The Logic of Biblical Subversion in Chaim Potok’s “The Trope Teacher”

Abstract

a brief overview of the novella's plot summary, I analyze Potok's treatment of the biblical myth in tandem with an expose of the character liana Davita Chandal, who is a central figure in all three of the short stories in Old Men at Midnight, and who originally appeared in Potok's novel Davita's Harp (1985). The Trope Teacher is an allegorical tale structured around the fate of Isaac Zapiski, an observant Ashkenazi Jew who makes his living in the United States by teaching trope - the punctuation marks for musical motifs and tones used in the chanting of Biblical Hebrew. Although gravely wounded during World War I and expelled from his university in Vienna on account of his being Jewish, Zapiski still feels himself to be very much a part of civilized Europe. At the beginning of the story, he decides to leave behind the America in which he does not belong, in order to return to Vienna on the eve of the Second World War. Benjamin Walter, the narrator of the story (as well as Zapiski 's student and the tale's main protagonist), describes him thus: A small, bumbling, stooped man who wore his hat low over his eyes . . . looking to all intents and purposes like a turtle in the act of withdrawing into its shell. He had a habit of shaking his head in a sort of nervous twitch . . . as if trying to disentangle himself from some web in which he had been caught