The Return of David and Max

The works of great writers often endure to inspire and entertain many generations of readers beyond their own. The monumental genius of Shakespeare’s plays, for example, Boswell’s massive and ground-breaking Life of Samuel Johnson, the beautiful and classic simplicity of Aesop’s Fables. And there are more, of course. Many more.

But sometimes a book establishes its timelessness through its message rather than through its intellectual force, be it a message of love, honor, endurance or perhaps courage. And it may go through several editions and enchant several generations, because its message is eternal.

Such a book might be David and Max, authored by the husband-wife team Gail and Gary Provost in their 19 th Century Lancaster, Massachusetts home, and published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1988.

David and Max is the story of the love between a young Jewish boy (David Newman) and his grandfather (Max Levene), and of their quest to find the elder’s best childhood friend, two generations after the pals were separated by Nazi barbarism in Poland. Unfolding in the mythical central Massachusetts town of Westbridge, the story of David and Max was written for young adult readers. A delicate, often humorous rendering of an inter-generational bond, it is also a graphic and harrowing account of Max’s earlier sufferings in a Nazi concentration camp.

Highly acclaimed when it was published, David and Max earned a dozen nominations for important awards, and later, in 1995, the continued popularity of the book prompted a second printing.

David and Max’s “career” might have ended with that second printing, but suddenly in 1995 Mr. Provost died. Widowed and deeply distraught, Gail Provost struggled to remain active and involved. Though she gained the composure to tour the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. with a friend later that year, she was unaware of how that visit would one day contribute to her book’s longevity. But her tour did deepen the emotional impact of the tragedy by imprinting it with countless human faces.

Fast forward—Spring, 2005. Now relocated to Tulsa, Oklahoma and married to Tulsa University law professor Lance Stockwell, Gail returned to the Holocaust Museum with her parents. Her mother and father had been charter members of the Museum, and although they’d always hoped to visit, they never had.

“They were aging, more frail, and I was determined that they’d see the Museum they’d helped to establish,” she says. “So Lance and I drove them from their home in New Jersey to Washington and assisted them as they toured the Museum in wheelchairs.”

The impact of the second tour registered more deeply, and Gail left the Museum determined to help prevent forever the recurrence of mass cruelty. Following her instincts, she soon decided how she would do that.

At the time, the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art in Tulsa was training a new group of docents for its own Holocaust exhibit. Gail began preparing for her task by attending docent classes there. She studied, she conferred, she researched, she thought, and she planned.

“To fully immerse myself in such dark, painful research was completely uncharacteristic of me,” she admits. “Ever since my childhood I’d preferred to view the world through rose colored glasses, and I still have the rims to prove it. Somehow, though, I found the courage – or the courage found me — to revisit the Holocaust’s savagery, which had targeted all Jewish people. My people. My family.”

Prepared now, Gail proposed an updated version of David and Max to the Jewish Publication Society.

“It’s the right time,” she says. “In today’s climate of international terrorism, people generally have a heightened interest in the Holocaust. And young people have a more mature understanding of its significance and place in history. The story of David and Max—their love for each other, their mutual loyalty, their lively and good-natured companionship, all of which overlay Max’s horrifying experiences as a youth—is timeless. And it is timeless because at its core, through the vivid portrayal of Max’s sufferings, the story warns us of the devastating consequences of hatred and intolerance.”

David and Max, updated for a new generation and now available through the Jewish Publication Society in a new edition, will grace anyone’s library, regardless of age, creed, color or culture. It is a call for awareness, for justice and decency. Stark sometimes, often whimsically humorous yet bold in its purpose, the story of David and Max will resonate in the hearts and minds of readers long after they close the book.

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