Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There Are No Words

Good fiction adapts to circumstances as it ages. What was immediately on the mind of the author and the details of his experiences are important beyond the times in which or about which they were written. I suppose this is of working definition of what’s meant by a ‘classic.’ In this sense at least I think Davita’s Harp qualifies as just that, a classic.

Potok’s book was written in 1985 but its setting is the late 1930’s. This is an era of severe political division and aggression in the United States. Communism and Fascism combat each other in local neighbourhoods as well as in international politics and military action. Unionising and union-busting, often violent, are commonplace. The horror of the Spanish Civil War is being pursued enthusiastically, and brutally, by both sides. Stalin starves the Ukrainians while Hitler de-personalises the German Jews.

The immediate context inhabited by Potok’s protagonist, a young American girl with a Christian father and Jewish mother, is casually anti-Semitic at all levels of society, from the playground to the boardroom. Easter European Jews are not only the most recent immigrants, they are also the most visible representatives of Marxist ideology and the chosen enemy of German fascists, for whom there is substantial American sympathy. So Jews are the natural object of moral panic.

But since she knows nothing about Judaism, she is also scorned by the Jewish community who simply don’t comprehend her status. As in a story told to her by a family friend who is also a writer, she is a grey horse living alone between a herd of black horses and a herd of white horses. No matter which herd she decides to join she will be an outcaste. On the face of it, this is a rather banal metaphor. But Potok has something in mind which makes the girl a universal figure, a representative of the entire world. Thus creating art.

Quite apart from the global ideologies and the emotional prejudices within her family and community, two fundamental principles are clearly at issue throughout the book: justice and freedom. To oversimplify, but not by much, the Torah is the symbol of ultimate divine justice. Although she is not religious, this priority is reflected in the mother’s Socialism. For the father’s family, the King James Bible is the epitome of freedom both in its creation and its continued importance in the rugged culture of rural Northern New England. Each group is alien to the other, involving very different experiences and interpretations of the same text.

The young protagonist doesn’t know it, but she is caught in the crossfire between the two interpretations of existential reality. Her mixed religious background is part of the metaphor for this situation, as is the Communist/Fascist antipathy (and the visible misogyny everywhere). How justice and freedom are prioritised and interpreted determines which side of the political and religious divide one ends up on. The dialectic is not inherent in either concept; but historically they have emerged as contradictory, forcing a cultural choice upon the girl.

It is here that the writerly friend of the girl’s mother emerges to suggest something crucial. While reporting on his experiences in the Spanish War, he writes: “Here things happen daily for which there are no words.” His experience of the crimes and inhumanity of both sides is not merely indescribable. It is descriptions of the conflict in terms of ideologies, religions, and opposing causes, that is to say, words, that are the origins of the conflict itself. The opposition among these ideologies, religious beliefs and causes is as tenuous, artificial and as historically conditioned as the dialectic of freedom and justice. The writer abandons politics completely in an attempt to escape.

And there the real paradox beings to appear: Words giveth and Words taketh away. Only death or mental collapse is the end of words, both often caused by the words. The mythical Yiddish witch, Baba Yaga, will do to represent words to the young girl. The witch torments her dreams. But the words of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, provide her only comfort when her father is killed at Guernica. Her mother too ultimately finds hope in words, strangely through the ministrations of her Christian evangelical sister-in-law. Both use words but not in accepted ways.

People don’t like your stories, especially political stories, if you don’t come down for either justice or freedom as the most important thing in life. Refusing to choose means you’re likely to remain the grey horse isolated between the white and black herds. Abandoning words is not a sensible option. Finding some other words to deal with a profoundly tragic and complicated reality is the real challenge. In this light, Potok’s story, although the best part of half a century old, retains its relevance.

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