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July 26, 2002/Av 17 5762, Vol. 54, No. 45
Remembering Chaim Potok
PETER EPHROSS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - Chaim Potok was a novelist who paved the way for a younger generation of religious American Jewish writers - and a Jewish scholar who worked tirelessly to bring Jews and Judaism closer together.
Potok, who was raised in an Orthodox home but later became a Conservative rabbi, died July 23 in his suburban Philadelphia home of brain cancer at the age of 73.
The best known of Potok's more than 15 works, including "The Chosen" and "My Name Is Asher Lev," describe Orthodox Jews struggling with maintaining their faith in a secular world.
"He is a major figure in the American Jewish literary canon," said Daniel Walden, a professor emeritus of American studies, English and comparative literature at Penn State University.
"His essential mission was to explore the core-to-core cultural conflicts of our civilization, and in doing so he exposed what the Jewish experience was like, what the Jewish religion was like."
Some of his interest in these "core conflicts" stemmed from his own experience in the Korean War, where he encountered Korean Buddhism as a U.S. Army chaplain - an experience he later fictionalized in "The Book of Lights."
Indeed, he opened the religious Jewish world up as much to non-Jews as to Jews.
Years after "The Chosen" was published, Potok received letters and e-mails from nuns and priests, as well as Protestant clergy, thanking him for writing the book, Walden said.
Earlier Jewish writers, such as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, were religious skeptics. But Potok wrote from within the Jewish religious tradition, Walden said.
As a result, he served as a model for the next generation of American Jewish writers who wrote about the religious experience.
Potok spent his childhood in New York, where he was born to parents who had emigrated from Poland.
In 1965, he earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.
From 1966 to 1974, he was the editor in chief of the Jewish Publication Society in Philadelphia. During his tenure, he launched JPS's series of Bible commentaries and emphasized the publication of children's literature.
For more than 15 years, he served chairman of the editorial committee, which oversees JPS's acquisitions.
Potok also was the literary editor of JPS's five-volume Torah commentary, which he adapted and edited during the 1990s into one volume that is used in Conservative synagogues throughout North America.
Potok was a founder of the Library Minyan at Temple Beth Hillel-Beth El, the Conservative synagogue in suburban Philadelphia where he regularly attended Shabbat morning services.
Potok won a variety of awards for his fiction, including the Athenaeum Prize for "The Promise" and the National Jewish Book Award for "The Gift of Asher Lev."
He also won praise for his nonfiction, particularly "Wanderings," an illustrated history of the Jewish people.
He served as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania in both the 1980s and 1990s, and taught briefly at Bryn Mawr College and Johns Hopkins University.
Potok was also a passionate lover of Israel, where he lived for several years, and was engaged in the Soviet Jewry movement.
JTA correspondent Lev Krichevsky in Moscow contributed to this report.
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