To read Chaim Potok's Wanderings, a superbly written … history of the Jews, is to understand why [the] theme of vengeance is so much a part of Jewish history. It also serves to remind that, though the major event of Christianity celebrates birth and love, and Judaism the memory of slaughter and vengeance, both have often practised in each other's territory….
[Wanderings is] the story of civilization—as it affects his people. Explains Potok: "Though I had studied history with great teachers in the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, I hesitated to move from the world of the imagination to the hard country of fact." His fears were unnecessary. As he traces the ancient exodus from Egypt of the "pitiful rabble, a mass of frightened, quarrelsome Asiatics wandering through the merciless sand and stone wilderness somewhere east of the Nile," Potok the novelist considers the great questions of imagination that historians may overlook. What, he asks, made Moses realize that slavery, an accepted custom, was wrong? "This is the point," answers Potok, "where the mind of man might turn a corner and come upon new and luminous awareness—an act of creation as mysterious as life itself."
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