggested in a scene in which Gershon

encounters Arthur’s parents and former President Harry Truman at the Riverside Hebrew

Institute. Upon Gershon’s acknowledgement that he studies mysticism, Charles Leiden

remarks, “We have a mutual interest in light then, don’t we?” Elizabeth Leiden interjects: “Very

different sorts of light” (67). This is the second dichotomy in which Keter participates: the

contrast between the spiritual light seen in Kabbalah and the lethal light of nuclear weaponry

and, by extension, of Western science.

Ironically, Keter’s background is that of “erstwhile mathematical genius and theoretical

physicist” (9), but he tells Gershon that a premonition led him to change his focus:

I had a vision one day that science in our century would lead to death. There

were many roads in my vision, all marked with the word for science. The roads

twisted and turned and became a huge road marked with the word ‘death.’ . . . I

did not wish to become what I beheld. . . . And so I decided to explore the

demonic that leads to life, rather than the demonic that leads to death. It

seemed to me that nothing was more demonically creative in all of Jewish

history than Kabbalah. I was not mistaken. (118–19)

In his earlier years, Keter foresaw the lethal uses to which science would be put in the twentieth

century. In words that echo the silken voice’s assertion that there is “much of me in your

47
Kabbalah,” the scholar recalls his decision to study the creative “dark side” rather than the

destructive one—the mysticism of the Jews rather than the scientific field in which many Jews

became prominent, a field that birthed the atomic bomb. Interestingly, Keter frames his decision

in terms of “a vision,” but it is unclear whether he is describing a mystical experience or a

metaphorical one. The latter is more consistent with his characterization throughout the book,

but the words he uses (“There were many roads in my vision, all marked with the word for

science. The roads twisted and turned and became a huge road marked with the word ‘death’ ”)

seem more applicable to the former possibility. Either interpretation is viable.

In contrast to Keter, Charles Leiden is the seeker of scientific knowledge who now finds

himself stricken by the use to which his findings were put. He once experienced the same kind

of uncertainty that plagues Gershon: “I remember that for the longest time I also wondered what

I would do. I am not entirely certain to this day why I chose physics” (358). (In contrast, Keter

says, “I am able to recollect clearly why I left mathematics and physics” [118].) Leiden recalls

the time of his work at Los Alamos as a time of moral and scientific dreams:

In many ways those were our finest years. . . . We traversed frontiers every

day. We were Olympians to ourselves. Titans. Prometheuses of physics. We

were searching for a bomb to kill the Germans before the Germans killed us.

Simple, yes? Good and evil. . . . Invent the bomb, punish the Germans, save

American boys, end the war. A benevolent apocalypse. Arthur senses nothing

of that. (234–35)

Leiden sees virtue in both the work he was doing and the purpose to which he thought it would

be put: scientific discovery (the good of knowledge for its own sake) that will help vanquish a

warlike regime with a particular prejudice against Jews. His son, he says, does not understand

the context in which he labored.

Commenting on whether individual scientists are accountable for the immoral use of

their work and on whether Jews have “a special need for expiation” because many of the

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physicists involved in the bomb project were Jewish, Sternlicht argues that Potok “indicts the

scientist, Jewish and Gentile, but implies that Jewish scientists . . . must be more sensitive than

others to human suffering” because of their history. This novel, Sternlicht asserts, is “Potok’s

contribution to Jewish expiation” (107). This view has a certain merit, but ironically, the novel’s

characterizations actually work against it. The mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

clearly have cast a pall over the life of Charles Leiden, Potok’s fictional embodiment of Jewish

involvement in the bomb’s creation, but Leiden has a more nuanced view of his labors than one

might expect. “Not for a moment do I regret the work that we did on that bomb,” he says. “And

not for a moment am I without remorse over our having used it on the Japanese” (Lights 235).

For Leiden, the sin of which he inadvertently became a part consisted in the way the bomb was

used, not in the fact of its use; his remarks suggest that had the device been used against some

German industrial burg, he would feel far less guilt. Further, although Arthur Leiden can be

viewed as an emotional casualty of the bomb, and therefore as an indictment of it, his

victimhood can also be seen as self-induced to some degree. As Sternlicht himself puts it,

Arthur “internalizes the guilt and is poisoned by it” (107)—yet he clearly bears no responsibility

for the existence or use of the bomb, and therefore his feverish obsession has the air of a dog

gnawing at a sore that might otherwise have healed but now threatens the animal’s health. In

addition, Charles remarks that “Arthur senses nothing” of the full context in which the elder

Leiden worked; if so, the son becomes an even less compelling symbol of the wrongness of

nuclear weaponry. Thus, the characterizations of the two male Leidens work against a clear-cut

view of the novel as an indictment of the bomb-makers and a “contribution to Jewish expiation.”

Nevertheless, science certainly is not a pure and shining beacon in the novel.

In a very broad-brush sense, The Promise and the Asher Lev novels are tales in which

the worldview of the secular West gains ground against that of “religion” as represented by

traditionalist Judaism. Reuven Malter makes a successful case for the use of textual criticism;

Asher Lev becomes an artist who is a Ladover rather than vice versa. Yet in The Book of Lights,

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the opposite holds true: religion seems to gain ground over the secular West as represented by

science. Abramson writes, “The light provided by science is seen to be discredited because it

has led to the creation of a weapon which J. Robert Oppenheimer called the ‘death light’ ” (126).

At the end of the novel, Charles Leiden—the man who bought into the promises of technology—

is emotionally broken; his life’s work has been betrayed (as he sees it), and his son Arthur is

lost to him, at first emotionally and then physically. In contrast, Jakob Keter—who turned from

science to the study of the spiritual—is alive and well and living in Jerusalem, anticipating

further study with his protégé, Gershon (Lights 370). Keter is no believer, but in the novel, he

represents the possibilities of faith vis-à-vis those of science. “In the atomic age,” Abramson

observes, “religion offers the only light available” (128). Keter’s role in Lights not only evokes

the mystical aspects of the biblical Jacob’s life but also comments on the pitfalls of science and

the positive possibilities of religion.

