asaki. These unprecedented atrocities require a radical review of the human predicament. Indeed, the traumatic aftermath of these events, particularly of the Holocaust, overshadows all of Potok's works. He is not only concerned with its devastating after-effects on his characters, but at the same time with what theologians and philosophers call the problem of Divine Providence or theodicy. Centering on the unanswerable question of how God can allow the existence of physical and moral evil in a world supposedly created by Him (Buning).It suggests that the author has decided in favor of religion. The book has ascetic, stoical, self-punishing tone, established with its first line. "All beginnings are hard" and sustained through the painful and sometime repetitious actions of the story. From shortly after birth in the nineteen-twenties, David Lurie is plagued by chronic sinus illnesses that prove to be emblematic of his growing up. David's inner life, tortured with fears and bad dreams, is followed through the depression, which ruins his family. In the late thirties and forties as the news from Europe grows more and more dreadful into David's budding years as a scholar buds, David learns that curiosity can be a dangerous enemy of faith. Mr. Potoks story cannot be recommended to everyone. Its prose is simple and smooth, but a heavy earnestness pervades it all (New Yorker 193).The book centers on the conflict between the religious life and the life of imagination. What " finally, boils down to be a story in which its hero must eventually confront- yes the conflict between orthodox and modern approaches to the scriptures (Huapt 373). All beginnings are hard. In the Beginning opens as David Lurie, now a famous Biblical scholar, now guiding his young students on the dangerous tightrope path of inquiry he himself traveled as a youth--where a misstep might mean hurtling into bitter loss of faith--looks back at his own beginning (Po...
