Contemporary Literary Criticism | Potok, Chaim (Vol. 112) - Times Literary Supplement (review date 31 August 1967)

Times Literary Supplement (review date 31 August 1967)

SOURCE: "Trying to Be Jewish," in Times Literary Supplement, August 31, 1967, p. 777.

[In the following excerpt, the critic gives a favorable assessment of The Chosen.]

Three more novels [Potok's The Chosen, Martin Yoseloff's A Time to be Young, and Charles Elliott's The Minority Man] to add in one way or another to the growing literature of Jewish self-exploration and self-definition, personal and national….

By far the most distinguished of the three, and that in a totally unexpected and unfashionable way, is The Chosen. We are back in New York, this time during and just after the last war. But instead of the search for a new identity amid the slipping faith and lax observance of Murray Ziegler's suburbia there is the fanaticism of the far-out Hasidic sect, which has survived almost unchanged since its establishment in eighteenth-century...

Join eNotes

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

eNotes Pass