In his foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Chosen, Potok calls the work a “seemingly fragile raft of a novel; this rarefied weave of signs, symbols, and metaphors; this odd tale of two boys from different backgrounds spinning out their adolescent lives in an arcane realm of Brooklyn homes, streets, playgrounds, libraries, houses of workshop, and academies of learning around the closing years of the Second World War.”
