At first, he doubted whether there were likely to be many readers for a story about two teenage boys in an Orthodox Jewish world, whose fathers represented alternative Judaisms. The Chosen found readers among conservative and evangelical communities, who responded to his grasp of the powerful claims of tradition.
Though few Jewish intellectuals saw it at the time, Potok's was the more universal subject. But in other ways it represented a striking departure from the emerging American Jewish literary canon which Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth were establishing: the drama of assimilation - of the move from the inner-city ghetto to the suburbs - interested Potok less than the conflict of individual aspiration and the demands of the community and its values. Its appeal to American readers, at a time of profound national disorder and conflict, is understandable. The Chosen stood on the New York Times bestseller lists for more than six months it was a finalist for the US national book award, and, in 1981, was made into a feature film starring Rod Steiger.
In fact, there is only one novel without a Jewish setting, a bleak portrayal of uneducated Korean war refugees, entitled I Am The Clay (1992). His literary career began with an autobiographical novel, The Chosen (1967), which was followed by eight novels, books for children and works on popular theology, history and art. The lure of intellectual and artistic self-emancipation put him at odds with his family, and the Orthodox faith itself, though, as a novelist, he wrote warmly of the possibility of an undistracted faith, simple and pure.īut such security was not his own experience, and the tension between the closed world of piety and the modern world, with its powerful intellectual resources - from Freudian psychoanalysis to the scientific criticism of texts - gave Potok a subject to which he returned again and again.
As a teenager, he listened to The Lone Ranger on the radio, and read Joyce's Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, and the novels of Hemingway and Evelyn Waugh. He encountered New York in the 1940s, with its passion for baseball and ethnic politics, through secret acts, little betrayals. In other respects, however, his early years were spent in a community determined to keep the secular world at a distance. Potok grew up in a modern Orthodox form of Judaism - modern in the sense that men did not grow beards and were not expected to retain their earlocks.
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