In the Beginning by Chaim Potok
This year I went back to him and re-read those three and this morning I finished his fourth novel: In The Beginning. His novels deal with racism, religion, family relationships, and the modern age.
In the beginning is a professor David Lurie telling the story of his beginning, growing up in Brooklyn through the thirties and forties. His mother and father had fled religious persecution in Poland and David is named after his dead uncle who was killed in a Pogrom.
The book, like all of his works, puts you deep into a world at war within itself. David is subject of brutal racism with the polish boy who lives in his building. His father was part of an armed resistance that fought and killed Cossacks and Poles who were killing Jews. Meanwhile, the depression hits and they all go broke. Then the Nazi's take power in Germany and anti-semitism grows in America as well (Father Coughlin whom I had to look up).
But it is at this time that David with his brilliance is beginning to study German higher criticism of the Bible and finds there both valuable insights, possibly truth, at least important questions as well as anti-semitism. And like all the protagonists in Potok's fiction, his world begins to tear apart. His inner questions are drawing him down a path that none of his family and community will understand and most will be aghast at.
It becomes worse as the photographs of what is found in different concentration camps hits the papers and word comes that all of his extended family (except for his dad and his uncle) have been killed, over one hundred family members. His father can no longer stand to see him read German books in his presence, even if they are by Jewish authors.
David finds one person who encourages him to go down this dangerous path and it is his Rebbe at the yeshiva. In the last twenty pages of the novel he tells him: "Lurie, if the Torah cannot go into your world of scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth.."
The book, like all of the others, speaks of what it means to make a beginning on your own, carrying the burdens of the past, carrying on all the gifts of those who have come before you, being from somewhere and not forgetting those who bear you upon their shoulders and those who struggled ... yet facing the world anew, and following the questions even as they lead you out of safe places. Perhaps even going into dangerous places to fight for the things you love.
At the very end of the novel, while a professor working on a scholarly book on Genesis he needs to travel to Germany to research manuscripts that are in Frankfurt and Erfurt. It is very difficult for him to do this, to enter into this place that attempted to destroy his people. But he goes. And stiffly he even forces himself to go to Bergen Belsen, the camp where his family perished, now turned into a vast parklike cemetery. "I am walking on the dead of my family's beginnings."
It is the difficult worlds that Potok leads me into, the worlds that are incredibly complex and you feel yourself torn as I believe Potok did feel torn. But you also recognize these worlds. They are not the worlds of political or religious words, but the actual ones we inhabit. We love our fore-bearers and we disappoint them, we see hatred but also see the fear and strain and deep sorrow that feeds into the rage. These are difficult books.
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