Word: potok
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...CHOSEN, by Chaim Potok, pits a pair of Jewish teen-agers against one another with a backdrop of Brooklyn in the closing days of World...
...CHOSEN by Chaim Potok. 284 pages. Simon & Schuster...
...this first novel, Chaim Potok, 38, editor of the Jewish Publication Society of America and graduate cum laude of a New York Jewish boyhood, brews up a hearty bowl of the same old chicken soup whose recipe was laid down a generation ago by Henry Roth in Call It Sleep and Daniel Fuchs in his Summer in Williamsburg trilogy. Potok, however, adds a slightly different flavor: the conflict of his youthful protagonists is resolved against the waning days of World War II on the home front-a back ground that, in the hands of novelists of all creeds, is becoming...
Inevitable Break. Potok's confrontation begins when 15-year-old Reuven Malter, brave but bespectacled star of his yeshiva (parochial school) softball team, clashes on the base paths with Danny Saunders, intense, blue-eyed and a sort of Jewish Frank Merriwell. Danny deliberately slams a line drive into Reuven's glasses, Precipitating a 58-page hospital sequence, during which the two boys' enmity grows toward friendship even as the Allies invade France and push out of Saint-L6 toward the Rhine...
Flat Shofar. As an insight into the self-righteous intricacies of Hasidism and the endlessly wrenching interior dialogue of the faithful Jew, Potok's novel is sound and satisfying. In craft and characterization, particularly in the passages dealing with a boy's reaction to World War II, it rings as flat as a shofar blown by a gentile. Listening to a radio report on the Normandy invasion, Reuven thinks miserably of the "broken vehicles and dead soldiers" on the beaches. No base ball-playing American kid-Jewish or otherwise-thought for a moment of bodies on that glorious...