The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

I was always taught to be wary of the allure of pagan culture. Yet my sense of the beautiful was awakened in Asia. I saw there loveliness not only in the world of nature but also in the exquisite creations of human beings—creations dedicated to idols! I educated my eyes to the beauty in God’s world by letting them feast upon the radiance I beheld in a pagan land. How was I to come to terms with such irony?

Truth in all creation and in revelations of God subtly in other cultures and gods. The creator would leave his stamp on all creation, clues to his identity. What irony?

And if the God to whom I pray is listening to this old pagan’s prayer, then what are Judaism and Christianity all about?

Why this question ? It seems very obviously answered in both faiths.

Religious parents raise a son or daughter, don’t transmit their values, send the offspring away to be educated. Six months or a year later the son or daughter is utterly transformed. The reverse is true as well. Raise a child in a secular home, don’t transmit a core of values, the child has no sense of self, of rootedness. Off goes the child, encounters the hot core of a religious cult, and is changed. It is difficult not to be swayed by an alluring core if you are only peripherally attached to your past, your beginnings, your self. That is a periphery-to-core culture confrontation.

Saul Bellow’s Herzog: a picture of periphery-to-core culture confrontation. Herzog along the periphery of his Jewish world and in the center of the university world.

For the texture of core-to-core confrontation, read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen Dedalus, from the core of Irish Catholicism, in confrontation with the core of modern secularism: literature. And read Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. And most of Ibsen. And Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.

We’re told that a woman who has been raped reports the atrocity in incoherent bits and pieces. To questions, she will often respond with contradictory answers. Images vivid one moment dissolve the next. Reality, shattered by trauma, becomes fluid, prismatic, kaleidoscopic, chaotic. When the bits and pieces begin to become coherent; when she starts shaping them into a story, any kind of story—the process of healing has begun.

In our time, sundered by truths about ourselves and our world that yield more trauma than comfort, we often look upon story-making as the beginning of healing.

It gives us some notion of Joyce’s view of the nature and task of literature: For myself I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.

A novel is about particulars: the commonplace grittiness of life as reimagined by someone with a facility for setting down images with words on paper and making a map so rich in detail and resonance that it will become eyeglasses of sorts, worn by readers who will forever see the world of the writer through those lenses. No one who reads Tolstoy can ever see Russia the same way after finishing Tolstoy as he or she might have seen it before coming to Tolstoy. No one who reads Kafka and Joyce can ever see the inner world of humankind the same way after finishing Kafka and Joyce as he or she might have seen it before coming to Kafka and Joyce.

For In the Beginning’s David Lurie, given his father’s very militant Jewishness, all was in confrontation with a radical new way of looking at the central text of all Western traditions—the Bible. The Book of Lights, the most difficult of Potok’s novels to read and fully grasp, the novel about the atomic bomb, dealt with one individual’s confrontation with that core element of Western civilization and its effect on the world of Asia. Davita’s Harp, a book about a young woman’s struggles, was based in part on his wife’s experiences in an Orthodox world.

“Whereas some Hasidim are strong Zionists and see in the State of Israel a sign of the coming of the Messiah, the Hasidim of Williamsburg are anti-Zionist. They reject everything and everyone that is associated with the new state. They conceive that the existence of the State of Israel is a threat to their traditional perception of the Messiah, because ‘all of it must emerge through holiness.’ ”

The conflict in Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen functions at several levels. These are: the generational conflict; the temperamental; the conflict between head and heart; the opposition between a petrified fanaticism and a humane tolerance; and, finally, the split between two visions of God and man’s relationship to Him. Of all of these, however, it is the opposition between the head and the heart which predominates.

What is important here, though, is that Danny becomes an object, manipulated by his father, rather than a person one relates to.

Disagree.

Generally speaking, critics identified the great Jewish American writers as those who were in conflict with traditional Judaism. This is in sharp contrast to the Yiddish fiction tradition (as exemplified by Chaim Grade), which looked back to the old world, not necessarily as a utopian society but as a foundational community. Grade is best known for his novels The Agunah and My Mother’s Sabbath Days and for the short story “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner” (later adapted for stage and film). Grade is an apt figure for comparison with Potok because he, too, left Orthodox Judaism, but his writing moved in a different direction.

While Danny and Reuven make choices that disappoint, pain, and even anger each other and their families, the conflicts center on different interpretations of religious identity, not their fundamental allegiances, and no irreparable breaks occur.

Potok’s characters do experience alienation, but he does not suggest that their experience is unique.

Gershon Shaked comments, “In his [Potok’s] fiction, it is the struggle for meaning and self-knowledge in the multiple entanglements of twentieth-century cultural confrontations that is central, though the actors who share in that struggle are all Jewish.”25

Potok understood that American life required choices—as suggested by his novel’s multivalent title—but he presents more complex options.

Potok, like many other authors, believed that literature had the power to transform individuals, to change their orientation to the world, and to instill moral virtues in their character.

The novelist’s first task is to animate a cast of characters. I was impressed by The Chosen’s structure; each portion contributed to the effect of the whole. There wasn’t a superfluous scene. The compelling narrative moved inexorably toward a classical Aristotelian climax, in which a recognition scene and an unexpected reversal of character occur.

Joseph Conrad says his only task as a novelist is to make the reader see.

While rereading The Chosen, I was struck by its implicit homoeroticism.

Disagree?

Reuven and Danny sublimate their developmental homosexual attachment; they resolve to some extent their respective Oedipal conflicts.

Resistance to other natural relationships ? Modern tendency to permit this without automatic sexualization between women?

The rebbe is rationalizing his father’s cruelty—and his own toward Danny. Reb Saunders is, in fact, an unconscious sadist who compulsively abuses Danny the same way his father abused him. The rebbe’s lack of self-awareness about his unconscious motivation enriches his characterization.

If this is abuse, what else can be? Royal children raised apart from parents? Etc. Why is this not a valid choice? Modern ideas about parenting imposed?

God never comes alive as a character in The Chosen. He is not felt as a presence in the fictive construct, as he is, for example, in The Magician of Lublin when he unexpectedly answers a sinner’s prayer. Singer was a fantasist—and something of a mystic as well. Chaim was a naturalist; the eruption of the uncanny into everyday life is absent from his work. But, like Singer, Chaim was a religious artist, and the essence of his religion was the relation between man and his fellows.

Chaim argued that most people separate their intellectual beliefs from their faith. They resist the attempt to synthesize them, and they’re emotionally and intellectually satisfied by this compartmentalization.

Not sure this is the case