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Encountering the Other
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19962 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
3,926 Words |
| Author
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S. Lillian Kremer
S. Lillian Kremer teaches English at Kansas State University
and is author of Witness through the Imagination: The
Holocaust in Jewish American Literature (Wayne State
University Press, 1989) and numerous journal articles. Under
a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, she
currently is writing an analysis of literature by women
portraying women's Holocaust experience, comparing the
fiction of émigrés writing from experience with writing by
Americans working from research and the imagination. |
Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, a novel about the enduring friendship of young British men of differing social classes and religious backgrounds, convinced Chaim Potok of the capacity of the novel to successfully transport readers into cultural environments foreign to their own. Fiction would become Potok's vehicle for weaving Jewish civilization into American literature, for showing man in relation to God, and for examining the importance of religion in our secular age and society. His characters, like Waugh's, display a strong sense of continuity with national history and often are presented against a backdrop of the demands of family and community. Potok, the son of Jewish immigrants and both a rabbi and a scholar, has demonstrated that the American novel is a viable genre for writing about Jewish theology, scholarship, and history. He has brought to American fiction a feeling for biblical exegesis, Talmudic study, and the mystical writings of the Kabblah and Zohar.
The genesis and substance of Wanderings: Chaim Potok's History of the Jews, and of his novels--until the publication of I Am The Clay--was the fusion of Jewish religious, historic, and cultural experience with non-Judaic cultures. His veneration of life, affirmative vision of human nature, pervasive striving for meaning in the midst of chaos, for good in the face of evil, derive from Judaism. Potok joins other Jewish American novelists in advocating the Jewish view of a sanctified world, of an enduring and noble humanity, as a vital alternative to twentieth-century alienation and despair.
America and Judaism
Potok writes of Jews "who are at the very heart of their Judaism and at the same time . . . encountering elements that are at the very heart of the umbrella civilization." The characters are conversant with Jewish theology, liturgy, and rabbinic commentaries. They frequently are presented in the context of synagogue, yeshiva, and observant Jewish homes, and they are engaged in activities historically associated with Judaism: prayer, study, and communal service. Even when his characters enter the secular professional world, they maintain Orthodox private lives.
In The Chosen and The Promise, two sets of core-to-core confrontations evolve: one between traditional Orthodox Judaism and Hasidism and another between religious orthodoxy and Western secular humanism. The Chosen, Potok's first novel, examines contemporary Jewish American Orthodox identity through an encounter between Hasidim, known for their mystical interpretation of Judaic sources and
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