There's still more loss ahead: Jakob Daw, deported from refuge in the US because of his politics, dies in France. So, while her father goes to Spain to cover the Civil War, Ilana Davita begins to attend a local synagogue on Saturdays (against her mother's wishes) then her father is killed at Guernica-and mother Anne loses her political faith with the Stalin/Hitler pact. Meanwhile, David Dinn-a Jewish boy living next door to the Chandals at the Seagate beach one summer-introduces her to an almost opposite world: the strange, beguiling forms of religious observance. As liana Davita grows up, then, Daw introduces her to the widened-out perimeters of the imagination. (Party cell meetings necessitate many moves to different apartments throughout the city.) And, now and again, the Chandals give respectful shelter to an old friend of Anne's from Europe, Jakob Daw, a tubercular writer of political allegories. Michael is a Maine native and newspaper writer Anne (once Channah) is a brilliant ideologue with a bitter European-Jewish past(her rabbi-father's paternal neglect, pogroms) they are atheistic, committed, peripatetic. It listens to his worries and even answers, and when it's time to leave an old Ilana Davita Chandal is the New York-born daughter of Michael and Anne, both Communists of the Thirties. Meanwhile, he finds comfort up in a dogwood tree. A well-told tale that needed telling.Jason's family is making their ``third move in five years'' once again, Jason says good-bye to his friends and packs his belongings. Potok is a master storyteller.?Chicago Tribune?Gripping and intriguing. Filled with a host of richly drawn characters. The reader knows from the first few pages that he is in the hands of a sure professional who won't let him down.?People?Engrossing. Potok's bravest book.?The New York Times Book Review?It is an enormous pleasure to sink into such a rich. To her, life's elusive possibilities for happiness, for fulfillment, for decency, become as real and resonant as the music of the small harp that hangs on her door, welcoming all guests with its sweet, gentle tones.Praise for Davita's Harp?Rich.

And Davita, unexpectedly, finds in the Jewish faith that her mother had long ago abandoned both a solace to her questioning inner pain and a test of her budding spirit of independence. But the deprivations of war and the Depression take their ruthless toll. Her loving parents, both fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely bright hope for a new, better world. For Davita Chandal, growing up in New York in the 1930s and '40s is an experience of indescribable joy?and unfathomable sadness.

Davita's Harp by Chaim Potok