tok 1).The story is tied to scriptural themes with unaccustomed complexity. I was surprised to see a reference to the Documentary Hypothesis. This is an explanation of how the first five books of the Bible were written. I learned about the Documentary Hypothesis in my Hebrew scripture class. This is a very complex biblical criticism in the middle of a novel. It does have references to Torah and Talmudic study, so non-Jews and seculars ones might have to look something Despite of the resulting fullness and complexity, the author has mis-estimated. His patterning is too careful, too insistent. When every small episode or description is made thematically relevant, there is a loss of the spontaneity that Mr. Potok's fluid associative mode of reminiscence seems to require. He proceeds too cautious, as through fearful of spilling a drop of his meaning. An incidentally effect is make Jewishness seem an exhausting full time condition imposing a conversational style that moves only between the gnomic and wry. The most important aspect of the miscalculation is that within the larger context the author has created, his hero is insufficiently interesting (Irwin 413).Most of Potok's novels can be seen as the fictional sites of cultural confrontation and how that confrontation affects the people involved in them. The cultural confrontation is between a minority immigrant Jewish subculture and the 'umbrella' culture (as the author himself calls it) of Western secular humanism. It is Potok's particular gift as a novelist and storyteller to have subjected these rather abstract areas of cultural expression to novelistic treatment and to have made them available to the common reader. He writes about these modern achievements with great enthusiasm and succeeds remarkably well in making them exciting for us, however complex they actually are. Yet, he is not blind to the darker aspects of Western civilization, particularly since its history is f...
