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    A Study Guide for Chaim Potok's "Davita's Harp"
    A Study Guide for Chaim Potok's "Davita's Harp"
    A Study Guide for Chaim Potok's "Davita's Harp"
    Ebook45 pages30 minutes

    A Study Guide for Chaim Potok's "Davita's Harp"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Chaim Potok's "Davita's Harp," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535821568
    A Study Guide for Chaim Potok's "Davita's Harp"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Chaim Potok's "Davita's Harp" - Gale

      10

      Davita's Harp

      Chaim Potok

      1985

      Introduction

      Davita's Harp is the haunting and painful story of a girl growing up in the first half of the twentieth century. Although she lives in New York, she is thrust into the middle of that brutal period's European wars through her parents and their friends, all activists, writers, and communists. Her mother, Anne, or Channah, as she is known to her friends from Poland, survived pogroms (massacres) that killed her family; she was a Hasidic Jew in Poland and an atheist and intellectual in Vienna before immigrating to America. Davita's father, Michael Chandal, is the son of Christian lumber tycoons who has rejected his parents' wealth and their religion to work as a journalist documenting the struggle of the working class in America. As Spain succumbs to fascism during the Spanish civil war, Davita's parents dedicate their lives to fighting for justice through their work in the Communist Party. Her father pays the ultimate price for his beliefs, dying in the bombing of Guernica while, with terrible irony, trying to save a nun.

      The events of the novel are related through the eyes of a child. Davita is around eight at the book's opening; at its conclusion she is thirteen. This rhetorical device gives the book its tremendous power and pathos. The child tells about the things in her life in the order in which they are important to her, and this order changes as, with age, her reflections develop more sophistication and subtlety. Throughout the book, a reader is aware of the vast difference between knowing things and understanding them; Davita describes what she experiences without judgment, and this innocence defines the novel just as the novel defines the twentieth century itself, in a voice that grows less innocent with each new horror that history manifests.

      Author Biography

      Herman Harold Potok was born on February 17, 1929, and raised in New York City in an Orthodox Jewish home, the oldest son of Polish immigrants. Following Jewish tradition, his parents also gave the boy a Hebrew name, Chaim, which means life. Potok went to Jewish schools as a child, where he studied regular academic subjects along with the Talmud, the book of Jewish law and tradition. He developed an early interest in more secular forms of Judaism and at the age of twenty-five was ordained a Conservative rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Beginning in 1955 Potok served as an army chaplain on the front lines for sixteen months during the Korean War, an experience that exposed him to deeply religious cultures in a world where there were few Jews.

      Potok started writing fiction at age sixteen, after being profoundly moved by Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945), and received a B.A. in English Literature from Yeshiva University in 1950. He went on to write ten novels, the most famous being The Chosen (1967), which tells the story of two friends growing up in Jewish

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