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February 16, 2022

Almanac of Story Tellers: Chaim Potok

  Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books

Today is a story of  February 17th.

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     It is the 48th day of the year, leaving 317 days remaining in 2022.
   
    On this date in 1929, the author and rabbi Chaim Potok was born in New York City.


    Potok was one of the first modern authors to weave the stories of the spiritual and cultural life of Orthodox Jews into his fiction.

    He was ordained a rabbi in 1954, and spent the next decade in Jewish intitutions of higher education, where he taught and edited conservative Jewish publications.

    Potok published his debut novel, The Chosen, in 1967. It is believed to be the first novel to portray Orthodox Judaism sensitively and perceptively. The Chosen is a story of Reuven Malter, a teenage Orthodox Jew who wants to become a rabbi, and his friend, Danny Saunders, the son of an Hasidic rabbi, who often feels trapped in his conservative, closed religious world.

    Its sequel, The Promise, came out in 1969 and followed the boys into adulthood. In all, Potok wrote 10 novels and three short story collections.

    The Chosen received praise for Potok's portrayal of the Hasidic community, and for his efforts to define Orthodox and conservative Jewish culture in a modern world. It was criticized for its prosaic writing, cliches, and having flat characters. Still, it sold about 3.4 million copies and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

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