Word: potok
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Hats off, though to Chaim Potok. Davita's Harp, the author's sixth novel and the first narrated by a woman, successfully balances the stuff of newspapers with the stuff of diaries. Here, the key events of the 1930s--the Depression, the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of the Second World War--intersect with, indeed, shape, the life of an irresistible young girl in an altogether fine, albeit sentimental, book. Potok, the author of The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev, triumphs where so many before him have failed, by writing a historical novel...
...neither their politics nor their gatherings. No matter where they live, though, the Chandals hang a small wooden harp on the entrance door that emits a sound with every visitor. It seems that all that passes through the door the politics the passions, play on the impressionable Ilana, too. Potok has written a Bildangstoman, a portrait of the artist as a young girl whose watchful eyes and curious mind set upon the whirlwind times and enigmatic people at surround...
...There is a sort of spiritual determinism at work here: despite her mother's adamant atheism, despite her father's Protestant background Ilana has a Jewish soul in need of uncovering. This represents a twist of the theme of generational conflict that is at the crux of much of Potok's work. In both The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lee youngsters from religious backgrounds partially break away from their families and communities in pursuit of secular goals. In Davita Harp however, the pattern reversed here religion is the forbidden trust...
...cliche. Still. I found myself moved by the sympathetic portrayals of seemingly minor events in the book: weddings, births, the lighting of the Sabbath candles. Here, it's the little things that count. Writing about a century best defined by the word mass--mass, culture, mass movements, mass destruction--Potok has lived up to the novelist's task and reaffirmed, amidst all the tragedy, the dignity of an individual life...
...narrative deftly captures Davita's particular sense of placelessness and evokes a child's view of events. But in explaining the parents' political fervor and in analyzing their times, Davita's Harp too often limits itself to predictable externalities. Potok relies heavily on the imagination of other artists: the explanation for Davita's father's alienation from his timber- tycoon forebears, for example, is that he witnessed a real-life scene of antiunion violence that is vividly evoked in John Dos Passos' 1919, and Davita comes to understand him by reading the book. He also introduces a surrogate uncle...