Symbolism In Davita's Harp

This narrative inclusion, so different from the male, Jewish perspective in Potok’s earlier novels, is congruent with the protagonist’s feminist perspective: it is collaborative and communal learning. The writing of fiction holds no real values in the strictly orthodox community of which Davita becomes a part. This fact is coupled with the fact that women themselves also seem to lack significant roles in religious reading and ritual outside of the home, where their Sabbath role is enormously important, as they light the candles, recite the prayers, and becomes the “Sabbath Queens.” Through the creation of a female protagonist, Potok discloses the weaknesses of exclusion, and in Davita’s Harp, he makes a convincing case for rethinking and restructuring the place of women within the orthodox Jewish tradition. Discussion Inclusive theology is not a new idea to Jewish thought. Davita’s Harp, with its emphasis upon the value of story and the mystical, of the healing force of imagination and words, also reveals extensive Kabbalist influences in

In this way Davita becomes a kind of everywoman and a liberationist who contests, transforms, creates, displays (through action, character, and finally her fiction) new ways of being Jewish in modern America, ways that revivify ancient Jewish beliefs, rather than reject them. In the time-frame of the novel (the late 1930s), women writers were devalued in the larger American culture. Davita’s promise to become such a women, to find what Virgina Woolf names “a room of [her] own,” and in that newly located sacred place to create he own art is clear by completion of Davita’s Harp. Her process involves the development and integration of various aspects of herself as well as movement towards maturity in her thoughts and thinking about the Jewish and the American