In the Beginning by Chaim Potok

First published: 1975

Type of plot: Impressionistic memoir

Time of work: Primarily the 1920’s to the 1940’s

Locale: New York City

Principal Characters:

• David Lurie, the narrator
• Max Lurie, his father
• Ruth Lurie, his mother
• Alex Lurie, his younger brother
• Saul, his cousin
• Shmuel Bader, a successful businessman and David’s private Bible teacher
• Rav Tuvya Sharfman, David’s yeshiva instructor

The Novel

In the Beginning is a journey into the heart of an Orthodox Jewish family, Polish immigrants who have settled in the Bronx. It is the reminiscence of David Lurie, now a teacher, then a young boy struggling to piece together the meaning of his life in the midst of dark and troubling visions. When the novel opens, David is approaching six years of age; at its close, he is setting off for graduate study at the University of Chicago.

David is a sickly child, his frequent fevers the result of an undiagnosed deviated septum sustained in a fall with his mother, who was bringing him home from the hospital after his birth. Mishaps continue to plague his early childhood, and one day he accidentally runs over the hand of Eddie Kulanski, one of the neighborhood boys, with his tricycle. Eddie, a violently anti-Semitic bully, uses the incident as a pretext to threaten and torment David, who thus experiences at first hand the reality of the irrational hatred that even then was preparing the way for the Holocaust. Throughout his childhood, David is haunted by his impotence against the goyim in his neighborhood and those in Poland whose pogroms had so angered his father, Max Lurie. In fever dreams, David imagines the Golem of Prague, a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, able to subdue all those who persecute the Jews.

David’s earliest memories involve meetings of the Am Kedoshim (Holy Nation) Society, founded by his father. Successful in real estate, Max Lurie is working with fellow Jews to bring relatives and friends to the United States to escape the bloodshed in Poland. Max is no passive victim; in his homeland he had organized the Lemburg Jews to defend themselves, and when he saw that the situation there was hopeless, he led a group which emigrated to the United States.

David’s early life centers on Shabbat, Sabbath observances. David is a prodigy, asking uncomfortable questions about adult life and catching the “whispers and sighs and glances and the often barely discernible gestures that are the real message carriers in our noisy world.” Soon he begins studies at the yeshiva with his older cousin Saul, and soon his father is confronted with the stock-market crash.

Max Lurie’s business fails during the Depression, the Am Kedoshim Society is bankrupt, and Max plunges into deep despair. Eventually the Luries move to smaller quarters, and Max begins to develop a new trade of watch repair. David remembers his frail mother, writing letters to her family remaining in Poland, nursing her husband, reading to David in German, fearful.

David studies Torah, the first five books of Moses, with Mr. Shmuel Bader.

I had never been taught Bible that way in school. For my teacher, the words of the Bible . . . were simply there. Our task was to understand, to memorize, and to give back what we had learned. When Mr. Bader was done with that page it quivered and resonated with life.

Max Lurie’s new business prospers, and the family moves to a larger apartment house. In the midst of dark rumors of Jewish deaths in Adolf Hitler’s Germany, David’s time is occupied with intense study of the strange books given to him by a superstitious neighbor, Mrs. Horowitz, now long dead. The books, which belonged to her father, are in German; they are works of biblical criticism that study not a seamless Torah with one (divine) author but rather a collection of writings from many sources.

After completing his undergraduate work at the yeshiva, David chooses secular Bible study at the University of Chicago. His younger brother, Alex, explores modern novels and the works of Sigmund Freud. The grief of David’s father, who fears that his sons are becoming traitors to Orthodoxy, is put into perspective in the novel’s visionary conclusion, which takes place years later, on a visit to the site of the Bergen-Belsen death camp. There, David has an imaginary conversation with the spirit of his namesake, Max’s brother, killed in a pogrom. They are joined by the spirit of David’s father, also dead now, and father and son are reassured that there has been neither failure nor betrayal: From the goyim, Jews must draw culture to enrich the roots of Orthodoxy. It is not rage, says the ghost, but a deep penetration of that evil culture that will in the end transform it.

The Characters

The characters are drawn with broad strokes, as befits a story much of which is recounted from the point of view of a boy. Although first-person narrator David Lurie is a mature young man by the time the book ends, the bulk of the narrative centers on his boyhood and adolescence, and Potok frequently exploits the dramatic irony occasioned by youthful lack of knowledge.

To the young David, his father, Max Lurie, is a larger-than-life figure, a pillar of strength—at least until the Crash of 1929, which ruins him. Even this loss, however, does not permanently break his spirit. A revisionist Orthodox Jew, he fought against the Red Cossacks who invaded Poland in 1920. When his brother David died in a pogrom, Max married David’s widow, Ruth, in accordance with the Law of Moses. Max is a resourceful provider for his family, burdened always with the belief that the tradition must be preserved. Despite fits of anger at the pogroms and at his son David’s choice of studies, Max tries to recognize that there is another way besides rage:

You want to fight the goyim with words? All right. Good. Fight them with words. My little brother would not have been troubled too much to see you reading German books if you were thinking to use them as weapons. I will fight them with guns.

