Chaim Potok: Confronting Modernity through the Lens of Tradition ed. by Daniel Walden (review)

Daniel Walden’s last book, published only a few months before his passing in November 2013, should be read as a moving tribute not only to Chaim Potok, whom Walden calls a “world-class writer and scholar,” but to Walden himself. Long a critical champion of Potok’s fiction in an academic milieu that tends to privilege secular rebellions over traditional commitments, Walden–likewise a world-class writer and scholar–insisted on re-casting American Jewish creative culture so that the concerns explored by Potok would no longer occupy the margins of American Jewish literary criticism.

The latest turns both in scholarship as well as fiction writing should further prove Walden’s prescience. Potok, derided by critics and scholars for his popular success, famously wrote about the tensions of American Jewish life from, as Walden writes in his introduction, “from the inside, inclusively” (xi). Potok, like many of his protagonists, embraced both modernity and traditional Judaism. As Walden and the other scholars collected in this volume note, Potok, a rabbi ordained by the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary and who also earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, termed his own and his characters’ struggles between secular modernity and ritual praxis “core-to-core cultural confrontations” (xi). His subjects were Jews at home in their faith and traditions negotiating, and often integrating, the possibilities offered by a modern, secular world. The significant organizing ideas that frame the volume are thus not migration and diaspora, ethnicity and identity–the lexicon that came to dominate American Jewish literary scholarship as it came of age–but rather faith, textuality, and community.

As these contributors note in nuanced though consistent ways, Potok delineates the creative and productive tensions between different modes of faithful Jewish practice, rather than between Jews and a dominant non-Jewish culture, or between Jews and other “Others” in America. Ironically, Potok’s unapologetically “Jewish” fiction, while contributing to his marginalization in academic discourse, has earned him enormous popularity among non-Jewish readers, suggesting, as Kathryn McClymond does, that “people across various religious communities [wrestle] with questions of how to live as modern Americans within traditional religious frameworks” (16). New attention to the realities of religious life in America, critical reappraisals of Cynthia Ozick and Allegra Goodman, and the rise of such writers as Dara Horn and Nathan Englander, all writers who, with many others, “write from the inside,” portend shifts in literary scholarship as well.

The volume features, in Part I, seven essays by both veteran and emerging scholars, and in Part 2, seven personal reminiscences about Potok by friends, family and colleagues, including Hugh Nissenson, Jonathan Rosen, Jane Eisner, and Adena Potok. The final word is a memoir by Potok himself, “My Life as a Writer.” The critical essays alone in the volume present probably the most complete picture to date of Potok criticism, beginning with Kathryn McClymond on Potok’s first (and still most famous) novel, The Chosen (1967); Jessica Lang and Victoria Aarons on its sequel, The Promise (1969); S. Lillian Kramer on the Asher Lev novels (1972 and 1990); Susanne Klingenstein on Davita’s Harp (1985); Sanford Marovitz on The Book of Lights (1981); and in a most original contribution drawing heavily on Potok’s archives, Nathan Devir on Potok’s last, “Un-Jewish” novel, I Am The Clay (1991). Part 2’s “rememberings” are hybrid pieces, often moving between memories of Potok himself and readings of the same novels featured in Part 1. The effect is both repetitive and reverberative. Daniel Walden’s introduction to the volume is repeated with only slight difference in his reminiscence in Part 2; Nathan Devir’s analysis of I Am The Clay find its counterpart in his Part 2 interview with Adena Potok on the genesis of that novel in Potok’s experiences as an army chaplain in Korea in 1956–7.

The volume is missing some of what one might expect in a critical...