Word: reuven
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
Danny is a Hasid-a member of the ultra-Orthodox sect that affects earlocks, broad-brimmed hats and long, black overcoats-while Reuven, the novel's narrator, practices a more liberal Judaism. As the son of a tzaddik (as the Hasids' hereditary rabbis are called), Danny must follow his father as the sect's leader, though his personal bent is toward psychology. Gradually, the two boys work toward Danny's inevitable break with tradition and discover along the way that the humanistic content of Judaism far outweighs its rigid ritualism...
...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 day; he imagined brave jut-jawed soldiers in spotless khakis charging through the cringing, craven "Nazzy" lines...