Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Potok, Chaim (Vol. 112) - Dorothy Rabinowitz (review date May 1970)

1. Printable Version
2. Download PDF
3. Cite this Page

Dorothy Rabinowitz (review date May 1970)

SOURCE: "Sequels," in Commentary, Vol. 49, May, 1970, pp. 104, 106, 108.

[In the following excerpt, Rabinowitz offers a mixed assessment of The Promise, faulting it for intrusive or overly academic psychologizing among the characters.]

… [Chaim Potok's] The Promise is no disappointment as its fore-runner, The Chosen, is no masterpiece. The Chosen stayed at the top of the best-seller list for reasons which are easy enough to imagine. The story of Danny and Reuven and the Brooklyn Hasidic world begins, in The Chosen, with a now-famous baseball game in which Reuven's eye is fairly torn out of his head by Danny, batting fiercely for the Yeshiva team out to beat the apikorsim. Indeed, the first sixty pages of that novel gave fair promise of an interesting storyteller at work. Very soon thereafter in The Chosen, one sees that nothing of that promise...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass

1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Granville Hicks (review date 29 April 1967)
   2. Edmund Fuller (review date 15 May 1967)
   3. Sandra Schmidt (review date 20 July 1967)
   4. Times Literary Supplement (review date 31 August 1967)
   5. Richard Freedman (review date 14 September 1969)
   6. Dorothy Rabinowitz (review date May 1970)
   7. Washington Post Book World (review date 3 December 1978)
   8. J. D. Reed (review date 19 October 1981)
   9. John H. Timmerman (essay date 16 May 1984)
   10. Time (review date 25 March 1985)
   11. Paul Cowan (review date 31 March 1985)
   12. Cynthia Grenier (review date 29 April 1985)
   13. Susan Reed (review date 6 May 1985)
   14. Edward A. Abramson (essay date 1986)
   15. S. Lillian Kremer (essay date 1989)
   16. Andy Solomon (review date 6 May 1990)
   17. Nikki Stiller (review date 13 May 1990)
   18. Brian Morton (review date 2 November 1990)
   19. Irving Abrahamson (review date 17 May 1992)
   20. Bryan Cheyette (review date 27 November 1992)
   21. Felicity Barringer (review date 1 December 1996)
   22. David M. Shribman (review date 12 December 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright