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.