Chaim Potok

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Rabbi Dr. Chaim Potok (February 17, 1929 - July 23, 2002) was an American author and rabbi.

Herman Harold Potok was born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Poland. His parents, Benjamin Max (d. 1958) and Mollie (Friedman) Potok (d. 1985), gave him a Hebrew name, Chaim Tzvi. His Orthodox education taught him Talmud as well as secular studies. He decided to become a writer as a teenager, after reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.

In 1950, he obtained a B.A., summa cum laude, in English Literature from Yeshiva University. After receiving an M.A. in Hebrew literature, and his later rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Potok joined the U.S. Army as a chaplain. He served in South Korea from 1955 to 1957. He has described his time in South Korea as being a transformative experience; brought up to believe that the Jewish people were central to history and God's plans, he experienced a continent where there were no Jews and no anti-semitism, yet whose religious believers prayed with the same fervour that he saw in the orthodox synagogues at home. The experience made him question many of the things he had believed in.

On June 8, 1958, he married Adena Sara Mosevitzsky, a psychiatric social worker, whom he met in 1952 at Camp Ramah in the Poconos. They had three children: Rena, Naama, and Akiva.

From 1964 to 1975, Potok edited Conservative Judaism and also served as editor, from 1965-1974, of the Jewish Publication Society. In 1965, Potok was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Potok edited the p'shat (plain meaning) commentary of the Rabbinical Assembly's groundbreaking 2000 edition of the chumash, Etz Hayim.

Potok is most famous for his 1967 novel The Chosen, which was also made into a film released in 1981, which won top award at the World Film Festival, Montreal, and later became a musical on Broadway for a short time. It was a semi-autobiographical story about two boys. Reuven Malter, a Modern Orthodox Jew, becomes friends with Danny Saunders, an exceptionally brilliant young son of a Hasidic rabbi. The father, Reb Saunders, expects his son to succeed him as a rabbi and the leader of their Hassidic sect, yet Danny wants to study psychology, a secular field of study.

The protagonists of most of his novels are Orthodox American-born Jews, although he has experimented with Korean protagonists in his novel I Am The Clay and with other Gentile characters in some of his short stories. Two of the themes that dominate his work are the conflict between father and son and the consequent search for a mentor, and the struggle to bridge the gap between Orthodox Judaism and modernity. Many of his books are coming of age novels, in which the characters try to find a place for themselves that incorporates both religion and the intellectual fruits of secular culture.

In addition to his work in the fields of theology, history, and literature, Rabbi Potok was an accomplished painter. His novel My Name is Asher Lev chronicles the conflicts experienced by a young artist who had been raised in Orthodox Judaism. Dr. Potok cited James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ernest Hemingway, and S.Y. Agnon as his chief literary influences. His prose style is reminiscent of Hemingway, and he grapples with philosophical ideas as do Mann and Dostoevsky.

Dr. Potok died of brain cancer in Merion, Pennsylvania, on July 23, 2002.