Two Worlds by David Daiches
"Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood" by David Daiches is a memoir that recounts the author's formative years growing up in a Jewish family in Edinburgh. The narrative spans from Daiches’ early childhood at six years old to his adulthood at twenty-six, culminating in the period surrounding his father's death. It provides insight into his experiences at home and school, depicting his relationships with family members and the cultural tensions he navigated between his Jewish heritage and broader societal influences. Through eight focused chapters, Daiches reflects on significant events, such as family vacations and his father's legal battles, which shaped his identity.
The memoir is noted for its literary quality and humor, and while it is rooted in Daiches' specific identity as a Jewish scholar, it touches on universal themes of belonging and self-discovery. The struggles of navigating dual worlds resonate with broader experiences of conflict between personal aspirations and familial expectations. This exploration of identity makes "Two Worlds" relevant to anyone grappling with similar issues, transcending its autobiographical context to offer insights into the human experience of growth and self-definition.
Subject Terms
Two Worlds by David Daiches
First published: 1956
Type of work: Memoir/autobiography
Time of work: 1919-1944
Locale: Edinburgh and Fife, Scotland
Principal Personages:
David Daiches , a developing writer, later a biblical-literary scholar, teacher, and diplomatSalis Daiches , his father, a rabbinical leader in EdinburghFlora Daiches (nee Levin) , his motherLionel Daiches , his elder brotherSylvia , andBeryl , his sistersIsrael Daiches , his grandfather, a rabbi in Leeds
Form and Content
In the summer of 1937, having found his father’s religious-secular synthesis personally untenable, David Daiches, son of Salis Daiches, a leading rabbi in Edinburgh, departed from a tradition that had produced an unbroken line of Daiches rabbis from the time of the Middle Ages. He resigned his fellowship at Balliol College, University of Oxford, where he had been writing his doctoral dissertation on English translations of the Hebrew Bible; he accepted an academic position at the University of Chicago so that back in Edinburgh his father “would not feel embarrassed,” and he was married to his beloved Isobel Mackay.
By the late 1980’s, Daiches had written and edited more than twenty-five books and taught as a tenured and visiting professor at more than fifteen major universities, including Cornell University and the University of Cambridge. His books include The Novel and the Modern World (1939), Poetry and the Modern World: A Study of Poetry in England Between 1900 and 1939 (1940), Virginia Woolf (1942), Robert Louis Stevenson (1947), A Study of Literature for Readers and Critics (1948), Robert Burns (1950), Milton (1957), The Present Age After 1920 (1958), A Critical History of English Literature (1960), Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction (1971), Sir Walter Scott and His World (1971), and God and the Poets (1984).
Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood, one of three autobiographical works, is best described as a memoir, since it deals exclusively with a life segment so influenced by Daiches’ father. Daiches first reveals himself as a lonely six-year-old and ends as a mature adult twenty-six years later, at the time of his father’s death. In the second work, A Third World (1971), Daiches describes his life in the United States: at the University of Chicago, at Cornell, and at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. The third work, Was: A Pastime from Time Past (1975), is more experimental in style than the two previous books and may be an attempt to reconcile differences for a mature synthesis.
Two Worlds is relatively short, 152 pages, and carefully focused. In eight chapters Daiches describes his life as a child about to enter Watson’s Boys’ College; his experiences at school and at home with his family—brother, sisters, mother, father, and paternal grandparents; his family vacations; his father’s great legal battle and triumph against a rabbinical impostor; and the resolution Daiches achieved of conflicts generated by his life in two worlds.
Critical Context
The reviewers who discussed Two Worlds in 1956, the year of its American publication, primarily considered the specific identity of the author. David Daiches was a distinguished scholar, writer, and university lecturer descended from a long line of Orthodox Jewish rabbis. George Adelman, reviewing the memoir for Library Journal, Saul Bellow, writing for Saturday Review, Milton Hindus, writing for Chicago Sunday Tribune, and several others saw the book as one written by a master of language and literature, humorous and appealing, a Jewish story of a memorable father by his son.
What seems to have been ignored is the implicit but universal struggle of the son. In that sense, the true story has much broader appeal and wider relevance. Twelve years after the first American publication of Two Worlds, William G. Perry, Jr., published Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years (1968), in which he discussed results of interviewing large groups of students at Harvard University during their undergraduate years. He concluded that normal development involves a questioning and reassessment of family and community values and a final definition of oneself related to an informed choice of vocation. In the same year, Erik H. Erikson first published Identity, Youth, and Crisis (1968) and confirmed many of Perry’s conclusions about adolescent development.
Stories of such quests usually begin with the hero’s leaving home to test his powers in the larger world. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce strikes a familiar note when his hero, Stephen Dedalus, identifies himself by placing his name at the top of a list of locations. The locations start with Stephen’s presence in his schoolroom class in chemical “elements” and the list continues, suggesting widening concentric circles, so that, finally, “the world” is followed by the ultimate in one’s address, “the universe.” When Stephen leaves home, he leaves his mother, his father, his siblings, Catholicism, and Ireland, calling on an adoptive father, Daedalus, to help him. Perhaps he may return after a broader perspective helps him clearly sort out who he is. This biographical novel was first written as Stephen Hero in 1903.
Ralph Ellison’s hero in Invisible Man (1947) is forced to search actively for a meaningful identity in order to be perceived as a man. The conflicts are infinitely complex and symbolic in this novel of growing up, but they certainly involve a testing of worlds and a quest for identity.
If Two Worlds is significant, it is so at least partly because the youthful agony of divided loyalties makes the story vital. The conflict between childhood dreams and parental hopes, between personal needs and real or imagined family expectations, is not new. The search for identity, if new in any respect, is merely newly recognized.
Bibliography
Adelman, George. Review in Library Journal. LXXXI (February 1, 1956), p. 436.
Bellow, Saul. Review in Saturday Review. XXXIX (March 24, 1956), p. 19.
Hindus, Milton. Review in Chicago Sunday Tribune. April 8, 1956, p. 9.
The New Yorker. Review. XXXII (March 24, 1956), p. 151.
Russell, Francis. Review in The Christian Science Monitor. April 30, 1956, p. 3.