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 CHAPTER 4

DAVITA’S HARP

“One of these things is not like the others”—when comparing Davita’s Harp to the

novels thus far examined, one might recall that song from the children’s TV show Sesame

Street. These books feature young male protagonists—practicing Jews reared in traditionalist

circles and living in the World War II era or later; in their worlds, secular politics come in a

distant second (at best) to theological differences. Not so with Davita’s Harp. For much of this

1985 novel, the circle is not traditionalist, the main character is not practicing, and theology is

not a primary concern. The narrative begins in the late 1920’s, and politics is a key element. But

most important, the central figure is not male—Davita’s Harp boasts Chaim Potok’s first female

protagonist, Ilana Davita Chandal. (Indeed, with the exception of a Korean woman who shares

the spotlight in the 1992 novel I Am the Clay, Ilana is the only female protagonist in Potok’s

novels.) Critic Victoria Aarons, in an essay on female Jewish-American authors, notes a

penchant for characters who “find themselves paradoxically alienated from and drawn to a

heritage from which they are excluded . . . . Often, such characters are torn between a longing

for the past, for a sense of absolutes (rituals, traditions, beliefs), and a determination to forge

ahead . . .” (393). Although not written about Ilana, Aarons’s description fits her in several ways.

As Davita’s Harp progresses, Ilana is both drawn to and alienated from her Jewish heritage; she

is affected by her past and also faces her future with a certain determination.

Nor is the protagonist the only way in which Davita’s Harp is “not like the others”; the

novel’s Jacob figure is distinct as well. In The Promise, the Asher Lev books, and The Book of

Lights, these characters are teachers either by profession (Jacob Kalman and Jakob Keter) or

in their role (Jacob Kahn). They also are not emotionally close to the main characters (unless

one counts the antagonism between Kalman and Reuven Malter as a sort of negative intimacy).

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Again, not so in Davita’s Harp. Jakob Daw is a European writer, a friend of the young Ilana’s

mother, and he initially appears as the parents’ fellow political activist. But almost immediately,

the child and the writer begin to cultivate a certain familial relationship; he becomes “Uncle

Jakob.” And as the narrative progresses, the stories that he creates for her spark her

imagination—a faculty that Potok sees as a tool for “coming to terms with unbearable reality”

(Kauvar 69) and one that is intertwined with the clash between traditionalist Judaism and

Western feminism that is key to the later part of the book.

“We are going to build a new world”

If Asher Lev’s fellow Hasidim want to make the world holy, Channah and Michael

Chandal, Ilana’s parents, are no less ambitious. Zealous advocates for Communism, Channah

is an intellectual social worker and lapsed Jew, and Michael is a journalist and lapsed

Episcopalian. When Ilana complains about her mother’s habit of answering queries about word

meanings by going into a term’s history, Channah replies that “everything has a past. . . . If you

don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future. We are

going to build a new world, Ilana. How can we ignore the past?” (10) The Chandals have a

burning vision for the future of America and the world, but they (and indeed all of the novel’s

principal adult figures) are individuals with a past—a past that gradually emerges as the

narrative progresses and that helps the reader to “understand the present” in which they exist.

Ilana’s childhood world is a somewhat unstable one. “We moved often, every year or so

. . . . One winter we moved twice in three months” (5–6). These uprootings often are linked to

the Chandals’ activism, and particularly their penchant for noisy home gatherings marked by

leftist political discussions and music. “Sometimes the singing was so loud I was sure it could be

heard all through the house and perhaps even in the street,” Ilana notes (9). One meeting ends

in “shouts, arguments, threats, and the sounds of things breaking . . . . Two weeks later we

moved again” (10). (This episode foreshadows the party fractiousness that will loom large later

in the novel.) Ilana’s childhood also is marked by the death of a sickly infant brother and the

52
subsequent illness of her mother. For a few weeks Channah is cared for by Sarah Chandal,

Michael’s sister, a devoutly Christian nurse who tells her niece stories about novelist George

Sand, Pocahontas, and pioneer women who had to cope with their husbands’ long absences.

“What do you think the women did in all that lonely time? . . . They used their imagination,”

Sarah tells Ilana (16). The aunt’s tales link two key themes of the book: women (notably women

whose lives are made more difficult by the actions of men) and the use of the imagination.

When Ilana is eight years old, the writer Jakob Daw appears in her apartment:

He had a wide forehead, straight black hair, thin arching dark eyebrows, and an

aquiline nose that seemed almost knifelike. . . . The chin was pointed, the

cheeks slightly concave. His smooth face and forehead were shockingly pale. I

had never before seen anyone with such chalky features. . . . He was a small

man, not much taller than my mother, thinly boned, with delicate features and

white hands and narrow shoulders. He looked fragile and infirm. (34–35)

The description evokes an almost elfin quality; this, along with a chronic cough and a “raspy”

voice (35)—Daw was a victim of poison gas during World War I—gives him the air of being

much older than he apparently is. Yet the effects are not always negative: “A quality of intense

power seemed to radiate from his fragility, from his hooded eyes and hoarse voice, from his

occasional cough,” Ilana thinks upon hearing him speak at an activist meeting (38). He also

displays a certain Old World formality in his speech. “Your parents did not do you justice when

they told me about you,” he says to Ilana when they meet. “A Viking beauty. Clearly your

father’s side dominates, at least on the outside” (35). He and Michael embark on a multi-city

series of lectures and meetings for leftist causes, but one night he comes to Ilana’s bedroom

and tells her a story about a little bird that finds itself in a beautiful land that is haunted by both

war and a pervasive music. The bird, deciding that perhaps the melody clouds the people’s

understanding of their cruelties and thus enables them to continue, decides to search for the

source of the music and halt it if possible (41–42).

