Customer Reviews

In The Beginning

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Here I am, a conservative Christian lawyer in a small town in Michigan, writing about a Hasidic-born Jewish writer. Seems incongruous, and yet...

My one and only meeting with Dr. Potok occurred in 1975, while I was one of two *goyim* attending Jacob Hiatt Institute in Jerusalem, a study center maintained by Brandeis University. I was fascinated by his talk, and went out and bought "My Name is Asher Lev" and devoured it. Interestingly, Dr. Potok's visit coincided with classes on Biblical History taught by Dr. Chaim Tadmor from Hebrew U - which interested me so much in scientific Biblical criticism that I added a religion major when I got back to my college, and immersed myself in that discipline.

"In the Beginning" is, in my estimation, probably the most honest of Dr. Potok's books. It holds particular synchronicity for me, having been published in 1975, the same year that I began to learn about its core issues and the same year that I met him. The main character, David Lurie, is forced to confront both his growing awareness of scientific Biblical criticism, and its value, and the insistence of the world around him that he is rejecting all that they hold dear. He is given a choice between truth and isolation, or the society of those he holds dear and ignoring that truth. In the end, Dr. Potok's picture of "watering the roots" of religious faith is a powerful image, especially for someone who understands exactly what the book is talking about.

The book is longer than the three preceding it, and more complex; but it's issues are more easily understood by even a non-Jewish audience. It is a valuable and significant read; and one in which I gradually understood that Potok, like so many others, actually writes for the "dysfunctional" among us, those who feel isolated by family issues, substance abuse or tragedy, and yet somehow feel that we have some belief, talent or substance that we can say the world does not recognize, but that allows us to hold off the feeling of insignificance - that the more we are opposed, the more we think we are actually special. In the hands of demagogues or opportunists, this results in conspiracy theories, dreck like "Chariots of the Gods", or even well-written and attractive, yet completely fictional and inaccurate, stuff like "The Da Vinci Code." In the hands of Ann Coulter or Ted Rall, this encourages paranoid isolation from rational discourse on both the left and the right. In the hands of Potok, this is none of the above, but a compelling examination of the human spirit.

This book gave me new insight into the lives of Talmud Scholars, their deep and detailed exploration of the oldest, yet most vital book of human history. Behind the setting of David Lurie's genius, I found myself wondering why gentile Christians did not ask for Talmud scholars as "bible study" teachers. Their training in asking and answering the mystery questions is a 100 times better developed in their first years, than our ministers find in seminaries! As I see it, David's quest for answers in the light of present day knowledge was only the beginning to answering the ignorance or incompetence of my gentile Christian teachers. Could not put this book down!! I recommend it to all.

This is a very good book, like most of Potok's other works, it is centered around a Jewish adolescent,(orthodox, of course) coming of age and learning how to interact with his parents.

This book was, in some ways, a departure from Potok's earlier works about Hasidism. This takes place before THE CHOSEN, and MY NAME IS ASHER LEV, and has barely any mention of the "pious ones", save for the character's father voicing his distaste for them.

This is the story of every typical jewish kid in NYC in the between-war-years, (with the exception of the constant illness this caracter is afflicted with) and for that, it is very successful.

Reading this, for me, was invaluable in doing genealogy research on my family. This helped me get in the "mindset of the time". My family, like the family of the main character, had come over, had children, and then watched their relatives get killed in Europe, and this gave me a very good sense of what it was like, from the American viewpoint.

It showed how the Americanized Jews dealt with the problems in Palestine, how Jews and gentiles interacted, all the while with Henry Ford and Father Couglin taking up arms against them [the Jews]. It also showed how they responded to the early Nazism in 1930s Germany, and then what happened when they learned the awful truth.

Like most of Potok's main characters, this one is involved in Torah and Talmudic study, so non-jews and secular ones, BEWARE: YOU MIGHT HAVE TO LOOK SOMETHING UP! (oh, the horror!)

But, despite whatever minor issues one might have with this book, it succeeds in the end, and it is a very compelling story.

Chaim Potok often writes about the conflicts of pursuing your dreams when everyone else is trying to derail your efforts. Although Chaim Potok revisits this theme in several of his books, he has something new to say each time. Each story he crafts makes you feel you actually know these characters even though his characters may come from a culture totally alien to the reader. Chaim Potok writes about the Jewish people in such a way that we are reminded that we have more things in common with each other than differences. I keep talking about all this mumbo jumbo when I should just say this is among Chaim Potok's best stories. It ranks right up there with "My Name is Asher Lev."

Among Potok's fantastic novels, this one stands above the rest in it's moving intellectual and emotional sincerity and honesty. In a way it is unfortunate that this book was not his debute novel instead of The Chosen, since the greatness of this book seems to get lost behind his more well known titles like My Name Is Asher Lev.

