The Chosen

"He wrote in a very mainstream way. As you say, the book was a bestseller and it was made into a beautiful movie. It is the first Jewish American book that really deals with religious people. His work stands out, in that way, from the work of novelists like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow – wonderful writers who were more culturally than religiously Jewish in their themes. Chaim Potok’s Judaism is not one of Woody Allen humour, it’s not the nostalgic old-world kind of stuff – it’s quite different. He tried to write about Jewish spirituality in America. He took religious people seriously. He wasn’t making fun of them and he wasn’t apologising for them. Rather, he took the reader into this world of Jewish believers. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I read this book when I was 12. It was the first Jewish American novel I’d read that centred on religious characters – a rabbi, his brilliant son and the son’s best friend. I was fascinated by the novel’s dramatisation of religious experience in prayer and in Jewish learning. At the same time I found the book sentimental. I remember telling my mother that if I wrote a novel about a rabbi and his son they wouldn’t have a deathbed reconciliation. My mother was a little sceptical. But I ended up doing just that. In Kaaterskill Falls I had a rabbi and his son who were bitterly at odds. The rabbi is on his deathbed and the son comes to him. But the rabbi can’t forgive his son. Their differences are insurmountable. In many ways my novel was a response to The Chosen . I was interested in why somebody wouldn’t forgive. Again, it varies by person. Jewish writers are such a diverse group. But I think it has changed in some ways – from older to younger generations. The older generation of Jewish American writers were satirists, social critics and quite American. The younger Jewish American writers – like me, or like Nathan Englander – write in a way that is very much informed by Jewish texts, and we weave in Jewish liturgy and Jewish rituals. In my case, it’s partly that I grew up in a more traditional household than some of the older writers, and it’s partly that I grew up in Honolulu – far from the American centres of Jewish culture that so many older writers were a part of. So in my early work, the religious dimension of Judaism was more important than the cultural dimension."