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 Jakob Daw stopped. There was silence.

I asked quietly, “Did the bird find the music?”

“He is still searching.”

I thought a moment. “I don’t think I like the story.” (42)

The bird’s cryptic adventures become an ongoing element in the relationship between the two.

The family spends the summer of 1936 at the Brooklyn community of Sea Gate, where

Ilana attends a political meeting during which Michael comments on trouble brewing in Spain:

My own feeling is that we’re seeing the start of a long civil war. I think that

Germany and Italy will probably come in on the side of Franco. The only power

that will stand against the Fascists will be Russia. . . . The alternatives are

going to be an active alliance either with communism or with fascism, or

neutrality—which will be the same as a passive alliance with fascism. And we

know what choice decent people will make. (76)

The Chandals fervently believe that the Soviet Union and Communism represent the future and

(although they do not express it this way) that Fascism is the political version of the sitra achra.

Thus, it is no surprise when Michael leaves his family to cover the Spanish Civil War. “He will be

hurt if he is not more careful,” says a letter from Daw, who is also in Europe. But the journalist is

consumed by his cause, Daw says: “He answers that all the world is in peril now and if the

Fascists win we are all doomed” (125). Soon Michael does return, trying to recover from

grenade shrapnel and jaundice (128), but he is determined to go back to Spain as soon as

possible. Meanwhile, Ilana has been quietly investigating her Jewish heritage, going to

synagogue services and talking with David Dinn, the young son of Ezra Dinn, her mother’s

devout cousin. As her parents discuss Michael’s return to Spain, Ilana thinks:

If there was no snowstorm tomorrow morning, I would go again to the

synagogue. That was better than sitting home listening to all the talk about

Spain and Franco and Hitler and Stalin and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and

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 the bombing of Madrid and the battle for the Jarama and seeing in my mind

pictures of arms and legs everywhere. (143)

A rift is forming between Ilana’s values and those of her parents—religion on one hand and

politics on the other.

Separations

After Michael returns to Spain, Ilana and Channah get word of an attack near his last

known location. Soon their fears and a third-hand story by another journalist recently in Spain

are confirmed: “My mother turned the pages of The New York Times. Again there was my

father’s picture and a headline: JOURNALIST MICHAEL CHANDAL, 36, DEAD IN GUERNICA RAID” (189).

The Communist Party members in New York honor him, but that is not enough for Ilana, and

she finds herself standing and praying for him during a synagogue service. “There has to be

more for you, Papa, than just one memorial service,” she thinks. “Can one recite the Kaddish for

a father who wasn’t a Jew? I didn’t care. I went on” (200). Ilana’s journey to her mother’s old

faith, then, is marked by a certain unorthodoxy—not merely her saying Kaddish for a Gentile but

also her recitation of a prayer traditionally reserved for men.

Shortly after Michael’s death, Jakob Daw returns to America from Spain; one Friday

evening he requests that Ezra Dinn lead the traditional Havdoloh ceremony that marks the

beginning of the Sabbath. “In Madrid,” Daw recalls, “I once said to myself that if I came out alive

I would do something that would make my grandfather happy. . . . Once I said it very loudly in

Barcelona so I should be heard above the machine-gun fire by whoever or whatever listens to

such promises” (210). As Ezra begins the ceremony, he notes that its name means separation

—“We separate the Shabbos from the other days of the week” (211). And separations are at

work: for Channah and Ilana in the form of Michael’s death, and for Daw in the form of

Communist politics. Explaining to a distressed Channah why he has left the party, he recounts a

bloody episode among leftists in Barcelona: “They slaughtered anarchists, Trotskyists, P.O.U.M.

people. Stalin’s hand purged Barcelona. . . . It was more important for the Communists in

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Barcelona to kill anti-Stalinist workers than to kill Fascists” (214). But his renunciation of

Stalinism makes no difference to his foes in the U.S. government, and he is arrested and

deported. Ilana, stunned by this second loss within months, suffers a nervous breakdown and is

nursed back to health by her Aunt Sarah at the Chandal farmhouse in Canada. She later begins

to go to school at the yeshiva attended by David Dinn. Channah fills her hours with work and

other activities in an effort to stave off loneliness; she dates a leftist history scholar and even

plans to marry him—but then comes word of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, a handshake

between the avatars of Communism and Fascism that shatters Channah’s faith in the party. “In

the weeks that followed she seemed to grow old before my eyes. . . . She seemed to be

growing smaller and smaller,” Ilana recalls. “She went to work, prepared our meals, wrote letters

. . . but all the light was gone from her, and I barely knew who she was. There were no more

meetings in our apartment” (297). The marriage plans evaporate; now it is Channah’s turn to

break down, and like her daughter, she spends time recovering under Sarah’s ministrations in

Canada while Ilana stays with neighbors. “Davita, how can you know what it means to have

your dreams collapse all about you?” Sarah writes in a letter (302).

Upon her recovery, Channah becomes closer to Ezra; the two marry, and Channah

returns to being a practicing Jew. “She had two pasts now,” muses Ilana, who welcomes her

new stepfather and family life. “On occasion I saw returning to her eyes the old dark brooding

look. During her years with my father she had thought often about her religious past; now she

reflected upon her Communist past. She seemed unable to bring together those two parts of

herself. And that haunted her” (315). Then news reaches the family that Jakob Daw has died in

Marseilles, and Channah announces her determination to say Kaddish for him. Ezra quietly

objects: “But you don’t have to. You shouldn’t. It falls into the category of a Commandment that

doesn’t need to be performed. It has no meaning in the eyes of God.” Channah, however, is

determined—“It has meaning in my eyes, Ezra” (322)—although her husband’s prediction that it

will cause trouble at the synagogue comes true. Yet the final face-off between nascent feminism

