The Logic of Biblical Subversion in Chaim Potok’s “The Trope Teacher”

Introduction

The essay underlines the ways in which Chaim Potok subverts the biblical myth of the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) in one of his lesser-known literary works, “The Trope Teacher,” a short story from his last published collection, Old Men at Midnight (2001). In this article, I suggest that Potok’s particular subversion of the myth, which follows a distinctly American and conservative Jewish ethical and philosophical outlook, stresses three main themes: the preponderance of moral action; the rejection of blind reliance on traditional Judaic theodicy; and the realization that Judaism must come to be integrated into the modern world if it is to survive. Following a brief overview of the novella’s plot summary, I analyze Potok’s treatment of the biblical myth in tandem with an exposé of the character Ilana Davita Chandal, who is a central figure in all three of the short stories in Old Men at Midnight, and who originally appeared in Potok’s novel Davita’s Harp (1985).

“The Trope Teacher” is an allegorical tale structured around the fate of Isaac Zapiski, an observant Ashkenazi Jew who makes his living in the United States by teaching “trope”—the punctuation marks for musical motifs and tones used in the chanting of Biblical Hebrew. Although gravely wounded during World War I and expelled from his university in Vienna on account of his being Jewish, Zapiski still feels himself to be very much a part of “civilized” Europe. At the beginning of the story, he decides to leave behind the America in which he does not belong, in order to return to Vienna on the eve of the Second World War. Benjamin Walter, the narrator of the story (as well as Zapiski’s student and the tale’s main protagonist), describes him thus: “A small, bumbling, stooped man who wore his hat low over his eyes . . . looking to all intents and purposes like a turtle in the act of withdrawing into its shell. He had a habit of shaking his head in a sort of nervous twitch . . . as if trying to disentangle himself from some web in which he had been caught” (208). Zapiski frequently falls asleep, a state symbolic of his inaction. Even when awake, “He seemed then a helpless rag doll of a man. Wrinkled dark pants and jacket; stained white shirt, disheveled white beard; pale pockmarked features; the bad [prosthetic] leg lying on top of the good one as if it needed more than the floor for support” (218–19).

Zapiski returns to Europe and is never heard from again. Benjamin, however, is haunted by the memory of the man, and imagines him as a stand-in for all of the Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the knowledge of which is only beginning to make itself known to American Jews. Motivated by an urge to defeat what he sees as the modern-day incarnation of Amalek (Exod. 17), the archetypal enemy of the Jews, Benjamin joins the US army and helps to liberate some of the Nazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe. While there, he imagines Isaac Zapiski everywhere, and expects to come upon him at any moment. Instead, what Benjamin encounters is described as the “spirit” of the old man, which functions as a kind of talisman for the young soldier, inasmuch as the phantom of Zapiski tells Benjamin where to duck and dig in order not to be injured. After the war, Benjamin becomes a historian and uses his real-life experiences in the war as the impetus behind his major academic work, entitled Why So Late.

The reader will note that already one subversion of the Binding of Isaac myth has been outlined in this initial description of “Isaac” Zapiski, insofar as the novella’s titular character is the one depicted as having been sacrificed. However, this particular subversion—subversive because, in this case, Isaac actually dies, unlike in the biblical account—does not work in tandem with the main subversion of the plotline in Potok’s novella; therefore, I mention its symbolic components here only because they prefigure the later...