Giving Shape to Turmoil: A Conversation with Chaim Potok
It would strike some as odd that an ordained rabbi who served a chaplaincy in the Korean War, later earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from an Ivy League university, earned a reputation as a world-class Judaic scholar, and wrote several best-selling novels along the way, would be known for his mapmaking abilities. But Chaim Potok has spent the majority of his life doing just
that-mapping out the terrain of his Jewish past in novels which have transported both Jew and non-Jew into fictional worlds which transcend religious boundaries.
Perhaps best known as the author of The Chosen-which in 1981 was made into a movie starring Robby Benson and Rod Steiger, Potok is the author of eleven novels, two children’s books, and several works of nonfiction including the critically acclaimed Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews
“Long ago, in The Chosen,” he writes, “I set out to draw a map of the New York world through which I once journeyed. It was to be a map not only of broken streets, menacing alleys, concrete-surfaced backyards, neighborhood schools and stores . . . a map not only of the physical elements of my early life, but of the spiritual ones as well.”¹ The result of such mapmaking has been an insider’s look into opposing worldviews-conservative Jewish-American culture and twentieth- century secularism: clashing values, beliefs, ideas, and dreams. This has been the underlying tension in all of Potok’s writing. And it has also been the story of his life.
