Chaim Potok- The Chosen

Chaim Potok- The Chosen

  • Submitted By: marklowry
  • Date Submitted: 08/26/2014 8:45 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1020
  • Page: 5


Potok’s Relationships
Chaim Potok was born on February in the Bronx, New York. He attended a parochial Jewish school that was called a yeshiva. As a young boy he had keen interests in the arts, but his father and teachers discouraged him from those things because they were considered rebellious acts to God. His parents indulged him enough to write short stories. Potok studied English literature at Yeshiva University graduating in 1950. After completing his formal education in the 1960’s, he earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. For work, he found jobs at Jewish seminaries. Potok was married in 1958 and had two daughters. Potok has written eight novels and is generally rewarded for his ability to show conflict between Jewish parental values and the values of the larger society (Napierkowski 43-44) Chaim Potok’s most famous novel is The Chosen and is about two families and the two sons in those families who face conflict between their family’s traditional Jewish values and the society’s values that they live in. The fathers have expectations and roles that they want their sons to fill, but the sons see things differently, thus creating conflict between them. Chaim Potok shows the unique relationships between fathers and sons in a Jewish community in his novel The Chosen.
Potok demonstrates the relationship between Danny and his father through several examples in The Chosen. Danny Saunders is the son Reb Saunders, a Hasidic rabbi. Danny is expected to take his father’s place as a spiritual leader of his congregation, but Danny is interested in secular subjects, specifically Freudian psychology. His relationship with his father is mainly around the study of the Talmud. Their relationship is weak because Reb Saunders is silent with his son; he believes that his son’s intelligence will overwhelm his soul. Therefore he keeps things between them silent. Danny’s father disapproves of apikorsim, which is Jews who are not extremely...

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