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.”
For Students
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 version of this choice. The difference is that Danny's is extreme enough to make the structure visible. Every coming-of-age story is here in miniature. And the friendship between Danny and Reuven is one of the most honestly rendered male friendships in American fiction: no irony, no competition, just two people taking each other seriously.
For Teachers
The novel teaches the concept of unreliable narration from inside a reliable narrator — Reuven is honest, but he only knows what he can see, and the most important thing in the novel (the silence's purpose) is hidden from him for three hundred pages. The Talmudic argument structure gives students a model for debate and counter-argument that transfers directly to essay writing. The two-father structure allows for extended comparison and contrast analysis. The novel is also short enough to read closely in two weeks.
Why It Still Matters
The conflict between tradition and modernity never gets resolved because it isn't resolvable — it just takes different shapes in different generations. Danny Saunders is every first-generation college student whose parents don't understand why they have to go so far away. Reb Saunders is every parent who loves their child by giving them what they were given, not what the child asked for. The silence is every family where love is enormous and speech is impossible.