The following is an excerpt from Back to the Best Books, a new reading guide featuring 36 classics, old and new. It’s full of great selections for book groups and readers that are looking for the next great read. The books are arranged by topic to make the discussion more fun for all. Back to the Best Books is available at Amazon.com. To join the conversation, go to www.backtothebestbooks.com.
This article is taken from Chapter Three: Boys to Men.
“The boy is father to the man.”
Proverb
“Long ago, in The Chosen,” Chaim Potok writes, “I set out to draw a map of the New York world through which I once journeyed. It was to be a map not only of broken streets, menacing alleys, concrete-surfaced backyards, neighborhood schools and stores . . . a map not only of the physical elements of my early life, but of the spiritual ones as well.” (Chaim Potok, “The Invisible Map of Meaning: A Writer’s Confrontation,” Triquarterly, Spring 1992) With his glimpse into the lives of the Hasidic Jews of New York, Chaim Potok transports us to a world completely strange, yet strangely familiar.
Synopsis
The Chosen is the story of two young men growing up in Brooklyn just before the onset of World War II. Through a chance encounter between their baseball teams they form a friendship that changes both their lives. Reuven Malter is the narrator and a traditional orthodox Jew. He is the son of a passionate Zionist and dedicated scholar. Danny Saunders, a Hasidic Jew, is a brilliant boy with a photographic memory, who is being raised by his father under a code of silence. Other than in discussions of the Talmud, Reb Saunders never speaks to his son directly. This is to “teach him the suffering of the world” and prepare him to assume his father’s place as the head of the Hasidic sect. Though the two boys see each other as complete cultural strangers, to the outside world they are simply both Jews. .
As they become acquainted we come to understand, with Reuven, something about Hasidism, the ultra-conservative sect that originated in Poland in response to the persecutions suffered by Jews hundreds of years ago. Each group of Hasidic Jews is led by a Tzaddik, a mystical leader who is rabbi, prophet and even a Messianic figure to his followers. They dwell in a world closed even to other Jews, and as Reuven enters this world through his friendship with Danny, we have the rare opportunity to experience a fascinating culture within a culture. Danny is unwilling to follow in his father’s footsteps and longs to study psychology. We follow the boys through their high school and college years, as they come to terms with their fathers, their faith and their futures.
What Makes it Great
The greatness of this novel, and its enduring appeal, lies in the characters of the two boys at its heart. Both Danny and Reuven are irresistible in their sincerity and intelligence. It’s not easy being Jewish in any age, and Potok gives us a feel for the myriad challenges that they face. Potok’s strength is not in description or plot; it is in character. These boys and their fathers entrance us; we cannot look away. Here is the moment when Reb Saunders explains to Reuven (and by extension to Danny) why he imposed the code of silence that has caused Danny so much pain and sorrow.
“My father himself never talked to me, except when we studied together. He taught me with silence. He taught me to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. . . . One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain, he would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one’s own soul. And it is important to know of pain, he said. It destroys our self-pride, our arrogance, our indifference toward others. It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe. . . .
“Reuven, I did not want my Daniel to become like my brother, may he rest in peace. Better I should have had no son at all than to have a brilliant son who had no soul. . . . And I had to make certain his soul would be the soul of a tzaddik no matter what he did with his life.” (278, 279)
A Man of the World
Chaim Potok, born Herman Harold Potok, was reared in an Orthodox Jewish home by Polish immigrant parents. His parents also gave him his Hebrew name Chaim, meaning “life” or “alive.” Born in 1929 in New York City, he attended religious schools. However, as a young man he became man fascinated by less restrictive Jewish doctrines, earned degrees in English and Hebrew literature, and was eventually ordained a Conservative rabbi. He joined the U.S. Army as a chaplain and served in South Korea from 1955 to 1957, which he described as a transformative experience.
Chaim Potok says that he wrote The Chosen in order to come to terms with his own Jewish upbringing, particularly the fundamentalist viewpoint that taught him to see the Jewish race at the center of world history. Raised in an unquestioning orthodox home, Chaim graduated from his local Yeshiva and was ordained a rabbi. It was at this point that his life changed completely, when he was sent to Korea for two years as a chaplain. Of this experience he says, “When I went to Korea I was a very coherent human being in the sense that I had a model of what I was – I had a map. I knew who I was as a Jew. When I went to Asia, it all came unglued. It all became relativized. Everything turned upside down.” (Chaim Potok, personal interview)
Potok’s father had taught him that Jews suffered because they were God’s chosen, yet over a million Koreans had been senselessly slaughtered during the war. Were they also chosen in some way, or was all the suffering meaningless? As a boy, Potok had been taught to believe that paganism was evil, yet in the faces of devout Buddhists in prayer he recognized the same intensity that he knew in the faces of the faithful Jews in his synagogue. How could God hate these sincere, devout people? Potok began to question his assumption that Judaism was the only truth worth knowing and also his assumption that America was the only great nation. He concludes: “That experience not only relativized my Jewishness, it relativized my American-ness and my western-ness simultaneously. It set everything into specific culture contexts and at the same time taught me that my culture could be viewed from outside its perimeters by another culture, and be seen in an altogether different way. What happened was that I began to see my culture from the outside. When that happens to your head, you are never the same again.”
Chaim Potok understands that by helping us see into another culture, we may get a new perspective on our own.
One of his early inspirations was James Joyce, who wrote only about his hometown of Dublin. Joyce said, “If I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities in the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” As we get into the heart of a lonely Hasidic boy we learn some universal truths about the human struggle, and find curious parallels between his world and our own.
Reuven’s father tells him, “Human beings do not live forever, Rueven, we live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So we may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? I learned a long time ago, that the blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. The span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so that its quality is immeasurable, though its quantity may be insignificant. A man must fill his life with meaning; meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest, when I am no longer here…” (147)
Few goals are worthy of greater dedication.
About the Author: Chaim Potok
In 1967, Potok began his career as an author and novelist with the publication of The Chosen, written while he lived with his family in Jerusalem. It stands as the first book from a major publisher to portray Orthodox Judaism in the United States. After spending six months on the bestseller list, the book has remained extremely popular. Chaim Potok “wrote of what he knew best, Jewish-Americans in the 20th century struggling with two contradictory yet valid points of view.” (Shirley Saad, UPI). The conflict can best be summed up in Potok’s own words, “Is it possible to live in a religious culture and a secular culture at the same time?”
The Chosen was made into a film, released in 1981, which won the top award at the World Film Festival, Montreal. The novel was also adapted into a stage play by the author. He went on to publish a sequel to the book, The Promise, and many other fiction and non-fiction works.
In 1958, Potok married Adena Sara Mosevitzsky, a psychiatric social worker, whom he met in 1952 at Camp Ramah in the Poconos. They had three children: Rena, Naama, and Akiva. He died of brain cancer in 2002.
