Davita's Harp

What a miserable-looking girl! There are more appealing covers for this novel out there, but this is the one I picked up from Brotherhood Books in the middle of my Chaim Potok binge last year. Maybe I'd overdone it because I started reading Davita's Harp months ago and then abruptly gave up -- I couldn't handle yet another story of a morose child in dismal 1930s New York, struggling to understand the threatening rules of the adult world. So Davita's Harp has sat sadly on my reading pile with a bookmark near the start, until I relented and picked it up again.

Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood back then, maybe I had spent too long in Potok's world and needed a break, but this time around I quickly became absorbed in Davita's world and this novel might even have become my favourite of Potok's works. For one thing, it actually features a girl as the main character -- the only one of Potok's novels to do so. It also approaches his usual material -- orthodox Jewish community, politics, not fitting in, parents and children -- from a different angle. This time, the family are outside the Jewish community: Davita's Jewish mother has renounced her faith, driven to rebellion by an abusive, sexist father, and married a non-Jewish man, Davita's father. The usual central relationship in Potok's novels is between father and son; this time, it's mother and daughter. It's almost as if Potok challenged himself to break all his own rules! And instead of the central character chafing against the strict demands of Hasidic Judaism, this time Davita finds herself drawn toward the comfort of ritual and community, and gradually coming to embrace her Jewish identity, while still clashing with its misogynistic assumptions and injustices.

I found the background of Communist party activism and the Spanish Civil War fascinating, and it was timely in that I also recently watched Oppenheimer and began reading Anna Funder's book Wifedom about Eileen Blair, George Orwell's wife, and her involvement in Spain. It's so weird how these things seem to converge, time and again, without any conscious effort on my part!