Contemporary Literary Criticism | Potok, Chaim (Vol. 112) - Bryan Cheyette (review date 27 November 1992)

Bryan Cheyette (review date 27 November 1992)

SOURCE: "The Sacred East," in Times Literary Supplement, November 27, 1992, p. 26.

[In the following review, Cheyette finds fault with Potok's limited knowledge of Korea and "didacticism" in I Am the Clay.]

As a young Rabbi, Chaim Potok was a United States Army Chaplain during the Korean War. He served on the front line for sixteen months and this experience later provided the material for his first, unpublished, novel. I Am the Clay is evidently a rewriting of this embryonic early work. On one level, Potok could not have moved further from the rather sentimental depictions of New York's Hasidic Jewish community which he has made his own. And yet, the traumatic clash of conflicting cultures within an adolescent hero—which is Potok's perennial theme—is at the centre of this novel no less than his preceding work. Kim Sin Gyu, who takes up this boyish role, remembers his grandfather...

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