Review: The Chosen By Chaim Potok

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Caitlin R.P. Slattery English Honors 2 Period 4 March 1, 2012 Individual Novel Essay: The Chosen Proverbs say: “I was a son to my father and he taught me and said to me, let your heart hold fast my words.” Chaim Potok has written The Chosen, a finalist for the National Book Award; a novel with profound and universal themes that fill the mind with knowledge and wonder as the lives of two young Jewish boys intertwine. The setting of the Jewish communities are as different as these main characters, Danny and the narrator, Reuven, neither finding home or solace in the darker streets of the Hasids. Every sect of Orthodox Jews had their own looks, habits, and languages, and the places they lived were so full of the beliefs that they ate,…show more content…
“A block away lived another Hasidic sect, Jews from Southern Poland, who walked the Brooklyn streets like specters, with their black hats, long black coats, black beards, and earlocks. These Jews had their own rabbi, their own dynastic ruler, who could trace his family’s position of rabbinic leadership back to the time of Ba’al Shem Tov, the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidism, whom they all regarded as a God-invented personality.” In comparison, those that lived in this sect had a different setting, a more relaxed form of devotion like someone besotted with their crush, loyal with awe and not ferocity. They have their dark clothes and hair, and their homes most likely reflected the same color and emotional scheme that their synagogue did, because as the rabbi did, they did. “About three or four such Hasidic sects populated the area in which Danny and I grew up, each with its own rabbi, its own little synagogue, its own customs, its own fierce loyalties. On a Shabbat or…show more content…
Jewish education was compulsory for the Orthodox; they had Hebrew lessons in the mornings and English ones in the afternoons. “Danny attended the small yeshiva established by his fathers. Outside of the Williamsburg area, in Crown Heights, I attended the yeshiva my father taught.” Already you see how the setting of the homelands influenced the fathers, who as rabbis would create the settings for their people in New York, influencing the development of the children and students. “This yeshiva [Reuven’s father’s] was somewhat looked down upon by the students of other Jewish parochial schools of Brooklyn; it offered more English subjects than the required minimum, and it taught its Jewish subjects in Hebrew rather than Yiddish. Most of its students were children of immigrant Jews who preferred to regard themselves as having been emancipated from the fenced-off ghetto mentality typical of other Jewish parochial schools in Brooklyn.” Those that went to Reb Saunder’s yeshiva were the children of the Russian Hasidic Jews, the boys who were all the smaller, less-bearded versions of their fathers, who, in turn, were the less powerful versions of Saunders, their rabbi. They all aspired to eat, drink, and talk like their rabbi, an aspiration particularly enforced by the fierce loyalty towards Saunders. Reuven Malter’s father, on the other hand, was a

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