I had little quarrel with my Jewish world. As he writes in his essay 'Culture Confrontation in Urban America: A Writer's Beginning': No change is permitted.)Įven though he was content growing up within his Jewish religion and culture, Potok sensed that there existed a world beyond his Jewish one that he wanted to experience. It is, they say, eternal, authentic, and binding. They believe that the Old Testament, known as the Torah - Tore ah - and considered to contain the central, most important tenets of the Jewish religion, was given to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai by God and is literally true. (Orthodox Jews believe that Jewish law and practice must be strictly observed. (His brother eventually became a rabbi, and his sisters both married rabbis.) As with many young boys raised in the Orthodox Jewish religion, he attended Jewish parochial schools, most notably Talmudic Academy of Yeshiva College. Chaim Potok, along with his younger brother and two younger sisters, was raised in the Orthodox Jewish religion. Potok sold stationery following the Depression, he became a jeweler.

His father had emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1921. Originally named Herman Harold, Potok was born in New York City on February 17, 1929, to Polish-Jewish immigrants Benjamin Max Potok and Mollie Friedman Potok. To a great degree, he is describing not only the lives of the characters in the novel but his own life - ac-cording to Potok, the novel is very much an autobiography of his young-adult life. In The Chosen, Chaim Potok (pronounced Hi em Poe talk) describes the condition of American Jews living in two cultures, one secular and one religious.

Chaim potok paintings