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and Jewish traditionalism involves Ilana rather than her mother, when she is passed over for her

yeshiva’s highest academic prize, the Akiva Award, because of her sex. A perturbed Ezra

probes the matter and discovers the reason:

Authorities in high academies of learning . . . had let it be known through

intermediaries that they would look with disapproval upon a yeshiva where a

girl was publicly shown to be the best student of a graduating class that had

boys in it. . . . [This had been] a statement of strong policy from some of the

most powerful figures in the Torah world. What sort of future students of Torah

would come out of a class where the best student was a girl? And how could a

high academy of Torah learning accept any boy from such a class? (363)

The entire family is appalled by the incident; after graduation, Ilana thinks: “I had wanted to

enter Jewish history. I had wanted to be part of that warm and wondrous world—and they

wouldn’t let me. . . . An injustice had been performed by a world that taught justice. How could I

live in that world now? How could I be part of its heart and soul, its core?” (366) Yet, using her

imagination, she gains a small bit of solace by giving her undelivered graduation speech to

Jakob Daw, her father, and her Aunt Sarah, and later begins to tell a story to her new baby

sister. If Ilana finds a way to live in the world that has so greatly disappointed her—and that is

far from clear—it appears that her imagination will be her helpmeet.

The daughter of Jacob

Of the four Jacob figures examined here, Daw is probably the least similar to his biblical

forebear. Unmarried, childless, and atheistic (210), he clearly is not a modern mirror image of a

polygamous patriarch with a large family and a record of interactions with God. Nevertheless,

certain parallels exist. Like Jacob of old, Daw is part of what might be called (for lack of a better

term) a romantic polygon. As mentioned before, Jacob inadvertently acquires two wives (Leah

and Rachel), who in their battle for domestic and reproductive dominance send their

handmaidens (Bilhah and Zilpah) to Jacob’s bed in an early version of surrogate motherhood.

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Jacob is the one man connected with four women in a single household. Jakob Daw, as noted,

is unmarried—but like the other principal male characters in Davita’s Harp, he also is part of

Channah’s romantic history. “Uncle Jakob knew Mama in Vienna, and Mr. Dinn knew Mama in

New York,” Ilana says to her father, talking about her mother’s youth. “That’s right,” Michael

replies. “The three of us were in love with your mother, and she married me” (140). Thus, in a

sexual reversal of the situation in Genesis, Jakob Daw is one of four men (including the leftist

historian Charles Carter) connected to one woman. Further, like the biblical figures who share a

household, all of the men linked to Channah share space with her in some sense—Michael and

Ezra because she is married to them, Jakob because he is a houseguest. (Carter does not live

with Channah during their relationship, but it is strongly hinted that the two are physically

intimate at her home on at least one occasion [291].)

Jakob Daw does become something of a father figure to Ilana, but in a manner different

from that of his counterparts in Potok’s other books. Kalman, Kahn, and Keter play teacher to

the protagonists in The Promise, the Asher Lev novels, and The Book of Lights; their “father”

relationship is one of direct academic, theological, or artistic influence. With Daw and Ilana, the

link is primarily an emotional one; Daw is the uncle whom Ilana has never had, and the two

develop a bond. The fact that Jakob and Channah share a romantic past may play a part in this.

“Mama, would you have married Papa if Jakob Daw had been in America?” Ilana asks at one

point (105). There is no indication that she finds this possibility unpleasant—in contrast to her

negative feelings about her mother’s romance with Charles Carter—which along with her

consternation at Daw’s deportment suggests that she views him as a surrogate father.

The primary “Jacob theme” in Davita’s Harp is actually embodied not in Daw but rather

in Davita and two other characters in their mirroring of Dinah, the only named daughter of the

biblical patriarch. Dinah is the child of Leah and the full sister of Simeon and Levi, among

others. Jacob and his family settle on a piece of land purchased from the family of the

Canaanite leader Hamor. One day, Dinah catches the eye of Hamor’s son Shechem; he rapes

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her, but being “strongly drawn” to her, he speaks “tenderly” to Dinah and then asks his father to

arrange a marriage. Dinah’s brothers are infuriated but deceptively acquiesce to the request on

the agreed-upon condition that every male in the town be circumcised (Gen. 33:18–34:24).

On the third day, when they were in pain, Simeon and Levi . . . took each his

sword, came upon the city unmolested, and slew all the males. They put Hamor

and his son Shechem to the sword, took Dinah out of Shechem’s house, and

went away. The other sons of Jacob came upon the slain and plundered the

town, because their sister had been defiled. (34:25–27)

In an epilogue, Jacob tells Levi and Simeon that this wholesale revenge has made their small

clan vulnerable to united retaliation on the Canaanites’ part. However, the brothers simply retort,

“Should our sister be treated like a whore?” (34:30–31) In terms of Potok’s novels, the vital

factor in this narrative is the rape rather than the slaughter—the committing of a crime or

injustice against a woman (in this case, a daughter of Israel) that involves her sex in some way.

In Davita’s Harp, the echoes of Dinah appear first in the minor character Teresa, a

young girl about Ilana’s age, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War who speaks briefly at a

political meeting. Ilana later follows her out of the room and finds her in a bedroom:

I stepped inside and peered behind the door and saw her sitting on the floor

against the wall near the corner of the room, her arms around her legs, her chin

on her knees, her eyes closed. She was rocking slowly back and forth, hugging

herself tightly. A low, soft, tremulous wail came from her lips and filled the

dimness of the large bedroom like an icy mist. (81)

Ilana attempts to comfort her, but she cries, “No touch me!” (81). As Ilana, her parents, and Daw

are walking home later, Ilana asks about the meaning of the word raped, which she overheard

applied to Teresa during the meeting. Channah’s reaction is significant: “ ‘It means to hurt

someone very, very badly,’ my mother said in a voice I could barely hear” (82–83). Channah’s

manner suggests that she has more than a theoretical understanding of the word, and this

