Chapters 1-3 Summary and Analysis

Chapter one, "The Fire Bringer," tells the story of Solomon Slepak. He was born in 1893, lost his father when he was eight, and ran away from home when he was thirteen. The small-town Russian Jewish boy eventually became a Bolshevik killer. When his father was alive, he dreamed that his son would attend an Academy of higher Jewish learning to study to become a rabbi. The author described several photographs that he found in his research. One was a portrait of Solomon's father. From the Ukraine, the man had a black beard and a dark skullcap. There is another photograph of a synagogue celebration in Dubrovno. Although it's clearly a celebration, no one is smiling in the photographs. Many of the other photographs that Potok observed showed deaths and suffering. Pictures of the pogroms showed wounded individuals with head...