Daniel Walden, the preeminent scholar of Potok’s work, takes up that self-description and uses it as the basis for an analysis of the author’s writing in “Chaim Potok: A Zwischenmensch (‘Between Person’) in the Cultures.” Potok, suggests Walden, was formed by his urban Jewish upbringing in the Bronx and then encountered the umbrella culture of Western secular humanism. As a result, his urban, intellectual, and literary wanderings produced a Zwischenmensch—a person, a novelist, occupying the interstitial space between Western secular humanism and religious orthodoxy. In “The Chosen Borough:
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