Chaim Potok

Biography

Chaim Potok (1929-2002) was born Herman Harold Potok in the Bronx, New York, to Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland. He grew up in the same milieu he depicts — a world of intense Talmudic scholarship, religious observance, and American acculturation. He was ordained as a Conservative rabbi, earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania, and served as a chaplain in Korea. The Chosen was his first novel, published when he was 38 — a book he had been living for decades before he wrote it. He is the first American-Jewish novelist to write primarily about the interior life of Orthodox Judaism for a general audience.

Chaim Potok at a glance