Hi.
How are you?
How’s the family?
Here’s my last book review of the year (more than my half-cannonball, less than a full), hope to hear from you in the new year!
I picked up Chaim Potok again this fall in order to offer an alternate text to students who had either already read, or were personally opposed to another book in my standard curriculum. As I did I remembered just how detailed and immersive a writer he is.
Covering the often tenuous uncertainty of friendship between an hasidic and a modern Jew in 1940s era New York City, Potok gives plenty of details about the cultural conflict between each sect. He also has an impressive ability to weave international incidents into the flow of a story with natural grace, giving the reader a sense of time as well as place.
But Potok’s best sense of immersion is at play in how he describes the people. Characters are rich and detailed, their behaviors motivated through histories both ancient and personal. Reuven, Danny and their fathers are beautifully crafted and sincerely engaging. They seem less like characters you’re reading about and more like people you’re sitting beside.
Before I prepared the quizzes and assignments associated with the book, I had described The Chosen as “a classic that captures friendship, feuds, growing up and growing old.”Re-reading it, I feel like I can shorten that again to “a classic”.
Cannonball Read V 