Music in the Darkness

AT FIRST the phrase "historical novel" sounds like a contradiction in terms. Can a writer really combine in one book events of far-reaching importance with a close-up look at a few unique characters and still produce a viable piece of fictions. The problem appears to be one of scale. To most history considers significant occurrences, often affecting millions of people while fiction focuses on the intricate subtleties of individual lives.

Characters who play out then lives against the backdrop of historical watersheds too often are overshadowed by the events themselves. Authors in fall into the trap of relving too much on wars revolts and liberations to evoke responses from readers and leave their characters two-dimensional and incomplete.

Hats off, though to Chaim Potok. Davita's Harp, the author's sixth novel and the first narrated by a woman, successfully balances the stuff of newspapers with the stuff of diaries. Here, the key events of the 1930s--the Depression, the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of the Second World War--intersect with, indeed, shape, the life of an irresistible young girl in an altogether fine, albeit sentimental, book. Potok, the author of The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev, triumphs where so many before him have failed, by writing a historical novel about people, not events.

The harp referred to in the title belongs to Ilana Davita Chandal, the precocious daughter of parents active in communist causes in New York City back in the days when political idealism consoled the victims of economic depression. Ilana'a immigrant mother, Anne, descends from orthodox eastern European Jews. Her fervent embrace of Marxism stems from a bitter disillusionment with religion--forever associated with a cold father more interested in following holy men than his family--and from her husband, Michael. The scion of a wealthy New England family, Michael Chandal abandoned riches for rags when, as a youth, he witnessed the murder of union organizers by businessmen. The two meet in New York and pledge themselves to the building of a better world as Michael works as a journalist for a left-wing paper and Anne does social work.

Ilana's earliest memories are of Party meetings in their house and the countless times the family has to move because landlords will tolerate neither their politics nor their gatherings. No matter where they live, though, the Chandals hang a small wooden harp on the entrance door that emits a sound with every visitor. It seems that all that passes through the door the politics the passions, play on the impressionable Ilana, too. Potok has written a Bildangstoman, a portrait of the artist as a young girl whose watchful eyes and curious mind set upon the whirlwind times and enigmatic people at surround her.

ILANA'S FORMATIVE YEARS are a bazaar of colorful people and firmly-held yet conflicting beliefs. The politics of her parents and their fellow traveller friends, the mystical stories of her Uncle Jakob, the Christian prety of her father's sister. Aunt Sarah, all make their way to her impressionable yet independent mind. All the passions that have moved people throughout the centuries meet and mix in the nighttime musings of an eight-year old girl and vie with each other for her allegience. Ultimately, and surprisingly, it is Judaism that wins.

The spiritual odyssey which lies at the heart of Davita's Harp begins one summer on Long Island. In order to escape the heat of the inner city, Ilana's parents rent a cottage on the beach next door to Anne's cousins, a recently widowed Orthodox Jew named Ezra Dinn and his young son, David. The sounds that come from the Dinn's house during the course of the summer, the Kaddish or prayer for the dead, the morning prayers and Sabbath hymns, catch Ilana's ear while she is sitting on the beach building sand castles or reading on the porch with her mother. Soon, the exoticism of the yarmulkas, the Sabbath rituals and the dietary restrictions, attract Ilana and draw her near so that when she returns to Brooklyn in the fall she begins to secretly attend synagogue with the Dinns. Her father's trip to Spain to cover the by-now raging civil war makes her clandestine observance that much easier.

A dark pall hovers over the the story when Ilana's father is killed while covering the fascist bombing of Guernica. Ilana continues to go to synagogue in order to say Kaddish despite her mother's disapproval. Soon, Ilana leaves public school and enrolls in a Jewish day school. There is a sort of spiritual determinism at work here: despite her mother's adamant atheism, despite her father's Protestant background Ilana has a Jewish soul in need of uncovering. This represents a twist of the theme of generational conflict that is at the crux of much of Potok's work. In both The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lee youngsters from religious backgrounds partially break away from their families and communities in pursuit of secular goals. In Davita Harp however, the pattern reversed here religion is the forbidden trust.

THE NOVEL CLOSES WITH a double irony. After a few years of lonely widowhood Ilana mother marries. Ezra Dinn and is recorded with her past. Ilana Calls 1941 the happiest year of her youth as her news family settles down to a normal life. But just as this newfound happiness appears to keep the events of the outer world at bay and prevent them from invading the hearth the unmentioned yet ever present destruction of European lewry hovers in the background. And just as her mother finally makes peace with the world the male orientation orthodox. Indaism begins to unsettle Ilana. Armidst all the resolutions of long burning conflicts that accompany the end of the novel are early warnings of Ilana's own intellectual rebellion that may be the foundation of succeeding books. It certainly would be a shame if the spiritual struggle's of Ilana Chandal Dinn ended at age 12.

I must confess at this point that the book made me cry. Often Certainly, it is not a piece of "great literature." Other writers have covered the sarne era more adroitly and many of the characters, especially the adults, seem a bit cliche. Still. I found myself moved by the sympathetic portrayals of seemingly minor events in the book: weddings, births, the lighting of the Sabbath candles. Here, it's the little things that count. Writing about a century best defined by the word mass--mass, culture, mass movements, mass destruction--Potok has lived up to the novelist's task and reaffirmed, amidst all the tragedy, the dignity of an individual life.