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Schwab Auditorium, Pennsylvania State University October 18, 1982 Thank you very much for the kind invitation to be with you here this evening. I’m especially grateful to the very nice people who hosted me at dinner this evening. Let me try to use the very brief time that we have together to tell you something about the background of the books that I have thus far written. Try to present to you the invisible scaffolding that holds the books together. The scaffolding that you’re really not supposed to discern as you read the books. You need not have read the books in order to follow what I’m going to try to present to you this evening. I’m going to start in a place very distant from the setting of the early novels . It isn’t so much a matter of scratching your left ear with the right hand, as much as it is an effort on my part to present to you how it came about that I worked out the basic model with which I do the exploring that I do as a writer. The triggering for the model was very far from the Brooklyn world in which the early novels are set. Early in February 1957, before many of you were born, I stood in Hiroshima at the blast site of the atomic bomb. I was, as you heard from the introduction, a chaplain at the time with the frontline engineer combat battalion in Korea. I had been in Korea for about a year chaim potok My Life as a Writer Chaim Potok 14 MY LIFE AS A WRITER 161 before the time that I journeyed to Hiroshima, and all the time in Korea I had felt myself drawn to that site, had felt somehow the horror of it, the awe of it, and knew that I would one day end up there. It was for me, and for the friend that accompanied me there, a long and very arduous journey. We went via Hong Kong and Cairo back to northern Japan and down through Japan across the sea to Hiroshima, in those days a lengthy journey indeed. I remember standing in front of the monument to peace, on what was then a bare, sandy, clean-swept area. A park, it is now green. I remember standing there, and remembering how I felt as a teenager, about the age of many of you here, when I heard for the first time about the dropping of the bomb. Very glad, truth to tell, that that bomb had been dropped because I knew somehow the war would be over. That was my initial response, and then frightened, feeling somehow that our species had turned a corner in its development, and nothing would ever be the same for us again. I stood there as a confused set of feelings came through me. What did it mean to me, that moment? Why was I there? What did it mean to me as an American? As a participant in Western civilization? I could not understand. I went back to my battalion and was haunted by that moment for all the remaining months I spent in Korea. Returned home, the haunting would not dissipate. That experience in Hiroshima , and a number of other experiences that I had during the months that I spent in Korea, continued to resonate inside me. And I began to explore that experience with the world of Asia, and the only way that I knew to do anything , I had trained myself from the time I was a young teenager to see the world through the medium of fiction, storytelling, a certain way of giving configuration, shape, to the way we think of the world as human beings. I began to explore that long encounter with the world of Asia through the medium of storytelling, and slowly, through writing, and the writing took years and years, a model began to develop. A model of activity in which every one of us is engaged today whether we are aware of it or not, and for the most part we are unaware of it, it is so integral to our lives. What I would like to do is share that model with you. All the books that I have thus far written have utilized this model, and all the books have been an attempt to lead up to and explore that moment in Hiroshima, and that long, dark...

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