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Davita's Harp

by prudence on 21-Apr-2024
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This -- another that came my way purely because it happened to appear at Kuching's wonderful second-hand book fair earlier in the year -- is by Chaim Potok (1929-2002). I'd previously read My Name is Asher Lev (published in 1972) and In the Beginning (1975), and remembered them as moving accounts of what it means to be Jewish. But I'd not read any more since the early 1990s.

This one came out in 1985; it's his sixth novel, and the first to have a female as the central character.

Potok was born in Brooklyn, the son of Polish immigrants with strong ties to Hasidism. I looked up the meaning of this when I read Eve Harris's The Marrying of Chani Kaufman. At that point I learned that practising Jews can be categorized as progressive (reform or liberal), conservative, and orthodox; orthodoxy further divides into modern orthodox and Charedi; and the Charedi can again be divided into two streams, Hasidic and Lithuanian.

Anyway, Potok was reared in a Hasidic home, with the expectation that he would become a scholar of the Talmud. But that calculation didn't take into account those amazing things that happen to people. At the age of 16, Potok was conquered by literature... He decided he "wanted to create stories that 'provide a map not only of the physical elements of life, but of the spiritual ones as well.'" This was sometimes an uphill struggle in a religious context where art is not greatly valued. At least, as he says, there's respect for the written word in Judaism, so putting words on paper was regarded with somewhat more comprehension than putting pictures on canvas. Even so...

I was interested to read that he was influenced by James Joyce, especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; by Evelyn Waugh and Brideshead Revisited (I so loved that book myself); and by Thomas Mann and The Magic Mountain.

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The narrator through whose eyes we see the world in this book is Ilana Davita Chandal, who is about eight when the novel opens. Many of the tensions that the story sets up are sketched in the first paragraph: "My mother came from a small town in Poland, my father from a small town in Maine. My mother was a nonbelieving Jew, my father a nonbelieving Christian. They met in New York while my father was doing a story for a leftist newspaper on living conditions in a row of vile tenements on Suffolk Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where my mother worked. This was in the late 1920s."

The family's experience is revealed bit by bit as the historical context evolves and Ilana's understanding develops. Her father is Michael Chandal, a journalist. Originally from a wealthy family, he opted for a different path after witnessing the lynching of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) member Wesley Everest in November 1919.

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"It is likely that sales of this songbook were used to aid in the defense of the IWW Centralia Prisoners who were arrested and imprisoned"

Most of Michael's family accept neither his choice of profession nor his decision to marry a Jewish woman. The exception is his sister, Ilana's Aunt Sarah, a Christian who channels her faith into the relief of suffering. She's a nurse, and serves in Spain during the Civil War, and in Ethiopia.

Ilana's mother is Channah, aka Annie or Anne. She came to the US shortly after World War I, when she was about 19. She received most of her education in Vienna, but she grew up in a border town between Russia and Poland (which immediately makes me think, of course, of A Small Town in Ukraine by Bernard Wasserstein). We eventually learn that she was raped, and her sister and grandfather killed, by Russian soldiers during a pogrom. This is why she despises Christianity: "Christians once hurt me... During the big war. Cossacks and Poles. Christians." And it's also why she despises Judaism. On Sabbaths and festivals, her father, a strict Hasidic Jew, was often away from home visiting the leader of his sect. He wasn't there to protect her when she most needed him. And he wasn't there in her earlier years either. It was her mother and grandfather who brought her up, and educated her. Her father didn't believe girls should be educated. His religion, she says, "made a slave of my mother"; religion in general is "a dangerous fraud".

Channah is a wonderfully contradictory character, as Janet Goodrich remarks: "On the one hand, she loves and respects Davita, even telling her at one point, 'Read whatever you want. You’ll find your way.' On the other hand, she’s an overpowering presence, a hurricane of a personality driven by her wounds and her ideals, and dragging Davita along."

