IVORY TOWERS: A Chosen Life

Chaim Potok holds a place among those writersChaim Potok holds a place among those writersand Philosophers who influenced him most Ever since the late 1600s, when the novel first came into being in the Western world, authors have probed deeply into the lives and minds of everyday people. Sometimes these authors go further than the average reader would like, asking questions about painful issues such as sin and evil and how people handle -- or don't handle -- them. Chaim Potok, in his own writing and the seminar he is teaching at the University, General Honors 205, continues the search into the areas of ourselves that, he says, many would rather leave untouched. For the past 40 years Potok has remained an influential figure in the Jewish Community, holding positions at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the University of Judaism and on the editorial boards of several Jewish publications, as well as Bryn Mawr College. Since receiving his Ph.D. from the University in 1965, this is the fifth year Potok has taught a seminar. But Potok is most widely recognized for his writing, especially his eight novels. Ordained as a Conservative rabbi, Potok's love for literature proved difficult to reconcile with his family's Orthodox lifestyle -- a conflict which is clearly expressed in his work. In his award-winning book, The Chosen, Potok portrays a teenage boy, Danny Saunders, who finds himself caught between his family's expectation that he will replace his father as the leader of the Hasidic community, and his passion for Western culture. Twentieth Century Fox adapted The Chosen into a major motion picture. Asher Lev, the main character in Potok's My Name is Asher Lev, experiences similar tension with his Hasidic parents. A talented artist, Lev tries to attain a balance between his commitment to Judaism and his artistic instinct. Many of Potok's books reflect a conflict, on the surface specifically addressing religion, that everyone encounters: the struggle to define what one stands for and how one relates to the community. In Potok's eyes, a book's seminality -- a word he uses repeatedly in class -- makes it an extraordinary work, influencing readers years after it is written. Potok attributes the attention 20th century authors give to "the self" to the Industrial Revolution. Because of the industry boom, families were dislocated, and frequently separated. Villages' isolated worlds shattered, and news from other areas became interesting -- the impetus for the newspaper. People began reading about others like them, abandoning the idyllic lives of kings and queens. "That's why the Hemingway heroes are not very learned people," Potok said. "Because most of us are that way. There are, until very recently, few of us who went through college and graduate school." But the characters in novels like Ernest Hemingway's reflect more than just the economic and social trends of the time. With the technological developments came a new value system -- one that looked to technology and science for guidance, not God. The people most directly affected by the new uncertainty were the middle class. "They are the ones who are paying the price for the confusion," Potok said. "'The death of God' as Nietzsche said. The inner chaos, the inner turmoil. The attempt to seek identity. The sudden emptying out of the value system of the past. Therefore, what was happening with them is of interest to us." That struggle, however, has not subsided -- an idea that Potok hopes his students will understand and grapple with, themselves. People now have to find their place in society given the modern paradox. The self has become an entity that "wants to discover its own potential" regardless of the community's needs, but is still unable to live independently. "Well, if you're not going to build community on the basis of something that's rooted in God, what's the basis?" Potok asked, his forehead wrinkling pensively. "Why should there be any loyalty between one human being and another, and among a group of individuals? What's going to be the core value? What are you going to commit your self to?" he added, lingering on the word "self." While inner confusion and the potential for destruction have become an integral part of the modern period, people have achieved a self-awareness that was virtually impossible in a God-centered world -- an era that Potok said he would never go back to if given the choice. "Only on the part of a few individuals was there a notion that your individuality might have a destiny different from the destiny of the community," Potok said. "If you said it too often, they burned you for it." Out of the modern period, with all of its problems, comes a greater potential for creativity that Potok capitalizes on. In his seminar, he highlights the literary greats, such as Feodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf, who have wrestled with the self and how it relates to community. The authors address what Potok calls the greatest problem of the modern period -- how to attain self-awareness without going insane from too much reflection. "You will say, 'how depressing, what an awful way to spend a semester,'" Potok told his students. "Well, let's see if you say that by the end of the semester. These are grim pictures of the self. But we ought to know these things about ourselves. "When you hit that kind of reading experience you know you're tapping into something very, very, very deep," Potok added, speaking more and more slowly. When he was younger, literature had a profound impact on Potok -- much like the one he tries to create for his students. Potok grew up primarily reading Evelyn Waugh, Sherwood Anderson, Mark Twain and James Joyce. But it is Joyce who evoked the strongest reaction. There is not a book or letter by Joyce that Potok has not read. When Potok was about 16 years old he read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel about a young man's battle to assert his identity as an artist in a rigid and judgmental Catholic society in Dublin. "I was going through a lot of the turmoil that Stephen Daedalus was experiencing, the religious turmoil and I couldn't put it into words," Potok said. "And lo and behold here's a novelist that through the power of the imagination he was shaping my inner world for me in language, in images in scenes. That's a powerful thing to do. "And if you're a 16 or 17 year old impressionable young person you're going to be overwhelmed by that experience. That's why I became a writer," he added, raising his index finger as he came to the conclusion. Potok took Joyce's example and and now uses his writing as a means to explore his own experiences. In finishing the last two chapters of his latest book, Potok continues to examine the process that people go through when searching for their identity. He traces the history of a Russian family whose father turned to Bolshevism in the 1900s. One of the major forces behind the Russian Revolution and opening China and Japan to Lenin, the man raised a son who became a leading dissident against Communism. Potok said he decided to write the novel after meeting the son in Russia during the 1980s. "There's an exploration of the self," Potok said. "A break [between the generations] in America is something you sort of expect -- it's a ho-hum kind of thing. But in the Soviet Union to have a break with your father the Bolshevik meant a break with the government. That repressive monster of a government. And I'm curious to know how the break occurred inch by inch, and what the price was." While Potok devotes much of his time to writing -- he likes to get up "very early" and does not like to be interrupted -- he said he needs an outlet from the isolated nature of being an author. He finds that outlet in teaching. "Writing is by definition lonely work, so you can lose touch," Potok said. "If you lose touch you're dead." Potok turns to teaching at the University, not only because he wants to learn how students feel about the issues he addresses in his writing, but also because he is especially interested in how students develop in a secular world. "As the class proceeds and some of the ordinary and expected deference and the distance wears off between student and professor, and they really start to talk that's when things get very interesting for everybody, including myself," he said.

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