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. 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.
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. His father had emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1921. Prior to the Great Depression, Mr. Potok sold stationery; following the Depression, he became a jeweler. Chaim Potok, along with his younger brother and two younger sisters, was raised in the Orthodox Jewish religion. (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. (Orthodox Jews believe that Jewish law and practice must be strictly observed. 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. It is, they say, eternal, authentic, and binding. No change is permitted.)
Even 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. As he writes in his essay "Culture Confrontation in Urban America: A Writer's Beginning":
I had little quarrel with my Jewish world . . . but beyond
our apartment, there was an echoing world that I longed to embrace: it streamed in upon me, its books, movies, music,
appealing not only to the mind, but also to the senses.
