The Chosen by Chaim Potok

The Chosen by Chaim Potok has been my favorite and most beloved book since I first read it when I was sixteen or seventeen. It is the one book I have read more often than any other, this last reread must be the tenth or something close to that. It is my ultimate comfort read, and I desperately needed one these past weeks. It is the one book that still makes me cry all through the last chapter, a book that I immediately want to start again when I finish it.

This was the first reread in five years and I am glad to tell you that everything I just wrote, is still true. I don’t really know why The Chosen affects me so much, but fact is that it does. This is the first time I am actually writing about The Chosen so this time around I tried to figure out what it is that makes this such an important book for me. Truth is, I still don’t have a clue. I have the beginnings of a clue, but nothing that explains it in a completely satisfying way. Chaim Potok is my favorite author, I have read almost all of his books and most of them more than once. Several of his books rank among my top-favorites. I think part of his magic to me is that he is such an excellent story teller.

The Chosen tells the story of the friendship between Modern Orthodox Jewish Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders. Reuven is raised in a more modern way, whereas Danny is the son of a Hasidic rabbi, raised according to traditions and laws that go back centuries, and destined to inherit his father’s place when he grows up. The story takes place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, during the final years of the Second World War and the early post-war years. The two fifteen year olds meet as a result of an accident while playing baseball and become close friends. Danny’s father raises his son in silence according to an old tradition, meaning that the two don’t talk with each other except during Talmud studies. Needing someone to talk to, Danny turns to Reuven and soon tells Reuven his biggest secret: for a while now he has been secretly visiting the public library to read books that his father would most certainly forbid him to read. Neither is Danny sure he wants to take his father’s place as a rabbi any longer. Instead, Danny wants to become a psychologist, but this would mean confronting his father and breaking with centuries old traditions. The Chosen tells the story of Danny’s confrontation between the old way of life he grew up in with its centuries old traditions and the inherited position of the community’s leader that Danny is supposed to take over and the twentieth century which Danny will have to enter if he chooses to pursue his dream of becoming a psychologist.

The Chosen is a book about friendship and father-son relationships, but also about loyalty and growing up, finding a place where one belongs and making choices.

One of the questions I am trying to find an answer to is why I still love this book so much even though I have so little in common with the characters. I’m a non-religious, feminist thirty-five year old (give or take a few days) woman, but every time I read The Chosen it still completely pulls me in and wins me over the same way it did when I first read it as a teenager. I think one important reason is the role of learning, education and books in the book. Another that both Reuven and Danny are very intelligent and learn easily. I was like that in high school and university. Neither held much of a challenge for me. I had to study, sure, but intellectually there wasn’t much challenge. If there was no challenge in substance, I created the challenge myself in taking up a second studies ending up with two Master’s degrees.

While reading this book, I realized once again how little intellectual challenge or activity there is in my life right now and how much I miss it in a way. You know what, I even miss studying, acquiring knowledge, learning new things. I have to admit that I reread The Chosen at a time when I have a lot to think about, changes to make and getting back to what is important to me.

So this ended up less a review of The Chosen than me going off on a tangent about…what? Life? I guess that’s what happens when I try to write for the first time about a book that’s so important to me. More than anything else I tried to find out why this book is so important to me. I feel the answer I have found is a start, but it’s not complete yet.

A short review I wrote about Chaim Potok’s The Gates of November is here.

Other reviews of The Chosen:
Banquet of Books
Ted at Bookeywookey

I you reviewed this book on your site, leave a link in the comments and I will add it to this list.

I’m curious

Is there anyone out there in the big wide world who can explain to me why my review of Orlando Figes’ The Whisperers (which I wrote in April of last year) has been getting so many views since July 19? Over half of all the traffic to this blog in the last couple of days has been going there and there is no way I can explain it by looking at search terms or incoming links. I’m just very curious, that’s all. Anyone?

Trial and Retribution III by Lynda la Plante

I don’t really have a lot to say about Trial and Retribution III by Lynda la Plante. It’s a decent, middle-of-the-road police mystery, the third in a series all called Trial and Retribution and all adapted for tv by La Plante. I am not sure what was there first, the book or the TV series, both came out in 1999. The book was obviously written with TV in mind, the writing was very visual, focused on what could be seen, rather than on the thoughts or internal actions of the characters.

Detective Inspector Pat North is called on to deal with Stephen Warrington, who has repeatedly called the police to complain about the house across the road from his own. As Warrington turns creepier and more annoying with every complaint, North’s partner (boyfriend sounds weird when talking about two people in their late thirties, early forties) Detective Superintendent Michael Walker is investigating the disappearance of fifteen year old Cassie Booth. She was seen being dragged into a car while doing her paper round early one morning. As Warrington begins to stalk DI North, a possible link between the two cases appears.

