Classic Book of the Month: Friendship forged in conflict

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, the 4th of July. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: WORLD’s Classic Book of the Month.

Today, a novel that starts with a clash between two very different Jewish communities.

AUDIO: Get a load of them.

And it leads to an unlikely friendship. The classic book for July is The Chosen. The author is Chaim Potok, and WORLD’s book reviewer is Emily Whitten.

MOVIE CLIP: I doubt if Danny Saunders and I would ever have met if it had not been for World War II and the desire to show Americans we were as physically fit as any other American. We would prove this by playing tough games of American baseball.

EMILY WHITTEN, REVIEWER: That’s a clip from the 1981 movie adaptation of Chaim Potok’s novel, The Chosen. The book opens in 1944—the height of World War II. It follows two Jewish American families through the post-war period and the creation of modern Israel. We first meet the book’s narrator, Reuven Malter, at a baseball game in the Bronx.

AUDIO: [Baseball sounds]

Even though he’s an orthodox Jew, Reuven has no contact with the nearby Hasidic Jewish community. That is, until that baseball game when he meets Danny Saunders.

MOVIE CLIP: ‘Strike three, you’re out!’ ‘Yeah! One more just like that, Davey.’ ‘No batter.’ ‘Easy out, easy out.’

The rest of the book traces Reuven’s and Danny’s friendship, including numerous conflicts between their different Jewish cultures and the modern world.

When Potok published his novel in 1967, it spent 39 weeks as a New York Times bestseller and in 1968, it won the National Book Award. Back then, Americans were reeling from political violence at home and abroad, and many embraced this quiet story of cross-cultural friendship.

WORLD News Coach Kelsey Reed says its themes remain relevant today.

REED: He's not only asking the questions that we need to be asking, he's also hitting on themes that are very different than the way we might write them, but help us to stretch our thinking further, like redemptive themes, incarnational themes.

In terms of Potok’s writing style, Reed says the visuals of that first baseball scene really drew her in.

REED: I found Potok to be very visually compelling. I just had a sense exactly of what that experience was that he was describing as Danny's team was in opposition to Rueven’s team. And just the very different cultural backgrounds, even between those two teams. I could see it in my mind's eye. And I could envision exactly what was going on.

Potok himself grew up as an orthodox Jew in New York, so while his characters aren’t real people, he certainly drew on personal experience. Like Danny, Potok used to slip away to the library to read fiction he couldn’t read at home, devouring books like Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. This soon caused friction with Potok’s rabbis. He explains in a John Adams Institute interview from 1989.

POTOK: He sensed that I had somehow made contact with the general civilization in which all of us live our lives today and to which all of us contribute our best energies. [cut words and begin again at 31:18] And in so far as my Talmud teacher was concerned, any contact with that civilization was inimical, adversary to what he took to be the nature of my small and particular world, the Jewish tradition.

In The Chosen, Danny’s crisis of identity is brought about by reading Freud. And many Christian parents today will relate to that kind of culture clash.

REED: The library was to Danny what smart phones are to the Christian teenager. There were so many books there that opened the world to different thinking outside of that orthodox belief set that his dad had sought to instill in him.

Eventually, Danny and Reuven go to college together, but while they’re hard at work, unfolding events in Israel cause an even bigger rift between their fathers. The question presses in, can their friendship survive such grave political and cultural division?

REED: He provides an insight into a culture that is completely alien from my own and shows me they're not so different from me. And they're dealing with the same core struggles, in terms of those core struggles that they deal with their conservative orthodox culture, confronted by and put into juxtaposition with modern secular culture.

Except for a few instances of bad language including use of God’s name in vain, this is a clean, thought-provoking story of ideas. These families remind me of my own conservative, Christian community in many ways, but they also vainly seek—as Paul put it—to establish their own righteousness apart from Christ. Still, Christian readers who look closely here can see shadows of Jesus, the true Chosen One.

REED: Danny needs somebody to be with him. And Reuven ends up being that friend that is closer than a brother, you know, there's something of the nature of their friendship that reminds us of things that we understand about who Jesus is. So Reuven ends up being a redemptive presence in Danny’s life.

I’m Emily Whitten.

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