Dawn

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1960

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary

Dawn is narrated in first person by Elisha, whose name isn’t revealed until the beginning of the second chapter. The first chapter opens in British Mandatory Palestine on an autumn evening. Elisha hears a child starting to cry somewhere.

Elisha recounts, “Tomorrow, I thought for the hundredth time, I would kill a man” (1). The man is Captain John Dawson, a hostage of the Movement. Elisha has never met Dawson and knows nothing about him other than the fact that he’s an Englishman and the enemy. Knowing that he has to execute Dawson makes Elisha miserable.

Elisha is accompanied by Gad, a fellow resistance member. Gad repeatedly reminds Elisha not to “torture himself” because it’s part of being at war.

Elisha reflects on a childhood experience, wherein he met a beggar while praying alone in the synagogue one night. When he first saw the beggar, he felt simultaneous fear and love because “a beggar might be the prophet Elijah in disguise” (3), but he could also be the Angel of Death. Elisha felt that he shouldn’t be in the synagogue much longer, because at midnight “the dead rise up from their graves and come to say their prayers” (3). Elisha offered the beggar food and a place to rest; the beggar said he wasn’t hungry and claimed that he never slept.

The beggar walked Elisha home, and Elisha admitted his fear of the dark. The beggar told him not to fear the dark, because night is “purer” than day. He told Elisha that “night has a face” (4) and that people are more honest at night. “Every evening since then I had made a point of standing near a window to witness the arrival of night” (5).

In the current narrative, night falls, and Elisha sees his own face reflected in the window.

Elisha reveals that he’s a member of a Zionist paramilitary organization called “the Movement.” The Movement’s leader, “the Old Man,” recently ordered Dawson to be executed. Dawson was kidnapped in response to English forces capturing a Jewish fighter named David ben Moshe; Dawson’s execution was declared in response to the English forces’ plan to execute ben Moshe. Both Jewish and English leadership fear that clemency toward their hostages indicates weakness.

The chapter ends with Gad repeating “This is war. Don’t torture yourself” (10) and Elisha repeating “Tomorrow I will kill a man” (10).

Chapter 2 Summary

Elisha introduces himself by name and adds that he’s 18. He says that Gad recruited him to the Movement and “made” him a terrorist. Elisha reflects on their first meeting.

They met in Paris immediately after World War II ended. The Americans had recently freed Elisha from the Buchenwald concentration camp. They offered to send Elisha home, but he refused, knowing his family was dead and his hometown was occupied by Russians. Instead, he sought asylum in France.

Elisha learned to speak French so that he could attend philosophy classes. He hoped they’d help him understand his traumatic experiences at Buchenwald, where he lost faith in God and his fellow man. He never attended the classes because Gad approached him to go to Palestine and join the Movement, a Zionist cause made up of young recruits “willing to offer their future” (18).

When they first met, Elisha regarded Gad as a holy messenger and privately compared him to Jehovah. Now, Elisha blames him for diverting him from his quest for answers.

In the current narrative, Gad and Elisha listen to Radio Jerusalem and hear confirmation that the English forces intend to hang David ben Moshe in the morning. The announcer identifies herself as “The Voice of Freedom.” Her real name is Ilana; she’s a friend of Elisha’s and is Gad’s girlfriend. Her announcement includes an impassioned appeal to the English, in which she repeatedly states, “We are not murderers” (23). She dedicates her broadcast to John Dawson and mourns for both him and ben Moshe. She identifies David as a “hero” whose death has meaning, whereas John is a “victim” whose death is meaningless.

As he listens, Elisha buries his face in his hands. The child outside stops crying.

Chapters 1-2 Analysis

Fate plays a significant role in Dawn. All his life, Elisha suffered due to forces beyond his control. Consequently, he developed a highly fatalistic view of life. In addition, he comes from a devoutly religious background, which leads him to think about existence in spiritual terms, even when he feels desolately nihilistic. His beliefs and feelings about fate—which speak to the theme The Post-Holocaust Jewish Experience—are particularly evident when he thinks of mysterious and intangible things like death and the future.

Elisha dwells on the concept of lives being “bound” together in death. Specifically, he dreads that he and Dawson will be “bound together by the tie that binds a victim and his executioner” (2). He doesn’t want to be branded an executioner for the rest of his existence. Likewise, he notes that John Dawson will be bound to David ben Moshe, as they’re both to die as collateral for each other’s capture.

Dawn’s preoccupation with fate is evident through characters like Elisha, Ilana, and Gad and the way they each talk about the future. All three speak of the future as if it’s fixed. Before their deaths, Ilana mourns for David and John on her radio program. Although she argues that ben Moshe’s death is “meaningful” where Dawson’s isn’t, she regards both their deaths as a waste of potential: “They might have been friends, but now this can never be” (21). Both are still alive at the time of the broadcast, but Ilana, her listeners, the Old Man, and everyone else involved are already resigned to their deaths.

Elisha’s fatalism about the future expresses itself through passivity. Although he has no desire to kill Dawson, he never considers refusing to participate in the execution. From the book’s outset, Elisha is already certain that he’ll kill a man. He thinks about this as if he has no choice in the matter. His grapples with his reluctance but never with whether to go through with the execution. Instead, he expresses his reluctance through myriad attempts to justify the killing to himself.

Gad treats the future as not merely fixed but an object to quantify and trade. When Elisha first meets him, he believes Gad has come to collect funds for Jewish Palestine; in fact, Gad states that he’s collecting “futures.” He asks Elisha to join the Movement by saying, “I want you to give me your future” (15), and speaks of other volunteers similarly: “The sum of their futures would be the freedom of Israel, the future of Palestine” (18). The way he talks about recruiting fighters suggests pooling the “futures”—the lives—of young men until he has collected a sufficient quantity to trade for “the future of Palestine.” This connotes an attitude toward death, loss, and suffering that isn’t merely fatalistic but actively callous.

In addition, also uses fatalistic concepts like destiny, fixity, and divine right to argue in favor of Zionism. In Gad’s view, Palestine isn’t only the ancestral home of the Jewish people, but the place where they naturally belong. When he says, “You walk out in the evening [in Palestine] with a woman, you tell her that she is beautiful and you love her, and twenty centuries hear what you are saying” (17), he places a romantic coupling between a Jewish man and woman in the context of an extensive history of Jews dwelling there. By his rhetoric, Jewish residence in Palestine is as natural as romance. Implicitly, Jewish couples should stay there and produce another generation, who will then take their place in their ancestral home, ad infinitum.