Chaim Potok (1929-2002). Biography and Creativity

Herman Harold Potok was born on February 17, 1929, in the Bronx, New York City, to Polish immigrant parents. In accordance with Jewish naming customs, he also had a Hebrew name: Chaim Tsvi. However, it is the combination of his Hebrew and non-Hebrew names with which students will be most familiar: Chaim Potok. And, it is a fitting combination, because he was a man who spent his career attempting to reconcile his Jewish faith with his growing awareness of the secular world around him.

Potok was educated in Orthodox Jewish parochial schools—schools that combine learning the Talmud (a sacred Jewish text) with secular courses like mathematics and English. Although an understanding of Judaism is not necessary to read any of Potok’s novels, it is important to know that growing up as a Hasidic Jew meant that his family upheld a strict observance of Jewish customs and rituals. Unlike Orthodox Jews, Hasidic Jews stand out in physical appearance, wearing black suits, a gartel/girdle around the waist, sometimes a round fur-trimmed hat called a shtreiml, and a beard. The physical appearance of the Hasidim signifies their separation from the rest of the world. The Potok home was not marked by the distinct physical appearance of the Hasidim, but they did observe the strict rituals and followed the Hasidic prayer book.

Study of the Talmud is highly prized in the Orthodox community, so when Potok showed an aptitude for visual arts around the age of 10, many conflicts ensued. Judaism adheres to the Ten Commandments, one of which prescribes: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4).

Thus, the visual arts are not as valued as talmudic scholarship among Orthodox Jews. Though Potok’s mother indulged his creativity while he was young, after his bar mitzvah she could no longer support him; his father never accepted Potok’s foray into visual arts. To his father the visual arts belonged to the secular world—a world from which they were set apart. Nevertheless, Potok’s creative drive never ceased; when he was an adult, oil painting and photography remained two of his hobbies.

By the time Potok turned 16, he had discovered a new form of artistic expression in fictional writing. He cites Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited as the novel that inspired him to explore writing. James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had a similar effect. He was moved by the emotions and experiences he felt while reading the novels despite his unfamiliarity with the worlds depicted by the authors. He submitted his first written story to a publisher, who did not accept the story but encouraged him by inquiring into whether Potok was ever going to write a novel. By the time he entered Yeshiva University in 1946, he had made a commitment to be a writer.

Potok’s choice to become a writer was met with disappointment in his Hasidic community: The choice alienated him from friends, family, and former teachers. Yet, what sets Potok apart from other writers who discuss the collision of faith and the secular world is that he chose to remain devout. Leaving behind the Hasidic culture he knew, he became a Conservative Jew. However, by removing himself from a culture he had known for so long, he had to reevaluate everything he knew. In interviews, Potok referred to this period in his life, claiming this experience as one catalyst for his recurring theme of “core- to-core cultural confrontation.” Because he chose to pursue writing fiction, he encountered emerging theories about scholarship and identity that challenged and later would reinforce his faith. He was able to face many crises of faith and emerge established more firmly in his beliefs.

In 1950 he graduated summa cum laude from Yeshiva University with a B.A. in English literature. Prior to entering seminary, he knew that he wanted to be a writer who would explore Judaism and the 20th century. He went on to the Jewish Theological Seminary in order to gain a better understanding of Judaism, and he graduated with an M.H.L. degree in 1954. In the year that followed he served as the national director of the Leaders Training Fellowship at the seminary. Potok then joined the U.S. Army in 1956 and served as a chaplain in the Korean War for one year. His service as chaplain fulfilled the seminary requirement for rabbinical ordination, but he knew that his place was not at a pulpit.

Potok referred to his experience in the Korean War as the period during which his beliefs were most tested. He was forced into the unfamiliar culture of Asia, and his internal struggles with his faith would become the inspiration for all of his novels. In a 1981 interview with S. Lillian Kremer, he explained about his experience in Korea: “I had been brought up to believe that Judaism made a fundamental difference in the world and I ended up in a world in which Judaism meant nothing. . . . It [being in Korea and experiencing the culture] required a lot of rethinking” (37). He has said that, ironically, it was in Korea, immersed in the secular world, that he first understood beauty.

Returning to America in 1957, Potok took residence as an instructor at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles for two years. In 1958, he married Adena Sara Mosevitzsky, with whom he would later have three daughters. Still haunted by his experiences in Korea, he spent time dealing with his crises of faith. In the interview with Kremer, Potok said that he started backward, contemplating the boy who went to Korea rather than the conflicted soul who left. His experience in Korea became the inspiration for his first novel, which was not accepted by publishers but would later be published as I Am the Clay in 1992. In fact, Potok has admitted that most of the books written by 1981 had main characters who were representations of him—each of the characters confronting something that he had dealt with while coming to terms with his faith.

