19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
more good stuff from chaim potok, October 28, 2001
By A Customer
This book is made up of three novellas that follow the life of Ilana Davita, who was first introduced as a child in Potok's novel Davita's Harp. Davita's sympathetic and intuitive nature lead her to act as a sort of muse, encouraging several men who have been through unspeakably painful events to artfully express their stories. I'll admit that I love everything Potok writes, but in my opinion this book is great. Perhaps not quite up to the level of The Chosen or My Name is Asher Lev, but certainly as good as The Book of Lights and In the Beginning, and certainly worth buying and reading immediately. Like everything of Potok's, it's a captivating read- I got through it in just over a day and highly recommend it.
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Trilogy, December 30, 2001
This is the first work of Mr. Chaim Potok's that I have read. He has produced a prodigious library of work in fiction, non-fiction, and children's stories. It is for others to judge this work as it relates to the body of his efforts, however as a first reading experience I very much enjoyed it.
"Old Men At Midnight", is a loosely connected series of three stories that are related through the presence of one common character. In the first novella, "The Ark Builder", Ilana teaches English to a young man who not only survived the Holocaust; he was the only person to survive from his village. While she teaches him a new language of words, he also shares his experiences silently with his tutor's young sister via the sharing of drawings they exchange. The young girl's pictures are full of color, while the young man's depict deep and very painful memories. He appears to share what he cannot speak of with a peer via images with a child too young to understand the horror of his youth.
The second tale is, "The War Doctor". This in many ways is the most disturbing story. It comes across as a familiar history lesson at first, however once Ilana, who is now a graduate student, has this man place his life as a NKVD officer on paper, he becomes as much a monster as the man he served without question until fear for his own life caused him to run away. Stalin's Russia is no less familiar that Hitler's Germany, however Mr. Potok finds a manner to bring across the near insanity that is required for a person to do the bidding of a monster like Stalin. For unlike Hitler, Stalin spread his death for decades. He also depicts a man who partitions what he believes he was involved in; versus the atrocities he believes he took no hand in. The story culminates in the historically factual, paranoid witch-hunt Stalin invented against, "The Doctors", as he neared the end of his run as Satan.
The final story is arguably the most interesting. Ilana is now an acclaimed author who moves next to a professor who is struggling with his memoirs. In this final story, "The Trope Teacher", the perceptions of this aged man, what he sees and what he believes he sees are in constant motion. Ilana acts at times like a muse, and at other moments a harsh task master, while in the background the professor's wife lies in bed awaiting an, "unnatural death", that became another form of indiscriminate evil in the late 20th Century.
There are all manner of authors and books to experience. You will have a task finding a more worthwhile pen to read.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Masterful Storytelling, March 3, 2002
As always, Chaim Potok is the master of storytelling. The three novellas are connected through Davita (of "Davita's Harp). The "Ark Builder" is a sensational story that captures the emotions of a young survivor of the Holocaust. The second story concerns an ex-KGB officer and professional tormentor whose position was to extract confessions from people, both the guilty and innocent. Finally, we see a man facing his own mortality and his wife's impending death from AIDs. This is stortelling at its best from the master. Perhaps the best thing about Potok is his ability to write for all ages.
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