Perhaps it is fitting that I should love so much his most obscure title considering this book's power is in the understanding Potok has of the quiet genius no one seems to understand, yet who struggles so desparately to try to understand the world and his place in it. His brilliance brings him suffering. At the climactic confrontation between David and his father, I sobbed. You just do not know unless you live it. How many quiet geniuses are there to identify--and fall in love--with this book?

And perhaps it is this identification and the fact that his novel's are so autobiographical (Potok did indeed "live it") that I felt such a profound loss at Potok's death on July 23, 2002. For as long as I am able to read, for as long as there are printed pages I will love him through his books. Thank you, Dr. Potok, so much for Ilana Davita, for Asher Lev, for Danny and Reuven, but thank you especially for David Lurie. He has shown me a beginning. . .

Never before have I ever read something so influential, so vividly drawn before me. I am a huge fan of Potok, and after reading Asher, Promise, Chosen, and Davita, this obscure novel that barely comes up in Borders search is my favorite. It is a shame to see it is widely ignored.

Potok is a genious, and one can understand this brilliant man in this book. He is able to create a person, a character, that seems life like. You want to jump in the book to hug him, to stop him, or to help him. It is an impossible book to put down, and by far the best book I have ever read. He is the best author I have ever read.

I recommend this book to everyone. Everyone could use a little of Danny in their lives.

I've never encountered a novel structured exactly like this one. The details given in the first 4/5ths of its length led a reader to believe In The Beginning was a story about a brilliant young Jewish boy and his family, their life in America, where the boy and his brother where born to recent Polish emigrants, and of the determined struggle this family undertakes, not only to establish their lives in the United States, but to honorably aid numerous Jewish families who wish to leave Poland and settle in New York. As the story of this family, the novel served a detailed, well-written tale that gave terrific insights into the psyche and values of east-European Jews in the early twentieth-century. The family thrives in the US in the prosperous 1920's, though the pre-school-age David is sadistically bullied by anti-Semitic local boys, and he lives to piece together the whispered secrets of his father's conduct as a one-time militant activist among Jews in the "old country." We follow this family into the Great Depression, when its fortunes declined, into World War Two, where its newly-discovered prosperity is scant comfort as its members learn of the Nazis' cruelty to family and acquaintances they left behind in Europe.

However, like a magician dealing out a slight of hand trick, Chaim Potok revealed the true story only at the very end of In The Beginning---and all else that came before this point was merely establishing the stage for the final act and a statement he wished to make on the subject of faith, reason, and evidence. The central character, David Lurie, due to his intellectual brilliance the shining star of his local school, stuns his family, friends, and classmates, by laying aside his Orthodox upbringing and upon college graduation becoming a secular Biblical scholar. Lurie announces his newfound conviction that the Torah was not given by G-d to Moses on Sinai, but was authored by numerous Jews across an indefinite time period, long after Moses' death. To Lurie's parents this is an act of unmitigated treason to all that is holy and life-sustaining in their world. That their much-loved eldest son, their pride and great hope, should plan to write skeptical books on this topic, and thereby "sin by making others sin" is crushing to them one and all. And only at the extreme conclusion of this 430 page novel is this revealed when beforehand a straightforward plot about Jews reacting to a changing world was what we had been lulled into expecting. The earlier tale of David's health struggles, his father's rise and fall, the immigration movement, and even at the end the horrors of Nazi Germany, all of that I found was Potok's subterfuge to sneak in an ending so different from what the deliberately-paced novel seemed to prepare us for that this work almost deserves to be spoken of as having some sort of twist at its shocking ending.

As always, Potok wrote well here and his characters and the setting were magnificently accomplished, but I was left feeling I had read two different books, one a family tale, the other a dissertation on modern Talmudic scholarship. I also strongly felt that the characters at the end, while bearing the same names they had 300 pages earlier, were not exactly the same ones I had been reading about as they advanced thru twenty harsh years in their lives. I also have read that this book is slightly autobiographical, so that deserves to be pointed out. This is a good book but it is slow-moving and spends much of its time inside David's head and the pseudo fantasy world which he inhabits, so be prepared for that. I also wish Potok had written a sequel, as he did with The Chosen. I ended up saying, "Yes, and what happens next?" Sadly, we'll never know...

Beautiful, well crafted novel about a young man discovering himself as an individual separate from his father, his teachings, and his family. As in "The Chosen." Potok is a master at making the reader excited about learning for its own sake. Unlike "The Chosen", this is a far slower, deeper, and ultimatly moving story. Prepare yourself for the slow pace, but jump in. It's worth it.

I too have read the more well known books of Potok. I picked up this one at a used book sale. This book is somewhat different from the others in that it it goes deeply into one characte's thoughts and emotions. One could label the book slow, but I didn't find it that way. I found the story of David Lurie's mother to be by far the most painful to read. As a reader, we are given only bits and pieces of this woman's very broken heart. Perhaps it's a sign of a wonderful writer that every character in this book seemed to warrant a book of his or her own.

This is a beautiful story; it is my very favourite book. I love it with all my heart.