She is also a lodestar for at least three men: Michael; Jakob Daw, an old friend from her Austria days; and her cousin, Ezra Dinn, who is a widower by the time the book opens. Ilana's father says: "The three of us were in love with your mother, and she married me." In Ezra's case, the stumbling-block was the religious and ideological chasm between them.

When Ilana is growing up, Annie and Michael are staunch communists. They believe the world is on the cusp of change. They're optimistic and earnest, and work tirelessly for the cause. Ironically, given Channah's resentment of her father's preoccupations, Ilana sometimes seems sidelined by this activity.

When the Spanish Civil War starts, Michael feels it is his journalistic duty to go to Spain, so that he can tell the world the truth about what is going on. He comes home, having been wounded, and seen terrible things, but once recovered, he feels he must return: "It's a hell... But it's the only place to be. A decent person knows where he belongs now." Channah supports his decision to return: "He ought to go back. People trust his stories about the war. He went there at my urging. It's the right thing for him to do."

He is killed. At Guernica.

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A detail from Picasso's Guernica, which Ilana later sees

Also caught up in the horrors of the era is Jakob Daw. He was gassed during WWI, and ended up in "a hospital for wounded minds"; physically, he has never entirely recovered. He's a writer and left-leaning activist. The stories he tells Ilana -- which she doesn't really understand, and often doesn't like -- all refer to creatures who are somehow outside the fold. He tells her he "was once very religious", but now isn't. Interestingly, though, he has Havdoloh (the ritual for taking leave of the Sabbath) said in memory of his dead grandfather: "I do not believe in God, you understand, but I do believe in my grandfather's Havdoloh."

Jakob Daw is deported from the US. He is still too revolutionary for the authorities, even though his communist faith has been severely dented... "Stalinism is dead for me after Barcelona," he says, "It was more important for the Communists in Barcelona to kill anti-Stalinist workers than to kill Fascists. This my eyes saw... It was a civil war inside a civil war. Workers killing workers... You think the Russians desire revolution in Spain, Channah? They do not." He goes to France, where he is initially confident he will be well received: "The French will take me in. The French appreciate my writing. Malraux himself is a devoted reader." He is disappointed here, too: "The right had called him a Marxist obscurantist and his writings a threat to moral decency, and the left had labeled him a voice of the decadent bourgeois class." He never recovers his health, and dies in France.

If the political tension of the era is very palpable in the novel, its other powerful counter-thread is religion. Over the course of the narrative, Ilana is more and more drawn to the Jewish faith -- despite her parents' proclaimed atheism, and quiet disapproval of her religious explorations. She admits she doesn't believe in God. But she is familiar with Jewish families and their practices (particularly Ezra Dinn, and his son, David; and the Helfman family who live in the flat below), and she is attracted by the ritual and the atmosphere. It reminds her of carefree times at the seaside (or as carefree as things ever get for Ilana, who is exposed to much change and a remarkable number of grown-up issues from a very early age): "It feels good and everything feels like it's being changed into something very beautiful like when I was building the castles on the beach." She starts to attend a Jewish school, and when her father is killed, she insists on saying Kaddish for him, even though she is constantly told that women/girls are not supposed to do that. It's true that she also feels comfortable praying with her Christian Aunt Sarah. But Judaism, more prominent among those around her, claims her heart.

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Museum of the Jewish Community of Trieste, 2023

While the comfort of religion is convincingly portrayed, so are its restrictions. Ilana constantly comes up against the conservatism of her teachers in her attempts to interpret the Torah. And her gender clearly works against her: She is eligible for a prestigious prize at her school, but is told it cannot be awarded to a girl.

Goodrich puts this very well: "Like Asher Lev, [Ilana] Davita is an unusually gifted person who, as the story develops, struggles to spread her wings within the strict Hasidic community. It rewards some parts of who she is (her love for learning, tradition, community), but not others (her femininity, her imagination and independent thinking). The way Chaim Potok writes about orthodox Judaism always makes it appealing to me. There’s something very attractive about the tradition and structure and ritual and belonging of it. But he writes honestly, showing how its rigidness creates the possibility of legalism, exclusiveness, fanaticism, and even hypocrisy."

