The Chosen
Chaim Potok (1967)
“Two Brooklyn boys — one Hasidic, one Modern Orthodox — form a friendship across a religious divide, and discover that the most powerful kind of love sometimes looks like silence.”
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The Chosen
Chaim Potok (1967) · 271pages · Contemporary / Postwar American · 5 AP appearances
Summary
In 1940s Brooklyn, a chance baseball game brings together Reuven Malter, a Modern Orthodox Jewish boy, and Danny Saunders, heir to a Hasidic dynasty and a near-genius reading Freud in secret. Despite their first meeting ending with Danny's line drive shattering Reuven's eyeglasses, they become inseparable. The novel follows their friendship over five years — through World War II, the Holocaust's revelation, the birth of Israel — as both boys struggle between the worlds their fathers built and the men they are becoming.
Why It Matters
The Chosen became a surprise bestseller and remained on the New York Times list for 39 weeks. It was the first American novel to portray Orthodox Jewish life — specifically Hasidic life — from inside, written for a general audience, without condescension or exoticism. It opened a conversation abo...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Formal but accessible — scholarly diction in argumentation, plain declarative prose in narration, Talmudic rhythms in religious speech
Narrator: Reuven Malter: first-person, retrospective, earnest, intellectually serious without being showy. He tells the story f...
Figurative Language: Low to moderate
Historical Context
1940s-1950s Brooklyn — WWII, the Holocaust's revelation, Israel's founding, postwar American Jewish community: The Holocaust is the novel's spiritual atmosphere. Every question about what God allows, what Jewish identity requires, and what the Jewish future should look like is asked in the shadow of six mil...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Why does Potok begin the novel with a baseball game? What does an American sport in a Brooklyn Jewish neighborhood accomplish for the story that a synagogue or classroom couldn't?
- Reuven's father says 'Danny Saunders might be a lens through which you will be able to see something very important.' What, specifically, does Reuven see through Danny? What does he see that he couldn't have seen otherwise?
- Reb Saunders explains that he raised Danny in silence to give him a soul commensurate with his mind. Is this a justification or a rationalization? Does the end justify the means?
- Danny's secret reading is guided by Reuven's father, not Danny's own father. What does it mean that the key enabling figure in Danny's intellectual liberation is another father?
- Compare Reb Saunders' sermon on suffering (Chapter 6) to David Malter's response to the Holocaust through Zionist activism. Both men are responding to the same catastrophe. Why are their responses so different?
Notable Quotes
“When a person comes to apologize, Reuven, you must be willing to listen.”
“I like your Talmud teacher, Reuven. Very much.”
“Danny Saunders might be a lens through which you will be able to see something very important.”
Why Read This
Because the central question — how much of yourself do you owe to who made you? — is the question of adolescence itself, stripped of any pretense. Danny Saunders has to choose between his father's world and his own mind. Most students face some ve...