Davita's Harp
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Davita's Harp is a novel by Chaim Potok, published in 1985. It is the only one of Potok's novels to feature a female protagonist.
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[edit] Plot Summary
In New York City of the 1930s, Ilana Davita Chandal is the child of a mixed marriage: a Polish Jewish immigrant mother and a Christian father from an old and wealthy New England family. Both of her parents are haunted by bitter and violent memories from their youths, and both have, in consequence, turned their backs on their pasts in order to become active members of the Communist Party. Ilana's early childhood is fraught with mystery and struggle as the neighbors eye the Chandal family with suspicion. When Michael Chandal, already wounded once in the Spanish Civil War, returns to Spain, Ilana begins to look for answers at the local synagogue and in friendship with observant Jews, including her neighbor Ruthie Helfman and her distant cousin, David Dinn. Michael Chandal is killed in Spain, at Guernica, and Ilana and her mother both struggle to cope with their grief. They are often at odds with each other as Ilana becomes more and more interested in traditional Judaism-- even asserting her right to say kaddish for her non-Jewish father-- while Anne Chandal devotes herself to the Party and becomes involved in a new relationship with a young Communist historian, Charles Carter. When Stalin signs a non-aggression pact with Hitler, Anne at last sees the light, leaves the Party, and breaks off her engagement to Carter. Ultimately Anne returns-- though not with her daughter's fervor-- to religious observance and marries her cousin Ezra Dinn, whom she had rejected many years before. Ilana becomes a star student at her Jewish day school. She is devastated when she is unjustly denied an academic award on account of her gender, but she remains determined to make her mark on the world.
A subplot involves the mystical European Jewish writer Jakob Daw, another former suitor of Anne Chandal. He is deported from the United States against his will-- and in spite of the best efforts of his lawyer, Ezra Dinn-- and dies in Europe soon afterwards. Anne Chandal, now Dinn, unconventionally decides to say kaddish for her old friend, even though she is a woman and women did not say kaddish in Orthodox synagogues in the 1940s.
[edit] Characters in Davita's Harp
Ilana Davita Chandal (later Dinn) - an intelligent young girl growing up in New York City in the 1930s and early 1940s
Anne "Channah" Chandal (later Dinn) - Ilana's mother, a Communist, later a social worker
Michael Chandal - Ilana's charismatic father, a journalist and a Communist, who is killed in the Spanish Civil War
Sarah Chandal - Ilana's paternal aunt, a nun and a nurse who sometimes works in war zones
Jakob Daw - a writer who is a close friend of the Chandals
Ezra Dinn - an immigration lawyer and observant Jew who is a cousin of Anne Chandal (and hoped to marry her)
David Dinn - Ezra Dinn's sweet, bookish son, who is the same age as Ilana, he is very smart for his age
Ruthie Helfman - a friend of Ilana's
Mr. Helfman - Ruthie's father; headmaster and Bible teacher at the school that Ilana, David, and Ruthie attend
Charles Carter - a Communist history professor who courts Anne Chandal
Rachel Dinn - daughter of Ezra and Channah Dinn
[edit] Criticism and Themes
In a public lecture, Chaim Potok stated that, " Davita's Harp is a confrontation between two fundamentalisms. . . the secular fundamentalism represented by Marxism, Stalinism, and communism, and the religious fundamentalism of the extreme right in my own [Jewish] tradition, and how those two fundamentalisms deeply hurt individuals profoundly committed to them, and what those individuals do in the wake of that pain.[1]
A major theme of Davita's Harp is the manner in which world events intersect with and shape individual lives. So, for example, Michael Chandal's experiences at Centralia[disambiguation needed] change his life course and inspire him to become a Communist; Michael is killed while reporting on the Spanish Civil War, sending his wife and daughter into a tailspin; and Stalin's pact with Hitler ends Anne Chandal and Charles Carter's romance.
Another theme of this work is the role of women in the Jewish community. Potok highlights several types of suffering specific to women: their vulnerability to rape; the Orthodox European Jewish community's discomfort with and rejection of survivors of rape; the isolation and heavy burden of financial responsibility placed on shtetl women whose husbands spend much of their time away from home, in yeshiva; and girls' failure to get the academic recognition they deserve. The scene late in the book in which Ilana is passed over for an academic award she has undoubtedly earned was loosely based on the experiences of Potok's wife, Adena Potok. [2]
[edit] Sequels
Potok may have planned a sequel to Davita's Harp, but he never wrote it.[3] Ilana Dinn reappears in the collection Old Men at Midnight.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Chaim Potok, March 20, 1986. Lecture at the Southern Adventist University, Collegedale, Tennessee. Quoted in http://www.lasierra.edu/~ballen/potok/Teachers.davita.html
- ^ Chaim Potok, in an interview with Barry Vogel, February 1997. Quoted on http://www.lasierra.edu/%7Eballen/potok/Potok.faqs.html#Davita
- ^ Chaim Potok, personal communication to Andy S., unknown date. Cited on http://www.lasierra.edu/%7Eballen/potok/Potok.faqs.html#Davita
