Page 8-THE NEWS-September, 1985
I^X Jewish Books in Review
_ I I I i FH is a service of the IWB lewish Book Council, ^3
^ ^ 75 East 26th St., New York, N.V. 10010
The Fifth Son. Elie Wiesel.
Summit, 1230 Avenue of the
Americas, New York, NY
10020. 220 pp. $15.95.
Davita's Harp. Chaim Potok.
Knopf, 201 East 50th Street,
New York, NY 10022. $16.95.
Inside, Outside. Herman Wouk.
Little Brown, 34 Beacon
Street, Boston, MA 02106.
$19.95.
Reviewed by Benjamin Nelson
The three new novels are by
authors who share a com
monality of Jewish outlook,
tradition and sensibility.
However, each writer speaks
with a distinct voice out of a
personal vision.
A survivor of the Holocaust
and its most eloquent poet,
Elie Wiesel has turned
repeatedly to the issues and
questions raised by the most
traumatic event of our cen
tury. In his latest novel. The
Fifth Son, Wiesel presents a
stunning and disturbing im
age of the isolation and possi
ble redemption of a second-
generation Holocaust victim,
the son of a survivor whose
journey toward retribution
and self-recognition is the cen
tral action of the book.
The story, told in overlap
ping narratives by four
figures: the youth, his father,
and two of the father’s friends
(also survivors), shuttles back
and forth in time from contem
porary New York to a Nazi-
enslaved ghetto in Europe of
the 1940s. The underlying plot
involves the unnamed son’s
plan to accomplish what his
father had botched after the
war: the execution of the
sadistic SS officer who had
terrorized the ghetto and
brutally murdered the father’s
first son. For this young man,
the execution will be both an
act of retributive justice as
well as a means of breaking
through the barrier of incom
prehensibility between his
father £md himself.
This is the stuff of powerful
drama, and in terms of plot
and structure, Wiesel handles
it with consummate skill. The
climax and resolution is
perceptive and challenging.
Nonetheless, something is
missing in this complex
morality tale: an emotional
core to the characters who
move through it.
For all its poetic beauty and
mored seriousness. The Fifth
Son is a curiously detached
and isolate work, a dramatiza
tion of a thesis in which
characters serve more as il
lustrations than human be
ings. The thesis is pertinent
£ind profound, but the illustra
tions are still illustrations.
♦♦♦
If Elie Wiesel’s characters
tend to shade toward the
abstract, Chaim Potok’s have
often been mired in one-
dimensionality. In The Chosen,
the story was interesting
enough to compensate for the
lack of in-depth characteriza
tion, but in subsequent novels,
in which the story became in
creasingly repetitive, the
superficiality of the characters
became increasingly obvious
and, in the process, weakened
the narrative. Potok was
caught on a treadmill. With
Davita’s Harp, he has happily
and successfully leaped off
Although the concerns in
Davita’s Harp are vintage
Potok — the schism between
tradition and modernism, faith
and doubt, and the emotional
and spiritual crises of a child
moving toward adulthood —
they are dramatized here with
a skillful and imaginative
quality that makes this his
best book to date.
liana Davita Chandal is the
daughter of a Christian father
and Jewish mother who are
both atheistic and suffused
with a zealous commitment to
Communist ideology and
idealism so prevalent among
the young intellectuals of the
1930s. The book dramatizes
the young girl’s loving but
complex relationship with her
parents, their struggles for
survival and meaning, and her
own process of maturation
through pain, death, disillu
sionment and love.
In his portrayal of the girl
and her mother, Potok has
created two of his finest
characters. They are multi
faceted, believable and deeply
human. Their developments,
which subtly parallel each
other, £ire rendered with great
insight and compassion.
The climactic, epiphanal mo
ment in which Davita envi
sions the speech she would
have given had not her
yeshiva reneged (because of
her sex) on awarding her a
prize for Talmudic studies, is
not only a gem of creative im
agination, but a beautiful and
wondrous synthesis of the
themes of the novel in a single,
poetic act of faith, courage and
hope. Like the harp of its title,
this novel, despite some flaws,
gives off a sweet, pure and
gentle sound.
♦♦♦
On the last page of Herman
Wouk’s Inside, Outside, the
first-person narrator, Israel
David Goodkind, sums up the
book. “It is a kaddish for my
father...but in counterpoint it
is also a torch song of the thir
ties, a sentimental Big Band
number.” It is that indeed-
and more. It is also a kaddish,
riotously and poignantly am
bivalent, for Goodkind’s
mother, a presence in his life
and memory even more domi
nant that Goodkind’s much
gentler and self-effacing
Cham
A -N 0 V 6 1;.
father. It is also a story about
Goodkind himself and the in
side/outside equalibrium of his
life.
Inside, Outside is fsir from be
ing a perfect novel. Like many
of Wouk’s previous books it
bogs down into woefully clich-
ed situations, its language
often flattens out into
banalities, and some of its
characters, particularly the
women, remain predictable
stereotypes. Ironically, the
daughter of Goodkind, his
“shikse” first love, and to an
extent his embarrassingly in-
dominatable mother have been
treated more brilliantly and in
cisively in the novels of Philip
Roth, a writer whom Wouk
skewers hilariously in the per
son of a neurotic self-hating
American-Jewish author who
is a friend of Goodkind.
What lifts Inside, Outside
above second-rate Philip
Roth? The answer is simple:
(cont’d on page 16)
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