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indeed proves to be the case. When Ilana reveals that her Aunt Sarah has given her religious

storybooks, her mother says she doesn’t like to see her reading such material. “Christians once

hurt me,” she says. “I don’t—,” but then she stops. Ilana questions her further. “ ‘During the big

war. Cossacks and Poles. Christians.’ She seemed to shrink into herself, to grow smaller and

smaller before my eyes” (135). Channah once again uses the word hurt, and her reticence

indicates that she is thinking about more than simple injury. Further, her posture echoes that of

Teresa—the Spanish girl has “her arms around her legs, her chin on her knees, . . . hugging

herself tightly,” and Channah seems to “shrink into herself, to grow smaller and smaller.” Later

in the novel, she and Ilana go to a movie in two men attack a young woman. “Nothing of the

brutality was shown,” Ilana recalls; “the gaps were left to the imagination. Afterward my mother

came out of the theater and hurried away as if I were not there” (261–62). Channah apologizes

to her daughter, criticizing “capitalist exploiters of the working class” who “show movies like that

to make money” (262). As in the episode with Teresa, Channah’s reaction suggests a personal

experience but like the film, Potok’s narrative leaves the details to the imagination. Further, in

both this incident and her remark to Ilana about being “hurt,” Channah links the violent deed to

something beyond itself—to capitalism in the former case and Christianity in the latter. This last

is borne out even further in Channah’s most explicit discussion of what happened to her.

Recalling why she went to study in Vienna, she tells Ilana how Russian soldiers attacked her

and killed her sister and grandfather during a pogram. “They hurt me very badly, Ilana. . . . How

I hated those soldiers!” she says. “I remember one of them wore a cross on top of his tunic, and

when he—when he—” (268). She does not finish the sentence, but the implication of rape is

clear, as is her association of it with Christianity. Thus, Channah’s experience clearly is a mirror

of Dinah’s, especially given that both women are Hebrews attacked by Gentiles.

Ilana’s participation in this theme is metaphorical rather than literal; unlike her mother

and Teresa, she is not physically assaulted. However, she is the subject of a personal injustice

that is attributable to men and specifically linked to her sex: Even though a top official at her

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yeshiva acknowledges that she is the best student in her class, she does not receive the prize

because she is a girl. An upset Ezra Dinn discovers that influential Jewish figures had made it

clear that no respectable yeshiva would honor a girl as its most capable student. Ilana wonders:

What else would they steal from me in the coming years? I would accomplish

something, and they would tell me I couldn’t have it because I was a girl. I had

made this community my home, and now I felt betrayed by it. It was like turning

a corner in one of the neighborhoods where I had lived as a child and never

knowing if that gang leader with the pimpled face and glittering eyes would

suddenly come upon me. (365)

Ilana compares the uncertainty that she now faces with the fear of a vicious boy from her

childhood. In both cases, male figures threaten to prey upon her vulnerability. Further, as with

Dinah, the wrong done to Ilana springs from the community around her—in Dinah’s case, the

influential local family that sold her father the land on which she lived; in Ilana’s case, the

religious community that she had joined and to whom she is linked through her mother and

stepfather. Interestingly enough, Potok drew this episode directly from life—in this case, that of

his spouse, Adena, who was bereft of a class valedictory award. “My wife has never fully gotten

over that experience,” Potok says in a 1986 interview. “It’s one of those scars that just stay with

you for the rest of your life, and my wife was thirteen years old at the time” (Kauvar 82). As

Davita’s Harp ends, it appears quite likely that like Adena Potok, Ilana will be permanently

affected by the injustice done her by male authority figures. Thus, the attack on the daughter of

the biblical Jacob is mirrored directly in the lives of Teresa and Channah (a physical descendant

of Jacob) and metaphorically in the life of Ilana (a physical descendant of the patriarch and an

emotional “child” of Daw), thereby establishing another Jacob theme in Potok’s work.

“Things from his imagination”

One of the themes of Davita’s Harp is the use of imagination—particularly how it can be

employed to cope with reality. The concept initially surfaces when the visiting Sarah Chandal

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tells her niece “stories about Pilgrims and Indians and lonely women who used their imagination

to fight their loneliness. . . . [S]ometimes I saw the women inside my eyes.” (16) As noted

before, this episode links women and imagination, but it also depicts imagination as a method of

dealing with difficult reality—specifically the loneliness experienced by American pioneer

women. Further, Ilana’s own imagination is fired by her aunt’s stories: “I saw the women inside

my eyes.” She also notes that her mother would tell her stories about “Poland and Russia and

sometimes about an evil witch named Baba Yaga” (16), and that her father would regale her

with tales of “Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, Baron Munchausen, and other such gentlemen

of fabled accomplishment” (19). (It may not be coincidental that in a novel dealing with male-

female issues, the aunt and mother tell stories about women and the father tells stories about

men; perhaps this is Potok’s way of saying that each sex tends to favor its own.) However, in

keeping with the link between the Jacob figures and the key themes of the novels, the primary

wielder of imagination in Davita’s Harp is Jakob Daw.

When the eight-year-old Ilana first hears that a writer is coming to visit, she asks, “Is

Jakob Daw from Maine?” and “Does Jakob Daw write ideas?” (22) This suggests that she

defines writer in terms of her father, a Maine-born practitioner of what might be called advocacy

journalism. But Channah quickly sets the record straight. “You could say that he writes ideas”

but also “things from his imagination,” she tells her daughter (22). From the novel’s first mention

of Daw, then, he is linked to the use of the imagination. When he and Ilana meet, she asks him,

“Mr. Daw, do you write stories?” (36), and his tales indeed prove to be a key factor in their

relationship. Over the course of the novel, Daw tells (orally or via letter) a number of parable-

esque stories—generally to Ilana herself, although he reads one aloud at the political meeting at

which the girl Teresa appears. These stories can be briefly described thus:

The Bird Story—“A little bird with black feathers and short wings and a small red spot

under each of its large dark eyes” finds himself in a beautiful land haunted by both war and a

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lovely, lulling music. Believing that ending the music might awaken the land’s inhabitants to the

nature of their cruelties, the bird begins to search for the melody’s source (41–42).

