In the Beginning by Chaim Potok

With the unique emotional power - the gift for evoking our deepest responses - that carried his first three novels to enormous bestsellerdom, the author of The Chosen, The Promise, and My Name is Ashey Lev takes us back through the decades to show us the turbulent education of a scholar, in a novel that reverberates with the tumults and homely joys of Jewish family life from the last days of the innocent 1920's through the gathering shadows of the Depression, World War II, and the ultimate shock of the Holocaust.

"All beginnings are hard." In the Beginning opens as David Lurie, now a famous Biblical scholar, now guiding his young students on the dangerous tightrope path of inquiry he himself traveled as a youth - where a misstep might mean hurtling into bitter loss of faith - looks back at his own beginning.

From his fourth year we enter his life and mind, to see how, out of a crucible of childhood pain and love, a man's spirit was forged; how a gentle, frail little boy became a young man with the terrible courage to pursue his vision of the truth at the risk of all that most dear to him: family love, friendship, and his passionate identity with the centuries of Jewish tradition.

And we enter his world. In sunlit apartments on the tree-lined boulevards of the Bronx that was: glass after glass of tea poured for the caller who brings news of the relatives in Poland - the conversations turning gradually over the years from happy gossip to exchanges of heart-rending fear as the radio brings Adolf Hitler's shrieking presence into the very sanctum of an American family. On the city sidewalks: Davey playing marbles in perfect communion with Tony Savanola until the six-year-old Eddie Kulanski, raised to hate "kikes," initiates Davey into the anguishing knowledge that to be a Jew is to be in peril.

In Davey we experience not only the universal joys - and universal guilts - of childhood, but the special excitements and the added burdens of a rare spirit and mind destined for rare achievement, and the cruel choices that such destiny demands of child, boy, youth, and man.

In the Beginning combines the most potent nostalgia - recovering for us the very feel of those lost decades - with a moving recapitulation of all our beginnings, intensified through the particular realities of an impassioned and fearless seeker after truth.