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Chaim Potok was a world-class writer and scholar, a Conservative Jew who wrote from and about his tradition and the conflicts between observance and acculturation. With a plain, straightforward style, his novels were set against the moral, spiritual, and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. His characters thought about modernity and wrestled with the core-to-core cultural confrontations they experienced when modernity clashed with faith. Potok was able to communicate with millions of people of many religious beliefs all over the world, because, unlike his major predecessors, he wrote from the inside, inclusively. Beginning with The Chosen and continuing through The Promise, My Name Is Asher Lev, The Gift of Asher Lev, The Book of Lights, and Davita’s Harp, Potok wrote very American novels. They were understandable and attractive to one and all. As Sheldon Grebstein put it, referring to The Chosen, a runaway best seller, the dream of success played out in an improbable but possible “only in America” way, demonstrating that “people can still make good through hard work, . . . integrity, and dedication,” if also at the cost of occasional alienation. Refusing to ignore modern thought, Potok was led to a crisis of faith, which he resolved by embracing both modernity and observant Judaism. In his view, Judaism was a tradition integrating into the American culture, not opposed to it. He kept his focus on working out his characters’ identity as American. Through his novels, Potok was a major voice in American literature because he was the first Jewish American novelist to open up the Jewish experience to a mass audience, to make that world familiar and accessible as the outside world increasingly became willing to acknowledge that Jews are a multiethnic, multiracial, and multireligious people. Potok touched chords felt by many and diverse peoples with his probing and wonderfully written evocations of the world that he knew. Herman Harold (Chaim Tzvi in Hebrew) Potok was born in 1929 in the Bronx, New York, to Benjamin and Molly Potok. His father was a Belzer Hasid, his mother a descendant of the Hasidic Ryzner dynasty. Growing up in introduction Daniel Walden XII CHAIM POTOK an Orthodox family, he had little quarrel with his Jewish world. He had a very Jewish education: he went to cheder and then a yeshiva and earned his B.A. in English literature from Yeshiva University in 1950, graduating summa cum laude. But when he was nine or ten he began to draw and paint, and when he was sixteen he accidentally came across Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited in the local library. Reading outside the prescribed curriculum, Potok entered a new tradition, modern literature, and came to recognize that “fundamental to that tradition was a certain way of thinking the world” that he had not encountered or used before. It entailed a “binocular view of the iconoclast, the individual who grows up inside the inherited systems of value and, while growing, begins to recoil from the games, masks, and hypocrisies he sees all around him.” By the time Potok was eighteen or nineteen, as he transitioned from the Hebrew high school to the university, he began to experience a significant change. He came to realize that he and his people were at the core of a subculture in America and that the new and exciting interpretations and ideas he was discovering and experiencing were from the core of the majoritarian culture that he came to call “Western secular humanism.” Having been formed by his very Jewish world of the Bronx, his encounter with this umbrella culture resulted in his becoming a “Zwischenmensch”—that is, a “between person.” One of the triggers that gave rise to his life as a writer was his discovery of the world of Evelyn Waugh when he was sixteen. Having been raised in a fundamentalist tradition, Potok found that Brideshead Revisited had a galvanic effect on him. “I will never forget the effect this book had upon me,” he once told me. “I found myself in a world of a barest existence of which I knew nothing about before.” Brideshead Revisited was about upper-class British Catholics. But, Potok explained, “I lived more deeply inside the world of that book than I lived inside my own world for the length of time it took me to read that book.” What had Evelyn Waugh done to him? How did a writer, Potok mused, “utilizing the faculty of [the] imagination, so fuse words and imagination onto empty sheets of paper...

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