Potok took on several different positions in the Jewish community before his first novel would be published in 1967. He served as the scholar in residence at Har Zion Temple in Philadelphia in 1959-63. He joined the faculty at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1963-64 and worked as the managing editor of Conservative Judaism in 1964-65. While holding these various positions, he also worked toward his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. He did not stay at the university to complete the course of study but instead moved to Jerusalem while studying secular philosophy with the intention of getting a better understanding of Western culture—much in the same way he had entered the seminary to understand Judaism better. Two years later, when The Chosen (1967) was published, he was serving as editor in chief of the Jewish Publication Society.

The Chosen met with critical acclaim and remained on best-seller lists for six months, even reaching the number one position. This novel remains his most- taught work and has been translated into many languages. The novel explores Potok’s notion of “core-to-core cultural confrontation”—his exploration of what happens when someone embedded in one culture encounters a culture markedly different.

His writing has been described as semiautobiographical because many of the questions that his characters deal with are issues that he wanted to answer for himself. He returns to the core-to-core cultural confrontation theme in all of his fiction novels: It is Freud for Danny Saunders; it is a scientific approach to the Talmud for Reuven Malter; it is anti-Semitism for David Lurie; it is art for Asher Lev; and it is feminism for Davita Chandal. Because he explores this theme throughout his work, critics have considered this a weakness in his books.

Some critics also object to his use of simple language and the fact that none of his characters ever completely leaves behind Judaism. In a world affected by the teachings of Darwin and Freud and haunted by the atrocities of the Holocaust, most authors who approached religion tended to do so negatively. Any type of religious observance was met with the attitude that people who chose to have faith were uninformed and ignorant. However, Potok argued differently: In his novels, and in his life, faith and knowledge coexist.

In spite of the many criticisms Potok has endured for the style of his novels, The Chosen marks the beginning of a long career as rabbi, scholar, and novelist. Potok wrote almost 20 works of nonfiction and fiction, as well as countless articles and commentaries. His articles appeared in publications such as TriQuarterly, Esquire, the New York Times Book Review, the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, and American Judaism. He also wrote three children’s books: The Tree of Here (1993), The Sky of Now (1995), and Zebra and Other Stories (1998).

He received numerous accolades for his work, including a National Book Award nomination and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for The Chosen; the Athenaeum Prize for The Promise; the Jewish National Book Award for The Gift of Asher Lev; the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Achievement Award; an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from La Sierra University; the Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play for his adaptation of The Chosen; the O. Henry Memorial Award for “Moon”; and the Distinguished Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Potok was actively engaged in the Jewish community as well as in the world of fiction. He had membership in the Authors’ Guild, the Dramatists’ Guild, the Authors’ League of America, the Rabbinical Assembly, PEN, and Artists’ Equity. Potok spent his life dealing with cultural confrontation, but he never failed to create a new understanding of the world that included both of the cultures that he loved. Because of his continued scholarship, Potok spent much of his life as a lecturer at various universities, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania (1983, 1992-98), Bryn Mawr College (1985), and Johns Hopkins University (1995-98).

Although he was diagnosed with brain cancer at the turn of the 21st century, Potok did not slow down his research and writing. His last novel, Old Men at Midnight, was published in 2001, one year before his death, on July 23, 2002. Potok spent more than 30 years contributing to contemporary American fiction, exploring themes such as racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, the horrors of war, and Jewish identity. His books have received international renown, having been translated into a number of different languages.

Often labeled a “Jewish-American” writer, Potok accepted that the label needed to exist for purposes of studying literature but always expressed distaste for the term. In one of his later interviews with Elaine M. Kauvar, he responded, “I think the proper way to categorize, if I were to do it, is to say that all of us are American writers with different kinds of subjects and territories” (Walden 77). He did not see himself as a “Jewish” writer in the same manner as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Unlike Roth and the early work of Bellow, Potok worked from within the core of Judaism. He claimed that most of the heralded Jewish authors were writing about a Jewish experience different from what he wrote about—they wrote about Judaism from a peripheral understanding. Whereas he had done extensive research into the customs and language, his fellow Jewish-American authors would often misquote or misrepresent Jewish culture. His novels take place in the heart of Judaism and address questions of identity from within the Jewish community.

However, he felt that his novels had universal appeal; he did not think that “core-to-core cultural confrontation” was a new idea, nor specific to Judaism. Danny Saunders has contact with Freud much in the same way that a devout Christian or Muslim might. For someone to remain devout in any faith, in the face of 20th-century developments in science and psychology, he or she would have to undergo the same struggles that face his Jewish characters. In a posthumous article entitled “The Orthodoxies of Chaim Potok,” George Jochnowitz wrote that “Potok chose to write about inner struggles concerning belief and identity rather than love or money. He defined his own area of exploration.

His understanding of the characters he created, with all their internal contradictions, is what makes him a great novelist.” Potok focused on one group of people because that was what he knew best, and he believed, as did James Joyce, that “in the particular is contained the universal.” And while there is an underlying darkness to all of his novels, he approached his fiction with the firm belief that there are a benevolent creator and a purpose to life.