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An Interview With Chaim Potok
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19961 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
1,698 Words |
| Author
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Wendy Herstein
Wendy Herstein is an editor in the Book World section of THE
WORLD & I. |
THE WORLD & I: What inspired you to write I Am the Clay, and what inspired you to write it at this time?
Potok: In the midfifties, I was a chaplain with the American Army in Korea for sixteen months, first with a medical battalion, then with an engineer combat battalion. One afternoon, in the medical battalion officers' mess, I glanced out the window and noticed a group of elderly Koreans on a nearby hill.
I asked what they are doing there and was told they were moving the grave of a woman who had lived and died in the village at the foot of the hill. They needed to relocate the grave because our battalion was about to be moved to that hill. I've carried that image around with me all these years: elderly Koreans on a hill digging up a grave. The notion of their having to move what I know to be a sacred site in order to make way for an American Army unit struck me with singular force and stayed with me.
I tried to deal with that image soon after I returned from Korea, and I wrote a novel, an apprentice novel, really, in which the moving of the grave was the central element. It was taken by the editor in chief of a New York publishing house, but the publisher wasn't too happy with it; he didn't think it would make any money. There was an altercation, and I withdrew it and put it aside. Then I started to write the book that ultimately turned into The Chosen. My writing agenda had changed; it had become not Korea itself but who it was who had gone to Korea and experienced the culture of Asia. I was digging into the various elements of myself, and those searches generated The Chosen, The Promise, and the other novels, up to and including The Book of Lights.
W&I: In the earlier novel, you wrote about Korea but from the American point of view.
Potok: Almost entirely from an American point of view.
W&I: It's interesting that you manage to get into the Korean point of view now, and even capture their culture.
Potok: That's the result of years of reading, of knowing Koreans, of repressed memories returning, and of the fires of the imagination.
W&I: You've studied Korean
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