*_*_*

The harp of the title is a door harp. This is a hollow wooden sound box, strung with metal strings that are tuned to a chord. Whenever the door is opened or closed, the strings are struck by little balls, randomly creating a series of gentle, harmonious sounds.

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Ilana's family frequently move house when she is small (they're short of money, and not every environment is sympathetic to their hosting of communist meetings). But two items always accompany them: A picture of three horses on a beach, and a door harp, which Ilana loves.

There's lots of symbolism at play here. Davita's Harp recalls the harp of the biblical David, whose playing helped to calm souls. There are many souls who need calming here (Jakob Daw, Channah, and Ilana herself all suffer bouts of mental illness).

As the door harp records entries and exits, all that passes through that entry-way, from politics to passions, strikes a chord with Ilana too.

And this analogy is taken further: Jakob Daw says that a writer "is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, finely tuned to the dark contradictions of life". Potok endorses that idea: "It's through the writer that the world and its winds are heard. But, remember that the harp is an instrument and the winds that go through it, that hit it, are not the same as the music or winds that come from it. Transformations take place as a result of the contact with the harp. The harp is capable of angelic music and also capable of some very heavy strumming. And I think it's the fundamental responsibility of a writer to deal with both the angelic and the darkness."

The door harp also becomes part of Davita's symbolic world. Nesting in the harp is a tiny bird, Jakob tells Davita in one of the stories he relates to the young girl. This bird has "wandered in search of the source of the world's music and finds in the harp a music of innocence. Joining it in the harp, Davita imagines, is another bird, this one from Picasso's painting, Guernica... The harp, with its imaginary birds, is the one constant in Davita's troubled life as she searches for meaning and sustenance."

Eloquent though the symbol of the door harp is, I found it overused, so that reference to it becomes almost a matter of routine, rather than a way of underlining the particular importance of a scene or transition.

*_*_*

Alongside the memorable characters, there is some beautiful description in this novel. Especially powerful are the scenes at Sea Gate, where a couple of our families sometimes rent beach-side cottages.

And Potok is good at conveying the looming quality of the era, with political conflict and uncertainty always waiting in the wings.

I took issue with two elements, though. The first is Channah's story arc. After much misery, mourning, and mental illness, she marries Ezra Dinn, the strict Hasidic Jew who would happily have married her earlier in life had she not been an irreligious communist...

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My issue is that there's way too short a time between Channah's refusal even to go to the Passover festival (because "there are too many memories of Sedorim when my father was with the rebbe instead of being with us") and her willingness to change completely, and adopt all the rituals of a strict Jewish household in order to comply with the faith of Ezra and his son, David.

Admittedly, the non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler played a pivotal role in torpedoing her faith in communism. She feels viscerally let down, and angrily explains to her comrades that Russia can no longer be seen as the leader of world communism. After that, she grows visibly older, Ilana tells us. She has a kind of breakdown, and ends up staying with Aunt Sarah, who seems to play a role in softening her heart somewhat towards religion in general. There's also a degree of compromise visible when her local Jewish congregation find a work-around to allow her to say Kaddish for Jakob Daw (even if it involves her hiding away behind a rigged-up screen).

But still, there's a lot of history to be undone, and a lot of animosity to be unravelled, and it seems a little implausible to me that such a reversal can be completed so soon.

Ilana says: "I marveled at my mother. She seemed so easily to have become once again an observant Jew... She had two pasts now... 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." So maybe we're SUPPOSED to think that this change was a bit quick, and there might be trouble ahead in the future...

Another criticism is that Potok, towards the end of the book, gets too involved in a kind of coming-of-age narrative for Ilana and David. I found the developing-bodies tropes a little hackneyed, and this whole narrative detour unnecessary. It's all much less interesting than Ilana's religious journey.

All in all, though, a very good reading experience, and an encouragement to read more about Judaism.