The Horse Story—“A young, strong, gray horse” lives in a valley that borders a

mountain range inhabited by a herd of powerful black horses as well as a plain that is home to

beautiful white horses. The gray horse, dissatisfied with his own “very dull between-world” but

ignored by both herds, searches for other gray horses. Unsuccessful, he returns to his valley

and decides to join the dark herd. However, during a storm he is struck by lightning that burns

him “black, all black,” killing him (62–64).

The Girl Story—A beautiful and mysterious young woman who hails from a distant land

lives on a grassy slope near a river and sells fragrant powdered flowers in a village. One day

the bird from the first story arrives and finds that the lulling music he hears seems especially

strong near the village and the girl’s cottage. He watches the girl, who gradually seems wearied

by her work. At last she goes down to the river and puts her hand into the water, which

becomes polluted. The young woman leaves and is never seen again; the bird concludes that

she is not the source of the music and continues his quest (78–80).

The War Story—The bird flies across a “stormy ocean” and comes to “an even stormier

land.” Terrible fighting and the distracting music are everywhere. He discovers a dead white

horse and sees troops kill children and elderly people who are reportedly sympathetic to the

soldiers’ foes. Believing that the music’s source cannot possibly be here, he decides to return to

“the land of mountains and rivers and plains and great forests” and so begins “his westward

journey back across the great sea” (151–52).

The Door Harp Story—The bird flies across the ocean, but he is pained by “bits and

pieces of broken dreams that kept piercing his troubled heart like shards of glass.” Weary and

no longer interested in the strange music, he becomes smaller and smaller as he flies. When he

arrives in the land, he hears a different melody coming from a house on a quiet lane; when a

little girl opens the door, he flies inside and finds that a door harp is the source of this new

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music—“sweet but not false, a comfort but not a deceiving caress; a music of innocence.” The

bird, now tiny, builds a nest inside the door harp, and “there he lives to this day” (226–27).

When read in light of the rest of the novel, these stories clearly are Daw’s allegorical

versions of events in his own life. The horse and the bird both represent him; the bird in

particular, with its “short wings” and “large dark eyes,” evokes Daw’s frail appearance.

(Sternlicht, commenting on this “sickly, unkempt” character, notes his name and compares him

to “a jackdaw, a crowlike bird that is unattractive to humans but very intelligent” [113]. In similar

fashion, Michael Chandal refers to Daw as “a strange guy” a few weeks after meeting him

[Davita 43].) The Bird Story can be seen as Daw’s comment on his politics. The haunting music

reflects the Marxist concept of a false consciousness that blinds human beings to the truth

about the world, in this case enabling the continuation of war and other violence. The bird (Daw)

hopes to quench this distraction and awaken people to their plight. The Horse Story suggests a

young man confronted by two ways of life—probably secularism (the black horses) and faith

(the white horses)—neither of which he finds fully comfortable. Alienated, he tries to find others

like himself but fails. He opts to cast his lot with the “black” way of life but pays a terrible price—

presumably the loss of his “white” side. The lightning may also function as a foreshadowing of

Daw’s eventual and utter disillusionment with Stalinist Communism, in that he joins a group but

also finds metaphorical death therein.

The Girl Story is less clear than the others, but it obviously reflects the role of Channah

in Daw’s life, most likely their years together in Vienna. (Significantly, after Channah hears the

story, she sits “white-faced and motionless” [80].) Like the girl in the story, Channah is a

beautiful young woman from another land (Poland) who settles near a village (Vienna) by a river

(the Wien or the Danube). The lulling music is unusually strong around the village and the girl’s

cottage (Daw finds Vienna and Channah particularly intoxicating). However, something goes

wrong, the setting is spoiled, the beautiful girl leaves, and the bird continues his quest. Here the

parallels between the bird’s story and Daw’s are more difficult to discern, but the pollution of the

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river may correspond to the effects of World War I, in which Daw was wounded. The War Story

clearly allegorizes Daw’s experience in battle-torn Spain; after encountering widespread

fratricidal violence, the bird decides to go “westward . . . back across the great sea” to “the land

of mountains and rivers and plains and great forests.” (Reflecting a growing understanding of

Daw, Ilana asks her mother after reading this tale, “Is Uncle Jakob coming back to America?”

[152]) The Door Harp Story is Daw’s final word. Wearied by war and politics, he returns to the

United States; like the bird, he is diminished. However, in the house of a little girl he hears a

“music of innocence” unlike the haunting societal melody whose riddle he cannot solve. The end

of the story is not a “happily ever after,” but the girl’s presence clearly provides a refuge that has

been sorely lacking.

In these tales, Daw uses his imagination to cope with the wrenching events in his life:

the sociopolitical problems of society, personal alienation and philosophical angst, lost love,

loneliness, and the horrors of war. Early in the novel, he remarks, “A writer is a strange

instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life” (77). Daw

thus links himself and his craft to the titular door harp, which Sternlicht sees as a symbol of “the

receptive, creative, individual imagination” (121). The door harp, he points out, “is played by the

motion [of the door], not directly by human hand” (121). This idea suggests the indirect and

unpredictable nature of the imagination; just as the human action of opening a door sets the

balls of a door harp in motion but cannot dictate the sounds that arise, so circumstances give

rise to products of the imagination—yet those results cannot be predicted or perhaps even

explained satisfactorily. Imagination’s processes and products are sometimes opaque. Talking

with Ilana about the then-unfinished Girl Story, Daw says that because it is not yet done, he

himself does not yet know what it is about. “Perhaps I will not know what my story is about even

after I complete it,” he muses. “Others may have to explain it to me” (69). As the Jacob figure in

