Chaim Potok’s The Chosen is a novel about Orthodox and Hasidic Jews living in Brooklyn toward the end of World War II, written in a contemporary vernacular. It is about two kinds of orthodoxy and about two subcultures confronting each other. It is also a kind of love story, about Danny and Reuven, not another angst-ridden novel about alienation.
In The Chosen, set in the Crown Heights and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn, a baseball game between an orthodox team and a Hasidic team brings together Danny Saunders, son of the rebbe, and Reuven Malter, son of a Zionist activist talmudic scholar. Danny, elevating the game to a Holy War, purposely hits Reuven with a ball, sending him to the hospital. At the hospital Danny makes amends and in the doing they become fast friends, which is frowned on by the rebbe. Meantime Reb Saunders, the tzaddik (the wise one, leader of the sect), believing that there is a danger that his son’s soul might be dominated by his mind, decides to speak to him in silence. In this way he will foster the values of heart and soul. Mr. Malter, viewed by the Hasidim as a rationalist and not a true believer, fuses the best secular learning with the best in talmudic scholarship. What happens is that as the relationship between Danny and Reuven ripens, Danny decides to become a psychologist, abdicating his role as heir to his father, while Reuven decides to become a rabbi, a rabbi to whom symbolic logic, math, and secular philosophy would help fuse the sacred and the secular. Each was combining two cultures and each was reflecting his and Potok’s own attempts as a zwischenmensch (a between person) to explore the role of Judaism in a secular society. The Chosen, for all its religious character, is a highly American novel. As Sheldon Grebstein has pointed out, it is reminiscent of the American cultural myth at the heart of the Horatio Alger stories and The Great Gatsby, optimism and the dream of success.
Potok is demonstrating the collision of two subcultures in an American context. As Tony Savio (an ex-boxer in the hospital who may lose an eye because of ring injuries) warns Reuven about Danny: “Real religious guy? Fanatic.” One of the points made by Potok is that religion is a fine thing—but not the destructive, all-consuming inflexible kind practiced by the Hasidim. Danny’s decision at the end to become a psychologist includes the use of Freud and talmudic study, as he is determined to continue to be an observant Jew.
In The Chosen Danny and Reuven represent the two poles within Orthodox Judaism. In that space lie the tensions Potok was exploring. As a writer, as a rabbi, as a scholar he was trying to understand and explain the forces that exist and the cultural confrontations he saw, as Judaism, traditional and modern, came in contact with the world we all know.
Sources
Alexander, Edward. Chaim Potok. Boston: Twayne, 1986.
Grebstein, Sheldon. “The Phenomenon of the Really Best Seller: Chaim Potok’s The Chosen.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 1 (Spring 1975): 23–31.
Nissenson, Hugh. “The Spark and the Shell.” New York Times Book Review, 7 May 1967, p. 4.
Potok, Chaim. The Chosen. New York: Knopf, 1967.
———. “Reply to a Semi-Sympathetic Critic.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 2 (1976): 30–34.
Rosen, Jonathan. “Chaim Potok and the Question of Jewish Writing.” In Chaim Potok and Jewish American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2002.
Sternlicht, Sanford. Chaim Potok. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Walden, Daniel, ed. Conversations with Chaim Potok. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
———. “The World of Chaim Potok.” Whole issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature 1 (Spring 1975).
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