David is a counterpoint to his father’s strength. A brilliant, precocious youth, David is hounded by childhood accidents and recurring illnesses, bullied by bigger, stronger boys, haunted by extraordinarily vivid nightmares. Yet David is less an individual and more a means for the author to exemplify the confrontation of Orthodox Judaism with anti-Semitism and secular culture. He is an ideal. He is simply too good—seemingly free, for example, of sexual desire. It is through him that Potok presents a reconciliation of the demands of Orthodoxy with those of modern gentile culture.

Aiding in that task are Mr. Bader and Rav Sharfman. Shmuel Bader’s mysterious business in Europe often keeps him away from tutoring David, yet his intellectual influence is profound on the boy. At an early point, Bader tells David that he does not hate goyim, because he was fortunate to be in the United States during World War I. Yet Bader feels guilty of his good fortune and does what he can to help Max in the Am Kedoshim Society. Bader seems worldly-wise, yet he remains a practicing Jew.

The raspy-voiced Rav Sharfman encourages David to study the Bible texts. He “deliberately sought to make room for the intellectually brave to chart their own lives.” He tells David that it is not a crime to argue against the revered Jewish commentators.

David’s mother, Ruth Lurie, uses words in a different way. She is superstitious and often repeats a charm that was used by Mrs. Horowitz to ensure David’s health. She is protective of her two children when Max is angry at them, yet she takes a kind of dark joy in their inquisitiveness. David’s character is much like that of her dead husband. Ruth suffers much—Max’s breakdown after the Crash, her parents’ refusal to resettle in America, the growing tension between Orthodoxy and David’s awakening mind— and she is often withdrawn.

If David represents Potok’s spiritual quest, Alex is the author’s aesthetic side. Alex is enthralled with English novels and wants to become a teacher of English literature. Alex is moved to tears by Oliver Twist. Potok, during his own high school days, devoured the works of not only Charles Dickens but also William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

David’s cousin Saul is a friend and ally until it is clear that David will be pursuing secular studies. Saul reminds David that it is the Torah of Moses he will be studying and writing about. To deny that authorship is to deny the Torah and Orthodoxy itself. In their early years, Saul had been an older and wiser guide for David, but now, like Vergil guiding Dante, here was a new world, a new way of seeing things, that Saul could not enter.

Critical Context

In the Beginning was Potok’s fourth novel; in it, he sought to recapture his earliest memories and define his struggle against his strict Orthodox upbringing (which he has called essentially Hasidic without the outward trappings). All of Potok’s novels are efforts to portray the lives of people precious to him, and in the present work, an air of kindliness, of sympathy, is pervasive. At the same time, however, the novel reflects Potok’s traumatic break with the subculture in which he was reared—a break he made in 1950, when, for his rabbinical studies, he opted for Conservative Judaism, with its openness to secular, historical study of biblical texts.

With his third novel, My Name Is Asher Lev (1972), Potok had mastered his craft, moving beyond the stylistic infelicities that marred his enormously successful first novel, The Chosen (1967), and its sequel, The Promise (1969). In the Beginning marked a further advance in craftmanship. A best-seller, like its predecessors, it was also by far his most complex book to date.

While it is undeniable that Potok has grown as a novelist, it is also true that there is a remarkable consistency to his work; this is both a strength and a weakness. Like My Name Is Asher Lev and a later novel, Davita’s Harp (1985), In the Beginning centers on the childhood and adolescence of a gifted, precocious first-person narrator; like those two works and The Book of Lights (1981), a third-person narrative based on Potok’s experiences as an army chaplain in Korea, In the Beginning is structured poetically, built around a pattern of recurring images. Finally, like all of Potok’s novels, In the Beginning deals with what he has called “the problem of faith in a secular world.”

Bibliography

Hock, Zarina Manawwar. “Authority and Multiculturalism: Reflections by Chaim Potok.” Language Arts 72 (April, 1995): 4. Hock discusses Potok’s use of multicultural themes to expose attitudes toward social issues. She demonstrates how his fiction reflects the battle between traditional and new sources of conduct.

Potok, Chaim. “The Invisible Map of Meaning: A Writer’s Confrontations.” Tri-Quarterly 84 (Spring, 1992): 17-45. Potok discusses the major theme that runs throughout his works, that of cultural conflict and the influence this conflict has on the direction of an individual life. Potok describes his first encounter with mainstream Western literature and shows how this experience shaped his subsequent writing, including In the Beginning.

Potok, Chaim. Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews. New York: Fawcett Books, 1990. Potok’s compelling history of the Jews recreates historical events and explores the many facets of Jewish life through the ages. Although this work does not address Potok’s fiction, it does provide insight into Potok’s ethnic heritage which has a direct bearing on his writing.

Walden, Daniel, ed. The World of Chaim Potok. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. This rich resource on the writing of Chaim Potok features critical essays, as well as reviews and a bibliographic essay. It does not directly discuss In the Beginning but provides valuable insight into Potok’s fiction that can be extended to the entire body of his work.