Nothing bad, nothing spectacular, but it did keep me turning the pages. An OK read, perfect for the holidays or when you don’t want to read something taxing your brain too much (which is why I took it up).

My review of Bella Mafia, also by Lynda la Plante, is here.

Bookloot and strange Tweets

Ok, so I was not planning to post again today, just as I was not planning to go to the bookstore today. But after meeting a friend for coffee, I somehow mysteriously, through a slight unintentional (yeah, right!) detour on the way from the cafe to the pet shop, found myself browsing the shelves at one of the two bookstores in Yerevan that have a quarterway decent English collection of books. This is what I came home with:

The topbook speaks for itself, below is a book called Gender: Key Concepts in Philosophy by Tina Chanter, the last book is called Deviation: Anthology of Contemporary Armenian Literature. This combination of books was unintentional, but it made me laugh.

When I came home I sent out this Tweet:

Went bookshopping. Came home with anthology of contemporary #Armenia writers, book on #gender and an English translation of the #Koran.

Within seconds this one came back:

ThaBookie@armenianodar You should read Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

The Tweet contained a link to a page at Amazon for a book with that title. ThaBookie? I don’t follow a ThaBookie and neither does it follow me.  Turns out @ThaBookie is a bot that makes book suggestions based on your Tweet. Now I am wondering what exactly triggered it to come up with a book about angry and controlling men? Koran and gender in one sentence maybe? Or possibly gender and Armenia? The more I think about it, the more it annoys me, because it is such a subtle (or maybe not so subtle) way to confirm already widespread prejudices about Islam.

And for the record: no, I am not interested in ThaBookie’s recommendation, thank you very much.

Furry Intermezzo

While I am working on three or four posts, here are some recent pictures of my furry kids.


This is Nirvo’s favorite place, he’s the Master of the TV.

I disturbed Archy in one of his favorite activities, watching the neighborhood from the balcony railing. One of his nicknames is the Neighborhood Watch.

Another favorite activity: relaxing in the bath tub. Hence his other nickname, King of the Bathroom.

Echte mannen eten geen kaas by Maria Mosterd

Echte mannen eten geen kaas has been a bestseller and its author Maria Mosterd a bit of a media hype in Holland since the book was published a year and a half ago and I think it deserves the attention, because it is an urgent and important book, though it does raises some important questions. I finished the book over two weeks ago, but I am still thinking about it and I will for some time to come.

The book’s author Maria Mosterd is now barely twenty years old, but she has already lived a lifetime worth of experiences. From age twelve till age sixteen she was in the hands of a loverboy, a guy called Manou, who forced her into prostitution and turned her life into one of crime, sex, drugs and violence. I am not sure the term loverboy is used in the same way outside of Holland. In Dutch the English word has come to refer to guys who start a relationship with young women and then force them into prostitution and crime. Over the last couple of years, the problem of loverboys has come to the foreground in Holland. Quite a few cases have been discussed in Dutch media in the past years.

Echte mannen eten geen kaas (literally translates as: Real men don’t eat cheese – a quote from Manou) recounts these four years Mosterd spent with Manou and how she eventually broke free from that life. It also describes how Mosterd became mentally so dependent on Manou, on someone telling her when to do what, even when to go to the bathroom. Some of the most poignant parts of the book are when she talks about the physical and mental control Manou has over her, the double feelings of love and hate she has for him and how hard it is for her to break free from him, especially mentally.

The book is written in a very conversational style and uses quite a lot of current slang and curse words. I needed a few pages to get used to that and quite honestly it made me feel “old”. Once I got used to the writing style, I raced through the book, reading especially the first part with a continuous knot in my stomach. The book is written in a very straightforward way and the slang, curse words, sex and violence may not be to everyone’s liking, but I feel they are necessary in this book, they are not superfluous. They are part of the culture, the world Mosterd lives in and they reflect her age and her character. The fairly simple and conversational writing style also make this book accessible to teenage girls. I feel this is a book that should be read widely by teenagers (and their parents) as a warning.

The book raised many questions, things I didn’t “get”, things I am still thinking about. So please keep in mind that especially the following part of this review are “thoughts under construction”. I find that the more distance (in time) I take from the book, the more I see its shortcomings.

