"In the Beginning" seems radically different from [Potok's earlier novels, "The Chosen" and "The Promise"]. True, the shift in its locale and time period is only slight…. But he does seem to have taken up new and profoundly more complex themes.

For one thing, he appears to be exploring the nature of evil in human affairs. "In the Beginning" unfolds against the background of the mounting persecution of European Jewry, first in Eastern Europe during and after World War I, then in Germany during the rise of Nazism. And Mr. Potok seems to be trying to mirror that evil by visiting a series of "accidents" on his young hero, David Lurie, a precocious reader and brilliant student of Jewish scriptures…. The accidental aspect of [certain] … incidents in the story is heavily underscored by Mr. Potok. It is as if he is setting us up for some comment on...