It would strike some as odd that an ordained rabbi who served a chaplaincy in the Korean War, later earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from an Ivy League university, earned a reputation as a world-class Judaic scholar, and wrote several best-selling novels along the way, would be known for his mapmaking abilities. But Chaim Potok has spent the majority of his life doing just that–mapping out the terrain of his Jewish past in novels which have transported both Jew and non-Jew into fictional worlds which transcend religious boundaries.
Perhaps best known as the author of The Chosen-which in 1981 was made into a movie starring Robby Benson and Rod Steiger, Potok is the author of eleven novels, two children’s books, and several works of nonfiction including the critically acclaimed Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews
“Long ago, in The Chosen,” he writes, “I set out to draw a map of the New York world through which I once journeyed. It was to be a map not only of broken streets, menacing alleys, concrete-surfaced backyards, neighborhood schools and stores . . . a map not only of the physical elements of my early life, but of the spiritual ones as well.”¹ The result of such mapmaking has been an insider’s look into opposing worldviews-conservative Jewish-American culture and twentieth- century secularism: clashing values, beliefs, ideas, and dreams. This has been the underlying tension in all of Potok’s writing. And it has also been the story of his life.