Davita’s Harp, Daw acts as a locus for this key element in the novel, modeling for Ilana the

possibilities of using one’s imagination to cope with life. A prominent instance of this comes at

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the very end of the book. After losing the Akiva Award and the chance to speak at the

graduation ceremony, feeling an “anger like a boiling juncture of tides” (366), Ilana visualizes

herself flying through the door harp as well as through a picture of horses that has long been a

fixture in her house. After arriving at the Chandal farmhouse in Canada, she talks about what

she would have said, saluting the dead Michael and Jakob and her Aunt Sarah and discussing

her fears and disappointments. “I wanted to say that I’m very frightened to be living in this world

and I don’t understand most of the things I see and hear and I don’t know what will happen to

me and to the family I love. . . . But they wouldn’t let me say it” (368–69). Potok remarks about

this scene:

Every time Davita confronts something unbearable, she restructures it through

the power of her imagination. Finally at the end of the novel when she suffers

this terrible indignity, she restructures the graduation ceremony by having her

uncle, her father, and her aunt there along with everything that she has

imagined. . . . So you have this seesawing back-and-forth between reality that’s

unbearable and the imagination that tries to rethink reality. (Kauvar 69)

As a prime example of this restructuring of reality, Potok cites Pablo Picasso’s Guernica—the

painting inspired by the Fascist attack in which Michael is killed in the novel, a painting that

Ilana encounters and that she incorporates into her imaginative life. For Potok, Guernica is an

embodiment of “the redemptive power of art. The artist, in strange fashion, redeems the horror

of reality through the power of his or her art” (Kauvar 70). This is what Daw does with his

stories, and what he implicitly teaches Ilana to do.

“I don’t like my imagination”

However, in Davita’s Harp, Potok is not merely presenting the imagination as a tool with

which to re-envision reality and make it endurable; he also is contrasting the mind-set that does

this with those that find the use of the imagination to be more problematic. This contrast is

suggested in the same passage, cited in part previously, that introduces the overall topic:

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 In the chill darkness of my room I lay in my bed and listened to my Aunt Sarah

from Maine telling me those stories about Pilgrims and Indians and lonely

women who used their imagination to fight their loneliness. My mother never

told me stories like those; her stories were about Poland and Russia and

sometimes about an evil witch named Baba Yaga. I listened to my Aunt Sarah’s

stories and sometimes I saw the women inside my eyes. (16)

This passage draws a contrast between Sarah and her sister-in-law. In part, this can be

attributed to culture; Sarah comes from the American Northeast, and Channah from Eastern

Europe. But there may be more to the contrast between the two women’s choices than first

meets the eye. One of Sarah’s ways of connecting with her niece is with stories (whether told or

in the form of books), often those about religious figures. Channah, however, is of a practical

bent, and by having her tell stories about “Poland and Russia” (i.e., places), Potok may be

underlining a certain disregard for imagination on her part. (On the other hand, he specifically

notes her familiarity with folktales about a witch, so this suggestion cannot be pressed too far.)

Unlike Sarah’s pioneer women who fight loneliness by using their imaginations, Channah

responds to Michael’s absences by keeping busy. “We have to work hard, Ilana,” she says

shortly after her husband leaves for Europe the first time. “That way most of the time we can

forget the loneliness” (104). She also cuts her daughter off when Ilana asks whether she might

have married Jakob Daw if he had been in the United States: “I don’t like if questions, Ilana.

They’re upsetting and turn your head away from your work” (105). Channah is not an explorer of

alternate realities. Unfortunately, her way of handling stressful solitude seems not always to

serve her well. Her abortive relationship with the politically impeccable but uncharismatic

Charles Carter, whom Ilana detests, springs at least in part from her loneliness, and Ezra Dinn

indicates that (at least in his opinion) her marriage to Michael can be traced to a similar source.

“Isn’t one mistake enough?” he snaps in a fight with Channah over her romance with Carter,

which he blames at least partly on her fraught relationship with her Hasidic father (278).

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Channah rejects his assessment of her marriage as an error, but the exchange does support

the implication that, ironically, choosing activity over imagination may have its downside.

An exchange between Ilana and David Dinn further develops the theme of contrasting

views of imagination. After David expresses disdain for fairy tales, Ilana asks, “Don’t you like

stories that come from your imagination?” The boy replies: “No. I don’t like my imagination. It

keeps me awake at night. Sometimes it keeps me from studying. . . . Sometimes it shows me

my mother in her grave” (207–08). Two attitudes are reflected in David’s statement. The first is

that imagination’s products are not always pleasant. The other is that imagination can be seen

as antithetical to the work of the intellect; in fact, David later says of his visions of his deceased

mother, “It helps if I study a lot. That keeps my imagination away” (208). David thus indicates

that intellect and imagination are sufficiently separate, even opposed, that he engages in

academic work for the specific purpose of shutting down his imagination. In addition, because it

is likely (given the culture) that the study mentioned by David is theological, the face-off that is

hinted at is not merely intellect versus imagination but spirituality versus imagination. (Critic

Daniel Walden comments that during Potok’s youth, the future author “realized that Rabbinic

Judaism of the Talmud was rational; imagination was pagan, imagination was Greek” [20].

Thus, the tension that David describes is quite personal for his creator.)

David Dinn’s comments foreshadow the higher-profile differences over imagination that

occur between Ilana and her teachers at the yeshiva. In two different episodes, Ilana uses her

imagination to come up with an explanation for a particular line in the Torah—one in Genesis

involving the presence of Canaanites in the Promised Land, the other in Deuteronomy noting

the site where Moses speaks to the gathered Israelites. In both cases, Ilana approaches the text

as she might an ordinary story, and both times her teachers find her hermeneutic unacceptable.

“If people wrote the Torah, why should we bother with it?” one instructor asks her, saying: “The

Torah is not stories, Ilana. The Torah is not a piece of make-believe. It is not like Shakespeare

or like—what is his name?—James Joyce or like your good friend Jakob Daw” (330–31).

