raught with an anti-Semitism that reached its greatest intensity in the Holocaust (Buning).This novel about a Jewish brain box puzzling at the irrationality of history turns out unexpectedly moving. Kept off stage and reflected in miscrosm, the street corner humiliations, the tough gangs of goyim forcing copies of social justice on Semitic looking schoolboys offer much more controllable leverage on our emotions. It is this careful focus which ensures that the conclusion works. With five million dead in Europe and a race about to make a new beginning, a decision to abandon orthodox Jewish study and see what goyische learning has to offer might seem less than a climax. It is a measure of Mr. Potok's plausibility and characterization that the act (viewed as treachery by the community) comes across as a necessary, heroic and loyal to a deeper Jewish tradition (Barnes 373) The mythic elements are superbly manipulated Potok has, at last, come to grips with the implicit in all of his previous work: the problem of sustaining religious faith in a meaningless world. He offers no easy resolution. Lurie (the narrator) at the end of the novel is still searching for the truth. That is what makes "In the Beginning" so powerful. It successfully re-creates a time, a place, and the journey of a soul. Its ultimate ambiguity is a perfect reflection of the response of an intelligent religious sensibility to life (Nissenson 321). Personally, I found this book to be dull. It was the same thing over and over. It did not hold my attention. It seemed centered on a boy named David who was sickly with some mysterious illness that could not be cured. The illness was never named. In spite of the illness, the child was bright and intelligent. He was ahead of his peers when he started school. He had self-taught himself to read both the English and Hebrew alphabet. It is centered on a Jewish boy learning how to interact with his parents.It seemed that i...
