In the Beginning, Chaim Potok's fourth novel, is again about urban life, about a young Jewish boy growing up in New York City and experiencing the strains that modern, assimilationist America can put upon a deeply religious, orthodox sensibility…. [Many] of the dramatic tensions in the novel develop through Max Lurie's active leadership in a society to help others emigrate to America. But the primary one derives from young David's situation in an environment that cherishes the old ways of life and Yeshiva study, while he becomes more and more conscious of a need to move out of that environment into the larger world of non-orthodox, even non-Jewish intellectual life—move out of it, moreover, without relinquishing it utterly. This is the theme of Potok's earlier novels, and while he treats it with great sensitivity and depth, he is dangerously close to repeating himself. He is unique among Jewish-American novelists in being able to write directly out of the context of lived orthodox experience …, and thus offers new perspectives on our visions of America. But other aspects of experience, particularly adult experience, should engage his interest more fully, as Max Lurie's does to a considerable though secondary extent in this fiction. (pp. 843-44)
Jay L. Halio, "American Dreams" (copyright, 1977, by Jay L. Halio), in The Southern Review, Vol. 13, No. 4, October, 1977, pp. 837-44.∗
This is a free excerpt of 226 words. There are 231 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Potok, Chaim 1929–: Critical Essay by Jay L. Halio Access Pass.