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Ironically, the explanation that Ilana uses in each instance is one favored by Abraham ibn Ezra,

an honored twelfth-century Jewish commentator. However, her instructors are so bound to a

particular theory of divine inspiration that Ilana’s proposals are dismissed out of hand. Thus, in

the novel, imagination is presented not only as a way for dealing with life’s hardships—a

presentation in which the book’s Jacob figure plays a central role—but as yet another

battleground in the clash of traditionalist Judaism and Western secularism. For the former, the

unbounded use of imagination is a theological danger; for the latter, it is a tool whose usability is

hardly to be questioned. Potok’s sympathies clearly lean toward the latter approach, although

one of the final remarks in the novel may hint at some boundaries. As Sarah Chandal is bidding

her niece farewell after her imaginary graduation speech, she says: “Be discontented with the

world. But be respectful at the same time” (370). Perhaps Potok would say that even such a

valuable faculty as imagination must be used with a grain of salt, so to speak.

The children of Israel

In his novels, Chaim Potok creates a fictional representation of a world unfamiliar to

much of American society and literature. Writing about his portrait of one section of New York

City, Joan Zlotnick states that “the borough portrayed in Potok’s early novels was memorable. It

was a Brooklyn never before depicted in American literature and never made familiar in the

dominant American culture . . .” (17–18). Nor is it a matter of Potok’s merely capturing a

snapshot of life in a particular time and place. On the question of whether his work made

possible a “greater emphasis on Jewish thought, theology, philosophy, scholarship, than was

hitherto the case,” Potok asserts: “No one tackled this material before. Or if someone tackled it,

it was presented in some arcane fashion, as the ultimate in exotica” (Kremer, “Interview” 44). In

his groundbreaking narratives, Potok’s work offers up both the outer and inner lives of a

distinctive U.S. community. To the degree that his novels suffer from scholarly neglect, our

picture of Jewish-American life and literature is diminished. Critiquing the academic tendency to

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concentrate on the fictional Jewry of authors such as Bellow, Malamud, and Roth, Kathryn

McClymond says:

By highlighting this stream of fiction, without noting divergent streams of writing,

critics were not just evaluating fiction. They were also glossing over the

diversity of Jewish experience in America. Orthodox, particularly Hasidic

Orthodox communities, were treated as throwbacks to the past, remains of the

initial waves of Jewish immigration, but certainly not representative of modern

Jewish life. (21, emphasis in orig.)

However, Potok’s Orthodox characters are representative not only of modern Jewish life but

indeed of all modern individuals for whom religious belief is a guiding force in daily life. This fact

not only widens the books’ possible audience but also increases their potential value to

scholars. Assessing the popularity of The Chosen, McClymond points out that

readers of all backgrounds could see themselves in Potok's world. Potok

managed to convince mainstream American readers that the personal religious

crises that Orthodox, even Hasidic Jews struggled with were not unlike their

own. It was not the [Jewish] content of the conflicts that resonated with them

. . . rather, it was the scope and tenor of the conflict. (17–18, emphasis in orig.)

Catholics, Methodists, and others can find sympathetic echoes of their own spiritual struggles in

Potok’s stories. Further, these fictional portraits of the pious are worthy of academic attention

because deep religious belief shapes society on every level from the local to the international,

from the establishment of community food ministries to the chronic unrest and bloodshed in the

Middle East. An academy that forgets or airily dismisses communities in which faith is central to

existence is neglecting opportunities for understanding.

In his depictions of such communities, Potok shows their inhabitants as actively and

emotionally engaged with the values of the secularist Western tradition that pervades their

surroundings and questions their presuppositions both implicitly and explicitly. Textual criticism,

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artistic philosophy, science, imagination—all of these come into play. “My subject in all my

books is the interplay of the Jewish tradition with the secular twentieth century. . . . [T]he Jews

that I write about are at the very heart of their Judaism and at the same time they are

encountering elements that are at the very heart of the umbrella [Western] civilization,” Potok

says (Kremer, “Interview” 32). In The Promise, My Name Is Asher Lev, The Book of Lights,

Davita’s Harp, and The Gift of Asher Lev, Potok engages these issues via the Jacob figures:

Kalman, Kahn, Keter, and Daw. In their interaction with the novels’ protagonists, these men

embody and represent societal forces—in Kalman, textual conservatism; in Kahn, artistic

freedom; in Keter, mystical religion; in Daw, imagination—that clash with other, opposing

philosophical views, thereby shaping the souls of the young. Moreover, in Potok’s echoes of the

Genesis narratives in his plots and characters, he has turned the biblical Jacob into a meta-

character, a figure of the ancient past whose life re-emerges in the lives of his fictional

descendants. Reuven Malter, Asher Lev, Gershon Loran, Ilana Davita Chandal—in their

fictional bloodlines and their interactions with the Jacob figures, these are the children of Israel.

Yet as Potok himself observes, Gentile readers identify with his stories as well: “they are simply

translating themselves into the particular context of the boys and the fathers and the mothers

and the situation that I’m writing about. So instead of being a Jew, you are a Baptist; instead of

being an Orthodox Jew, you are a Catholic; and the dynamic is the same. The culture war is the

same” (Ribalow 5–6). Thus, Potok’s themes are universally significant—the biblical patriarch

haunts the lives of Jew and Gentile alike, and Jacob figures crop up not just in New York

boroughs but elsewhere as well. In one sense or another, we are all children of Israel.

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 WORKS CITED

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 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Alan Morris Cochrum is a native of Fort Worth, Texas. In 1983, he graduated with

honors from the University of Texas at Arlington with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication

(Journalism). He spent almost twenty-five years as a copy editor and writer at the Waco

Tribune-Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, serving on the editorial board of the latter for

approximately fifteen years.

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