Matt Posner's Blog: You've Been Schooled - Posts Tagged "the-ghost-in-the-crystal"

I will soon finish rereading Chaim Potok's The Chosen which I am scheduled to teach to honors English 11. I have always read it for pleasure before, so reading it as a teacher feels pretty different. For the first time, I have begun to figure out why the novel starts out with so much stuff about eyes and blindness. It has to do with realizing the true self vs. being blind to one's identity. The final words of Part Two, "The only thing different about him was that he was now wearing glasses"(from reading too much) have broken the novel open for me in that regard.

The Chosen was a pivotal text in the construction of The Ghost in the Crystal. As I have acknowledged in other places, my character of Yakov Mermelstein is a variation upon Potok's Danny Saunders. Both are expected to be inheritors of their hereditary Chasidic rabbinical families, but whereas Danny's intelligence draws him to explore the world beyond the enclave, Yakov's personality causes him to fear that world and to resist it violently. As Danny, raised to be exclusively religious, is drawn out of his community and to a less rigid form of faith, so Yakov, who does not want to leave, has to do so in order to become more religious in the end.

The connection between the two characters may not be obvious, except that both use the term apikoros against their novels' protagonists, Danny against Reuven and Yakov against Simon, albeit for very different reasons. But I feel the connections very strongly.

Deborah Feldman, the famous young author of Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, read The Ghost in the Crystal and sent me a few remarks through a mutual friend. (I have never met Deborah.) I won't share all these remarks, but one was that she felt my version of Chasidism was too nice. I don't know about that. I know that my version owes a lot to Potok, who views the Chasidim with some sympathy (having left Chasidism just as Danny does).

I have limited personal experience with Chasidim, much more with Orthodox Jews, for whom I worked as an English teacher in three very different yeshivot in the early 2000s. My experience was that they were just people, and some were as kind as others were heartless. I think this is the only way I can write about people, as a mixed bunch.

I also owe some of my perception of Jews as characters to a fair bit of reading in Isaac Bashevis Singer, but I'll save that for another time.