Chaim Potok--rabbi, scholar, novelist--was a remarkable figure of the 20th century in the United States--and quite fortunately he has left us a literary inheritance that will go on inspiring lovers of the written word for generations to come.
We at ICM have several works by Potok in our library--My Name is Asher Lev, The Chosen, The Promise, The Book of Lights, Wanderings --and in our reference section we have his work as editor on the Jewish Publication Society’s five-volume set of the Torah. Also on our shelves you will find his erudition on the pages of Etz Chaim, the Conservative Movement’s commentary.
Prolific he was.
Recently, I’ve been on a bit of a Potok kick. I’ve been devouring his novels. Each one reminds me of his brilliant ability to create vivid characters in a Jewish milieu while weaving powerful stories about the forces that were buffeting them both within and outside of the Jewish community.
Much of the books incorporate his earlier life through fictional characters. Raised in a Hasidic environment, Potok was ordained at the Conservative Movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary. He was both a great Jewish scholar and an accomplished novelist.
He also broke from the traditions of his own Hasidic roots to engage with Judaism. As Potok was exposed to modern scholarship and secular, that is, non-religious thinkers, Potok was able to live his life celebrating traditions while evolving as a thinker.
To read these novels is to peer into the world of Jewry in the United States during and immediately after the Second World War. As we all know, European Jewry was destroyed. Potok’s novels illustrate, in part, the impact of that destruction in the United States Jewish community of the time.
In The Chosen we first meet the character of Reuven Malter. Reuven’s yeshivah is playing another yeshivah in baseball when one Daniel Saunders, son of the illustrious tzaddik Rav Saunders, singles the ball right into Reuven’s eye. Reuven, of course, is very angry, but Reuven’s father prevails on him to make Daniel a friend. Danny’s father is a tzaddik, a dynastic leader of a Hasidic community--and it is his interpretations and aura that define communal norms, religious practices, and values--right down to which version of Polish nobility dress they will wear, even on the hottest days of a Brooklyn summer.
Another conflict that Potok weaves through The Chosen is Reuven’s father is a noted Orthodox Talmud scholar whose work uses variant manuscript texts to harmonize contradictions in the Talmud. This is scandalous to those in the yeshivah world as this method of inquiry calls into question the Talmud’s holiness as being revealed by God to Moses at Mt. Sinai simultaneous with the written Torah.
Potok intertwines the friendship between the two students, filling the reader in on the background of the rise of Hasidism and the tensions it wrought in the Jewish world. Making it more difficult, Reuven’s new friend Danny is suppose to inherit his father’s position as the leader of his group of Hasidim, but Danny is much more interested in psychology and the ideas that lay far beyond outside the insular Hasidic world. It is Reuven’s father that helps Danny open his world by recommending books to read in the public library.
It is a page-turner.
As is The Promise. Potok picks-up where he left off--but now the fictional Abraham Gordon, who is seemingly based on a real world Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, has a son with a mental disability.
Throughout the novel, Potok weaves the relationship with the Gordon child Michael and Danny, who is know a psychological intern, and Reuven, who is studying for his rabbinic examination at an Orthodox yeshiva where his talmud teacher believes that Reuven's father’s scholarly book is blasphemous because it uses literary criticism to resolve conflicts as opposed to the earlier commentators on the Talmud.
In short, brilliant plots interwoven between doses of Jewish knowledge which Potok takes the time to explain to the reader.
Potok took the use of his Hebrew first name Chaim and was known by it until his death in 2002.
As I said, many of his books are here in the ICM Library (that’s where I got them from). Give yourself the gift of becoming acquainted or reacquainted with Potok's fiction.
It opens our senses to the Jewish world of Brooklyn and Manhattan from 70 years ago.
For some of us, it will take you back.
For others, it’ll be a first-time visit. And well worth it.
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