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Davita Davita’s Harp occupies an interesting place in Chaim Potok’s oeuvre. Along with his nonfiction work Theo Tobiasse: Artist in Exile (1986), it marks the precise middle of his writing career. Davita’s Harp appeared in 1985, eighteen years after Potok’s first novel, The Chosen, catapulted the author to fame and seventeen years before his death in 2002. It is his sixth work of fiction and his only novel narrated by a woman and centered on two female protagonists. Six works of fiction followed Davita’s Harp, among them three books for young adults, and with the exception of The Gift of Asher Lev (1990), they were not nearly as successful with readers as the six iconic works of fiction Potok had published between 1967 and 1985. Potok himself may have felt that he was reaching a plateau with the publication of Davita’s Harp—a plateau that turned out to be the zenith of his career as a fiction writer—because in 1986 he remarked in an interview with the literary scholar Elaine Kauvar, “What I am doing is setting the groundwork , and I am finished with that now. I have in my cast of characters a psychologist , Danny Saunders; a Talmudist, Reuven Malter; I also have a Bible scholar, David Lurie; an artist, Asher Lev; a mystic, Gershon Loran. Now I have a feminist writer; that’s what Davita’s going to be.” Kauvar was surprised to learn that Potok regarded the six novels merely as groundwork for a more davita’s harp The Silence of Violence and the Limits of the Imagination Susanne Klingenstein 5 SILENCE OF VIOLENCE AND LIMITS OF IMAGINATION 59 elaborate fictional edifice. She asked Potok whether he was planning a sequel to Davita’s Harp and whether Reuven Malter, the narrator of The Chosen, was going to play a role in that sequel. Potok’s reply revealed the energy and verve that generated his detailed plans for works still far in the future: “All of these people are going to be brought into the contemporary period, and the first one who will be brought into this part of the century will be Davita,” Potok said. His novel had left Davita as a fourteen-year-old in 1942. “As a matter of fact,” Potok continued, “she is going to be brought right into the eighties on a journey that she makes to the Soviet Union. That’s the point to the whole Communist background in the first of the Davita novels.” Unfortunately, Potok did not realize his plans, and very few of his central characters were brought into the second half of the twentieth century. The one sequel Potok did write was The Gift of Asher Lev (1990), in which he updated his readers on the life and fate of Asher Lev, the painter and Hasidic Jew in Parisian exile; this book came eighteen years (the numeric value of chai, the Hebrew word for “life”) after the publication of the first Asher Lev novel in 1972. Ilana Davita Chandal also reappears in a later work as a fullgrown adult but, disappointingly, not as a central protagonist or even a feminist writer. Rather, she is cast in a conventionally feminine role as a patient listener and inspiring muse. In Potok’s last work of fiction, Old Men at Midnight (2001), a collection of three novellas, Davita largely serves as an empathic listener, unloosening the memories of three older men—a Holocaust survivor , a former Jewish KGB officer who defected from the Soviet Union via East Germany in 1955, and a professor of warfare. Davita inspires these men, who are nearing the midnight of their lives, to put their memories into words. Her function is that of spiritual or psychological healer. Thus, she is picking up the work (if not the mission) of her aunt Sarah Chandal in Davita’s Harp rather than fulfilling her own destiny as a creative writer. Of the three novellas , only one, The War Doctor, actually has a direct connection to communism and the Soviet Union. In a set of stories mailed to Davita, a defector recounts his fate as a Jew under the rule of the Bolsheviks. He touches especially on the harrowing history of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which culminated in the rigged trial of fifteen Jewish intellectuals, all with stellar Bolshevik credentials, and the subsequent execution of fourteen of the defendants on August 12, 1952; among them were five brilliant Yiddish writers . The defector...

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