Moravian College

Where Did CHAIM POTOK FIT?
Vanessa Fisher ’06 has a keen sense of what separates people. Unlike most of her peers, she has had a medical
condition since childhood that has sent her to hospitals “more times than I can count,” she says. She also grew
up in a spiritual tradition that distances itself from much of popular culture.
When Vanessa, an English major, was looking for
a topic for her Honors thesis, she encountered
the works of Chaim Potok, whose novels famously
straddle a line between the secular and the religious.
It was a research match from the very beginning.
Potok’s fi ction takes root in his upbringing as
a Jew in a tight-knit Hasidic sect that largely shuns
the modern world. It is the tradition of total involvement
in Jewish life and law, marked by special dress,
elaborate prayer ritual, kosher diet, and living
within the boundaries of the community.
Potok left the confi nes of his community for a
variety of Judaism that accepted a greater measure
of contemporary values, but through his four books
he was forever looking back over the religious divide
to glimpse that realm he’d left behind. The novels—
The Chosen, The Promise, My Name is Asher Lev, and
The Gift of Asher Lev—became best-sellers as legions
of readers identifi ed with the transcultural theme.
Vanessa surely did. There was also an extra,
deeply personal yearning within her to understand
more about Jews. “It seemed I’d always been
interested in Jewish people,” she says, adding that
she’s not sure what prompted it. “When I was in
the third grade I became interested in the Holocaust.
My mom had to go to Kutztown [from the family
home in Allentown] so I could take books on it
from the library. I was really fascinated. How could
they exterminate so many people. I’ve always been
drawn to suffering.”
STUDENT:
RESEARCH PROJECT NO.
KARIMA MODJADIDI
What she found in Potok was the skein of
tensions, divisions, and debates that might typify any
heritage as strong and rich as Judaism. The struggles
are intellectual, artistic, behavioral, ethical and,
of course, religious. To what or whom does one give
highest loyalty—the authority of the religious
community and its sacred sources, the secular world
with its celebration of individualism, or a hybrid
life woven out of a mixture of beliefs and practices?
It is, fi nally, a matter of personal choice, an exalted
American value.
Vanessa fi nds the ambivalence in Potok’s decision
to leave his father’s Hasidic ways, where he couldn’t
be an artist, for broader participation in American
life. She discovers a complex pattern of gratitude
and regret among his poignantly drawn characters.
Having entered Potok’s realm, she would like to
visit the sites in Brooklyn where the major Hasidic
communities are established. And she hopes that
further opportunities to study about Judaism might
take her to graduate school and beyond.
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