The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

Potok attended Yeshiva University and then the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he received his rabbinic ordination. He then served for sixteen and a half months as a U.S. Army chaplain in Korea, in a medical battalion and in a combat engineering battalion. Raised to believe that Judaism made a fundamental difference in the world, Potok found himself, in Asia, in a world where Judaism meant nothing and where, to his astonishment, he witnessed deep faith in the heart of pagan idol worship. His cultural encounters in Korea and Japan relativized his Jewishness, Americanness, and Westernness simultaneously, creating a fundamental paradigm shift: he had entered that world with a coherent sense of who he was as a Jew, as an American, and as a Westerner. But in Japan, Korea, and the other parts of Asia he visited as an American soldier, that coherence came undone. The paradigm shift, and its attendant notions of unraveling and reconstituting identity, became the driving force behind his novels.