When Chaim Potok, the well-known Jewish novelist, decided to become a writer, his mother had a different idea. “Chaim,” she said, “don’t be a writer. Be a brain surgeon. You’ll keep a lot of people from dying and you’ll make a lot of money.”
Chaim said, “No, Mama, I want to be a writer.”
Periodically his mother tried to change his mind. “Chaim, listen to your mother. Become a brain surgeon. You’ll keep a lot of people from dying and you’ll make a lot of money.”
But he always replied, “No, Mama, I want to be a writer.” Eventually she lost her temper. “Chaim, you’re wasting your time. Become a brain surgeon. You’ll keep a lot of people from dying.”
Chaim shouted back, “I don’t want to keep people from dying; I want to show them how to live.”
Potok is one of the novelists I re-read – I’ve read several of his stories three times! He writes as a used-to-be insider on New York Hasidic communities in the mid-twentieth century. Talking with a good friend yesterday about what we were reading, she had bought The Chosen, on my recommendation. Hope she isn’t disappointed – one person’s enthusiasm can be another person’s tedium. Potok can be intense, and the world he evokes is the world of fading modernity, where human beings are still trying to figure out their place in this vast universe.
But for me, Potok has captured the powerful, ambivalent and even dangerous tensions created by religious commitment and the contemporary world. But he has also articulated those deep religious longings that are tied to community, tradition, difference and identity, and which arise out of that deep place in us where we feel the desperate desire to live our lives towards hope and fulfiment. You want to read something a little different – here’s a novelist who chose storytelling as a way of showing us how to live.
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