ime. David appears to be exploring the nature of evil in human affairs. David learns of scripture or history, what he hears about his parent's past, what he endures himself in the way of accident or cruelly all become aspects of a single experience-a Jewish experience. In the fourth year of David Lurie's life, we enter his life and mind, to see how, through a crucible of childhood pain and love, a man's spirit was forged. How a gentle, frail little boy became a young man with the terrible courage to pursue his vision of the truth at the risk of all that was most dear to him: family love, friendship and his passionate identity with the centuries of Jewish tradition. David Lurie lives on sunlit apartments on the tree-lined boulevards of the Bronx. On the city sidewalks, Davey (David Lurie) is playing marbles in perfect communion with Tony Savanola until the six-year-old Eddie Kulanski, raised to hate "Kikes," initiates Davey into the anguishing knowledge that to be a Jew is to be in peril.David Lurie learns that all beginnings are hard. He must fight for his place against the bullies in his depression-shadowed Bronx neighborhood and his own frail health. As a young man, he must start anew and define his own path of personal belief that diverges sharply with his devout father and everything he has been taught (Amazon). In the Beginning as the title suggests is a recapitulation of the Book of Genesis from the Creation to the flood of Noah.Many of the dramatic tensions in the novel develop through David's father Max. Max Lurie is active in leadership in a society to help other emigrants to America. The primary tensions in the novel develop from young David's situation in an environment that cherishes the old ways of life and Yeshiva study. David become more and more conscious of a need to move out that environment into the larger world of non-orthodox, even non-Jewish intellectual life move out of it, moreover, with out relinquishi...
