The Book of Daniel

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of suicidal ideation, an attempt to die by suicide, and incestuous fantasies.

The Book of Daniel is divided into two timelines. In the primary timeline, set in 1967, Daniel Lewin (originally named Daniel Isaacson) writes his dissertation at Columbia University. He has a “deliberately cool” appearance. The focus of his dissertation is radical politics in the United States. This is particularly relevant to Daniel as his biological parents, Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, were executed after being found guilty of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Daniel’s attempts to piece together his parents’ story form the secondary timeline.

In 1967, Daniel is writing his dissertation in the library of Columbia University. His research makes him think about Memorial Day, earlier in the year when he visited Massachusetts with his family. Daniel and his wife Phyllis have a young son named Paul, after Daniel’s biological father. While Daniel is 25 and on the cusp of completing his graduate degree, Phyllis is 19 and did not attend college. Daniel and his family hitchhike to the state hospital in Worchester, a “public facility for the mentally ill” (6). As he describes the hospital patients, Daniel is reminded of the Book of Daniel from the Old Testament, in which the Biblical Daniel interpreted “dreams, visions or apparitions” (13).

Daniel is visiting the hospital because his sister, Susan, is a patient there after attempting to die by suicide. At the hospital, Susan is watching television in the lounge. After a long and awkward silence, Susan blames their parents for what has happened to them. Susan has a unique ability to anger and annoy Daniel. He envies her directness and her ability to express her emotions. As he thinks about the Bible and God, Daniel becomes angry. He is not allowed to take Susan home from the hospital. His adoptive parents, he knows, would not approve of him doing so. His adoptive father Robert Lewin is a lawyer who works with disenfranchised people.

Daniel meets Susan’s therapist, Alan Duberstein, who reveals that the facility’s doctor has not yet finished his report on Susan’s condition. Daniel loathes Duberstein. The Lewins arrive and Daniel joins them in a meeting with the hospital staff. As they talk, Daniel notes that the Lewins are kind and gentle people. He and his sister, he believes, do not deserve the Lewins’ love because they are “cruel.” Privately, he is grateful to his sister for interrupting his dull research.

Daniel makes a mental itinerary of “subjects to be taken up” (19). Amid the social and political turmoil of 1967, he is trying to make sense of the world and his place within it. Like the Biblical Daniel, he is struggling to make sense of the visions in his mind. He remembers when he and Susan were young, attending a protest in honor of their parents. At the time, Daniel did not understand why he and his sister became the focus of the crowd’s attention, nor why people were chanting to “free them.” According to Daniel, the American political system has an innate tendency to slip into partisanship and violence in “in the years immediately after a war” (28).

After leaving Susan in the hospital, Daniel and his family accompany Duberstein and the Lewins to the restaurant where Susan attempted to die by suicide. Duberstein blames Susan’s political activism. Daniel resents the therapist’s implications and calls him a “schmuck,” leaving the table and finding himself in the same restroom where Susan “opened her veins” (34). Exiting, he sees her car in the parking lot. Daniel is reminded that his parents’ legacy is inescapable, no matter how hard he tries.

When Paul and Rochelle were alive, they lived with Daniel and Susan in the Bronx. Daniel recalls his mother being the practical one and his father being more idealistic, though both were dedicated to left-wing politics. Paul was well-educated and occasionally overly intellectual, as well as an avowed Marxist-Leninist. Rochelle treated Paul almost like a naïve child. Paul ran a small radio repair shop and Daniel enjoyed watching his father work. Daniel remembers the rage that his mother held toward social injustice. She believed in communism with an almost religious fervor, in contrast to Paul’s academic approach to the ideology. To this day, Daniel is not sure whether his parents were actually guilty of espionage.

