When Memory, Comfort Find Themselves at Odds

By Chaim Potok

Alfred A. Knopf

274 pages, $23

Chaim Potok captured international acclaim more than 30 years ago when his stunning first novel, “The Chosen,” made its debut. In the intervening decades, he’s continued to publish stories delving into the lives of Jews, religious and secular alike, as they make sense of their existence in this post-Holocaust age. “Old Men at Midnight,” Potok’s most recent work, is comprised of three loosely connected novellas, all of which share Ilana Davita Chandal (a character from his 1985 novel “Davita’s Harp”) as the passive recipient of tales told by men facing their pasts.

“The Ark Builder” focuses on 16-year-old Noah, a European refugee in New York during the summer of 1947. Davita, herself only 17, is hired as the English tutor for the young man. She encourages both Noah’s English and his drawing skills, slowly pulling out stories of the German army’s invasion of Noah’s Polish hometown and the attendant memories that refuse to abate. “Four thousand Jews, and he is the only survivor,” the boy’s aunt explains. “My husband and I, we say to ourselves God saved him for a reason.”

Just as Davita is the book’s structural nexus, the idea of having been saved for some unknowable purpose is the leitmotif that plays throughout the narratives. Leon Shertov in “The War Doctor,” for example, recalls his early years as a religious Jew during the Russian Civil War and the compassionate doctor who saved his wounded arm. In exchange for teaching the doctor “to read and speak our sacred language,” Leon is granted travel documents that rescue him from near-certain death. Leon’s having been saved, though, seems more curse than blessing when he uses his liberation to become a colonel with the KGB, specializing in interrogation and torture, and later re-encounters the doctor who’d been so instrumental in his early life.

Davita, who has meanwhile become a teaching assistant at Columbia University, asks the now-aged Leon to record his memories because “the past is erased without stories.” With a degree of compliance that borders on implausible--men seem to spill their otherwise guarded stories when she asks, an ease that weakens the book’s impact--Leon writes a response to Davita’s request, the text of which makes up the lion’s share of that tale.

The final novella, “The Trope Teacher,” is narrated by Benjamin Walter, a 68-year-old celebrated professor of military history who’s attempting to write his memoirs but can’t recall the early years. Benjamin’s new neighbor, the same Davita who’s now a successful novelist in her 50s, helps him remember the story of Mr. Zapiski, the trope teacher of Benjamin’s youth, around whom the story coalesces.

Mr. Zapiski is the European immigrant who taught Benjamin to chant scripture in preparation for his bar mitzvah and is the one character who rejects salvation. As the terror of World War II gains intensity, he forgoes his safety in the U.S. and voluntarily returns to Europe, ready to face inevitable death.

Countless years later, as Benjamin reflects with Davita on the early words of the trope teacher, they shimmer with meaning. “First, I will teach you the notes and grammar of the notes,” Zapiski had told him. “Then I will teach you the meaning behind the grammar. And if I see that you have truly mastered that, I will teach you the magic of this music, things few people know.” Finding meaning behind grammar, truth beneath history, solace amid the pain of remembering is Potok’s aim. But doing so, his stories make clear, is seldom easy. There is a specific burden carried by those who have been saved, a responsibility that is neither clear-cut nor easy to administer. Here, Potok expertly examines the weight of remembrance as a disquieting inheritance. When Davita helps Benjamin conjure buried memories, for example, she loses her temper with his desire for safety in the process. “You want to be sure?” she demands of him. “Go to your tax collector, get hit by lightning, that’s sure.... You want memory and comfort?”

It is unfortunate that this scene is one of the very few in which Davita, the listener, is given any life or substance. The rest of the time, her story is overshadowed by that of the men telling theirs. The result is to whet without satisfying the reader’s interest in her, a regrettable aspect, since the novellas hold together on their content alone. The book, though flawed by this structural issue, continues to build Potok’s oeuvre of heartfelt literature of Jewish assimilation in the aftermath of unfathomable violence. The stories he tells, like those of his characters, claim our attention.

Memory and comfort, though not necessarily incompatible, Potok tells us, are often at odds. In piecing together our difficult tales, memory must come first, like the trope teacher’s grammar lesson. Then, if we’re lucky, we’ll hear the transcendental music that makes the memories, like Potok’s stories, if not exactly consoling, life-affirming and essential.