Biography chaim potok
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Potok was also part of the translation team for the Jewish Publication Society's translation of the Bible, known as Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (The New JPS Translation according to the Traditional Hebrew Text).
Legacy
Potok cited James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ernest Hemingway, and S.Y. Agnon as his chief literary influences.
Potok died of brain cancer in Merion, Pennsylvania, on July 23, 2002.[3]
Literary career
The Chosen
Potok helped to introduce to an American audience the inner world of Jewish culture. In an interview Potok said, "I prayed in a little shtiebel [prayer room], and my mother is a descendant of a great Hasidic dynasty and my father was a Hasid, so I come from that world."
After reading Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited when he was a teenager, Potok decided to become a writer.
After spending a year in Israel working on his doctoral dissertation, Potok earned a Ph.D.
Potok edited the p'shat commentary of the Rabbinical Assembly's 2000 edition of the Chumash, Etz Hayim (The Rabbinical Assembly is the international organization of rabbis from Conservative Judaism; Chumash, or Humash is a Hebrew name for the Torah, or the Five Books of Moses).
Potok served as combat chaplain with the United States Army in Korea from 1955 to 1957. Potok followed this novel with a sequel, as well, publishing The Gift of Asher Lev eighteen years later in 1990.
Potok continued to examine the conflict between secular and religious interests in his other novels as well, which include In the Beginning in 1975, The Book of Lights in 1981, and Davita's Harp in 1985.
Davita's Harp and Old Men At Midnight are his only novels with a woman as the main character. It also became a short-lived Broadway musical and was subsequently adapted as a stage play by Aaron Posner in collaboration with Potok, which premiered at the Arden Theatre Company in Philadelphia in 1999. A methodology we call scientific text criticism." This form of Talmudic analysis is also called the historical method.
ISBN 9780805774634
The struggle between father and son, the father representing the traditional view and Danny the more modern one, is expressed by the theme of silence.
This experience provided material for Potok’s novels, The Book of Lights (1981) and I Am The Clay (1992).
As a novelist Potok made his debut with The Chosen (1967), a story about rivalry and friendship between a progressive Orthodox Jewish scholar and a young Hasid. He wrote several plays, as well as numerous short stories, essays and book reviews.
From his early youth, Danny's father only speaks to him when they study Jewish law together. Potok received his M.A. in Hebrew literature. Finding the grown-up Danny indeed had a heart, and cared deeply about other people, Reb Saunders was willing to give his blessing to Danny's dream of studying psychology.
His work was significant in raising the issue of the conflict between the traditional aspects of Jewish thought and culture and modernity to a wider, non-Jewish culture. Over a period of five years, he spent most of his free time reading the novels of great writers.
At the same time, he became fascinated by less restrictive Jewish doctrines, particularly the Conservative movement.
His first novel, The Chosen, was written while he was living with his family in Jerusalem.[2] It was the first novel treating them of Orthodox Judaism to be published by a major publishing house in the United States. Brought up to believe that the Jewish people were central to history and God's plans, he experienced a region where there were almost no Jews and no anti-Semitism, yet whose religious believers prayed with the same fervor that he saw in the Orthodox synagogues at home.[1]
On June 8, 1958, Potok married Adena Sara Mosevitzsky, a psychiatricsocial worker, whom he met in 1952 at Camp Ramah in the Poconos.
His father was a watchmaker and jeweler.