Daniel delves into his childhood memories. The family was poor. He remembers his parents’ friends—including Dr. Mindish and his “cretin daughter”; Nate Silverstein and his wife; Henry Bergman; Ben Cohen; and the Kantrowitz sisters—all meeting in the family home before heading to a Paul Robeson concert. Though Rochelle disapproved, Paul decided to take young Daniel to the concert with them. Robeson was a “proud black Communist” (58), and he performed while groups protested outside. On the way home, their bus was unexpectedly diverted. Rochelle cradled her son as racist, anti-communist attackers threw missiles at their bus. When Paul tried to confront the attackers, he was beaten, and his arm was broken. Though he does not remember the journey home, Daniel remembers the image of his father recovering on the couch. He remembers realizing for the first time that his father was naïve in the face of violence, even though Paul may have saved his friends’ lives since he was “the only man who did anything” (64). Daniel compares his father’s actions to the role of Bukharin, who was tried and executed in Stalin’s show trials in the Soviet Union in 1938.

Daniel and his family drive Susan’s car back to the Lewin home. As they talk, Daniel thinks about when he met Phyllis. She is from a wealthy New York family who seemed wary of the reputation of Daniel’s family. As Daniel drives fast through the rain, Phyllis admits that she is worried that Daniel finds her boring, especially as his family has such “big deals of suffering” (72). Daniel drives faster and Phyllis becomes scared and eventually agrees to Daniel’s demand to remove her pants, at which point Daniel switches the narrative focus as he contemplates burning her with the car’s cigarette lighter.

After Daniel and Susan were adopted by the Lewins, they never talked about their parents. They fought often but grew accustomed to “life in the middle class” (77), which still embarrasses Daniel. Living with the Lewins was very different from living with his parents. Though the world wanted Daniel and Susan to forget their parents, he believes, they could never escape their parents’ reputations. Daniel stopped talking to Susan when he left for college, but he realized that he could never escape the reality of his parents’ executions. He reached out to Susan, by which time her personality had changed. She had developed a “commanding presence” and become sexually adventurous. Her openness about private matters confounded Daniel.

The narrative switches to a biography of Daniel’s grandmother written from her perspective. She was a Jewish woman who fled persecution in Europe by “Czarist maniacs.” In the United States, she married quickly and lived in poverty on the Lower East Side. She lost one son in a tragic accident and another to the 1918 flu, as well as two younger sisters in a factory fire. When her husband died, she was left with only Rochelle. Daniel remembers his grandmother, who cursed in Yiddish and gave him pennies. She tended to run away from home in her old age and she would be brought back by the police, developing a reputation as the “neighborhood crazywoman.” Daniel blames her bouts of madness on superstition. He compares her struggles to the Bolsheviks’ attempts to educate “the Russian peasants” (85). He wonders whether he and Susan have inherited her mental health condition.

Daniel has a difficult relationship with his homeland. He always feels judged because of his parent’s reputation. He cannot pledge himself to the country that killed his parents, nor can he commit to political radicalism for fear that he would be doing exactly what everyone expects him to do. As a result, he feels powerless. He is “deprived of the chance of resisting [his] government” (89) and resents the implication that any political activism he might embark upon may be the result of his inherited genes. He thinks about historical ways in which countries have executed those accused of treason.

Robert and Lise Lewin were good, respectable, and Jewish, making them the ideal candidates to take in the Isaacson children. When Daniel drives Susan’s car to the Lewin house, he finds a letter written to him from Susan. In the letter, she shares traumatic memories and her plans to build the Foundation for Revolution in their parents’ name using money from their trust fund. Daniel was not supportive of the project, which caused tension in their relationship. As a result, Susan sought to purge Daniel from her life. Daniel remembers how their argument over her plans for the Foundation ruined a Christmas meal the year before.

Daniel describes his grandmother’s wake in 1947. He remembers the comforting smells, the crowds of people that “filled the house” (102), and his mother’s sadness. He remembers overhearing his father talking about the targeting of the Communist Party by the government and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Paul decried the “Fascistic insanity” of America. One man stood out among the guests at the wake, but Daniel did not know his name. Leaving the funeral and getting lost in his thoughts, Daniel visited a local African American superintendent who had a strange relationship with his grandmother. The man, Williams, hinted to Daniel that his grandmother was not as “crazy” as his parents. Daniel and Williams argued, and then Daniel ran away. Now, Daniel reflects on how irrelevant and “obscure” his family had been at the time. He remembers his mother telling him that “an atom bomb had been dropped on Japan” (118).