There is one small scene at the beginning of the book that is not very relevant to the bigger story, but for some reason I keep thinking about it. Mosterd describes how, as 11-12 year olds (before she meets Manou), she and her friend would walk through their town’s shopping streets handing out notes with their mobile phone numbers to cute guys. They would then wait for them to call and set up a meeting. Of course the girls wouldn’t show up, but instead hide somewhere nearby to watch the guys wait for them. We are talking 11 and 12 year olds here, handing out phone numbers to random strangers on the street!! I could not wrap my head around this. At all. When I was that age something like that would not even enter my head. Okay, I admit, I was twelve in the pre-mobile phone age and I was raised in very different circumstances.

Mosterd’s life with Manou went on undetected for four years, which made me think why didn’t the school or especially the mother (Mosterd comes from a single-parent family) notice anything, take any action? In between the lines you can actually read that both at school and the mother noticed things were not going well with Maria, but it is as if everywhere people consciously looked the other way, trying not to see or to deny that something was going on. Mosterd would come home stoned from smoking marijuana (Man, are my search ratings going to soar because of this post: sex, violence, drugs…), she hardly attended school during those four years, but no one asked questions or, if anyone did, no one pushed further to find out more. I do realize that my knowledge is obviously  limited to what I read in the book and in a few interviews, so it is very hard to judge the situation or put blame on anyone because obviously there is more I do not know than I do know.

The impression I got from Mosterd’s story is that she didn’t have many positive male role models in her life and that this may have played a part. There are hints in the book that she had “bad” boyfriends before and she comes from a single-parent family and hardly has any contact with her dad. I am definitely not saying that all this happened because she comes from a single-parent family. I don’t believe single-parent or other non-traditional families are necessarily a worse surrounding for children to grow up in. Traditional families can screw up just as well and there are many single parents or parents in non-traditional families who do a great job in raising their children. From reading the book, I just got the impression that in this particular case lack of positive male role models may have played a part in making her vulnerable.

It is too easy to just lay the blame with the school or Mosterd’s mother, because things like this (and Mosterd is not the only girl in Holland to fall prey to a loverboy) can only happen in a society or in a (sub)culture that permits situations like that. I am most definitely not blaming Dutch society as a whole, because forced prostitution, crime etc. are most certainly not accepted by society as a whole, but there are definitely sections or subcultures in Dutch society (and in many others), that make things like this possible. Unfortunately, from reading the book one might get the impression that things like this only happen among the Suriname, Netherlands-Antilles and other ethnic minorities in Holland and not among “white” ethnically Dutch. This sure is not the case. This is not an issue confined to ethnic minorities, but ethnically Dutch girls can just as easily become a victim and my guess is that there are ethnically Dutch men posing as loverboys just as well.

Earlier this year, Mosterd’s mother sued the school for negligence, for failure to react to Mosterd’s frequent absences from school. Which is kind of funny, because despite the frequent absences, Mosterd always got passing grades on her report cards and she always seemed to have progressed to the next year and never seemed to have to repeat a year (possible in Dutch schools if you don’t get enough passing grades). Also, it gives me the impression she is turning the majority of the responsibility of raising a child over to the school. I honestly don’t know if she would have gone to court had it not been for the book and the publicity it got. Apparently Lucie Mosterd, Maria’s mother, has now published a book as well about her side of the story. Why is mama Mosterd trying so hard to get money from the school, but from what I read doesn’t make more of an effort to get Manou behind bars? Is it just me, or is mama Mosterd really “milking” her daughter’s new found fame?

Some of the critics of the book raised some completely different but equally legitimate questions: Why have the police or the public prosecutor never decided to investigate Manou? Dutch criminal law is not my legal specialty, but from what I know, if the police or the public prosecutor have enough evidence or a large enough suspicion that criminal facts have been committed, they can launch an investigation even if there is no victim or nothing has been reported to the police. Other major criticisms are that there are points when Mosterd’s story rambles and critics wonder about Manou who appears to have completely disappeared from the face of the earth. Two pieces critical about Maria Mosterd’s story can be found here and here (both in Dutch). I may not agree with everything said on those two sites, but they do raise legitimate questions.

Despite the many questions the book raises, Echte mannen eten geen kaas is an important book. It vividly describes part of the “underbelly” of Holland, something that most people don’t know much about and (fortunately) will never experience, but it also describes problems that we cannot keep silent about, that have to be discussed and solved. It is a book that (unless proven otherwise) needs to be widely read.

A review of Mosterd’s newly released second book, Bindi, continuing where Echte mannen eten geen kaas left off and which was published just a few weeks ago can be found here (link in Dutch).