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University of Pennsylvania December 15, 2002 Born in 1929 in the Bronx, New York—his father, Benjamin Potok, a Belzer Hasid and his mother, Molly, a descendant of the Hasidic Ryzner dynasty— Chaim Tzvi grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Attending a cheder, a primary Jewish parochial school, his interest in and talent for painting came to the fore when one summer his yeshiva inexplicably hired an artist to give a course in painting to the children . That was his first step into the world of Western art. In his childhood, what Joyce was to Jesuits, painting was to Talmud. Deep into the study of Torah, and Talmud, he had begun that journey that would put his focus within the core of the Jewish tradition in confrontation with the world we all inhabit, the world of Western secular humanism. At the same time he was reading Ivanhoe and Treasure Island in his high school English subjects, he was browsing in the public library and came across Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, an adult novel about upper-class British Catholics. He remembered asking himself, “What did he do to me? How do you do this kind of thing with words?” That’s where his commitment to write began. What Chaim Potok discovered as he was writing The Chosen (1967), his first published book, was a cultural dynamic, a “culture war.” Within the overchaim potok A Zwischenmensch (“Between Person”) in the Cultures Daniel Walden 9 A ZWISCHENMENSCH IN THE CULTURES 129 arching culture in which we all live is the culture we call Western humanism —what Peter Gay calls “modern paganism”—and within that culture is a whole spectrum of subcultures. What happens is that these subcultures clash in a variety of ways with the overarching culture. What he seems to have stumbled across was a kind of core-to-core cultural confrontation. To that point he had been committed to study. After reading Brideshead Revisited and soon afterward Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a strange hunger arose to create worlds of his own out of words on paper, to tell stories. You have to understand, explained Potok, that Judaism is a textoriented world; it is a word world. And to study is the central text of the tradition . It is a commandment. Not to study the text is a transgression. It was this that concerned the rabbi, the teacher of Talmud. He sensed that in some strange and unexpected fashion, Potok had made contact with a fundamental element from the general civilization in which we all live—with the world of Newton, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Freud. He had made contact with Western literature. This powerful movement that the young Potok joined was part of a revolt of the modern contest against the grip of the emerging middle class, involving those individuals using the story in order to act as a mouthpiece against the ordinary, the callousness, the hypocrisy, the games they witnessed everywhere and felt they could no longer tolerate. He attempted to track one element of this confrontation; that is, ideas from the heart of one culture crashing up against ideas from the heart of another culture is what happens for individuals caught in what he called a core-to-core confrontation—in his case, the rigidity of his Hasidic upbringing and Freudian psychoanalytic theory. For example, Reuven Malter, in The Promise, was in confrontation with the Jewishness that he still loved. For In the Beginning’s David Lurie, given his father’s very militant Jewishness, all was in confrontation with a radical new way of looking at the central text of all Western traditions—the Bible. The Book of Lights, the most difficult of Potok’s novels to read and fully grasp, the novel about the atomic bomb, dealt with one individual’s confrontation with that core element of Western civilization and its effect on the world of Asia. Davita’s Harp, a book about a young woman’s struggles, was based in part on his wife’s experiences in an Orthodox world. But Potok was also concerned with images and metaphors. The central metaphor of The Chosen is “combat of various kinds,” the central metaphor of The Promise is “people gambling and winning or losing,” and the central metaphor in The Book of Lights is “the mystery and the awe that some of us sense [3.129.39.55] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 13...

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