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CHAIM POTOKS SELECT FICTION: A CRITICAL STUDYJEWS STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY AS A NATIONAN INTRODUCTIONJEWS AND THEIR DESIREThis thesis is aimed at describing the struggles faced by the Jews to prove their identity. From the beginning, the Jews claim to be a chosen people, their refusal worship other Gods, and their insistence on special religious laws placed them in a position and gave them the label alienated species. In the ancient Roman Empire, very few Jews were admitted to Roman citizenship. Early Christians held the Jews responsible for the crucifixion of Christ; an allegation that became the justification of antipathy towards Jews for many centuries. The middle ages were dominated by Christians, which further aggravated the desolation of the Jews. Periodic persecution of Jews occurred. By the end of the 15th century, the inquisition put to trial Jews and other non conformists in Spain, culminating in the expulsion of Jews from the country. A number of Jews, however, became Christians in order to remain in Spain, but they continued to practice Judaism secretly. They referred to as Marranos, a pejorative which meant pig. At about the same time, similar oppressive measures were enforced in England, France and Germany. Jews were also forced to live in ghettos. Outside the gates they were obliged to wear an identifying badge reducing them to the status of an outcast. The harassment of the Jews did not stop there; they were pursued by successions of Crusades, by the restrictions of the church council, the hatred churchmen and Jewbaiters. In 1860, it the AustrianJewish scholarMoritz Steinschneiderwho referred to Jewish hatred as antisemitic prejudices to characterise the idea that Semitic races were inferior to Aryan races. In the 19thcentury, the holocaust was a racial Anti-Semitism practised by Adolf Hitler. The pogroms in Russia and Nazism on territories captured Hilter acused a mass immigration to the U.S and the establishmet of colonies in Palestine. Though they found their golden land in the U.S, their strict adherence to their traditon and beliefs still marginalised them as an alienated or a separate cult. The young generation of Jews found it difficult to strike a balance between their tradition and modernity in the New World. Though they were content growing up within Jewish religion and culture, they sensed that there existed a world beyond their Jewish one, a secular world of freedom and opportunities where they could receive unbiased treatment. ABOUT THE WRITERChaim Potok is not only a prolific writer of Jewish origins but also a Jewish rabbi and a painter as well. His works present Jewish life and Judaism from the point of view of an observant Jew. His insights are from the inside of the Hasidic Jewish community, where one becomes part of the Jewish community through his special works. Judaism is at the heart of Potoks works. At the early age of ten he showed talent in drawing and painting but was dissuaded by his father and his teachers from pursuing this interest. Instead, he undertook a serious religious and secular education, first at the Orthodox Yeshiva University, New York, where he received a BA in English in 1950; then at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, where he received his Rabbinic ordination in 1954; and finally at the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained a PhD in 1965. Chaim Potak is famous as an American-Jewish writer. He writes about Jewish communities and the individuals who dwell with orthodox ideas and non-orthodox Jews also with them. Although the famous statue in Jewish history of the patriarch Abraham and the lawgiver Moses, the Jews have not historically been known as Abrahamites or the children of Moses. Really, they are Israelites- the heirs of Abrahams grandson who really was called Jacob and later was renamed Israel. In the Genesis narratives, Jacob is a multi-faceted figure - father, rogue, husband and also mystic - who most famously sires the sons who become the progenitors of the traditional 12 tribes. And in his works of the twentieth century Jewish-American novelist Chaim Potok, Jacob reappears, although not in his biblical persona. Beginning with the 1967 best seller the Chosen and continuing with the number of other novels, Potok creates a series of young Jewish protagonists whose conservative religious culture flashes with elements of the broader western society. In studies in Classic American literature (1924), D.H.Lawrence writes, In true art there is always the double rhythm of creating and destroying (P.68). In 1967 when Chaim Potok, rabbi, scholar, artist and writer, published his first novel The Chosen, he began a systematic exploration and development of the important themes of Jewish-American cultural confrontation that have continued through his seven subsequent novels. In his creativity Potok has been led to destroy conventional assumptions about what Judaism is and its place in American life; instead of concentrating on the Jew as trekker to America or European immigrant, Potok examines his Jewish characters as religious clusters, skeptics, visionaries and mentors. For Potok, the process of story-telling revises Judaism as a way of being and believing the life. Potok carefully explores the seemingly desperate orthodox, Hasidic, and more liberal expressions of Jewish tradition, and this style naturally represents something new in American literature. Furthermore, Potok is the first American novelist to demonstrate that, writing about Jewish theology, liturgy, history and scholarship is appropriate to the genre of the American Novel. (S.Lillian Kremer, Chaim Potok P.232) Strictly speaking, Potok has shown special enthusiasm in exhibiting that the American- Jewish community is a combination of many people whose origin is different. Here it is apt to look at the origin of Jewish community.THE ORIGINS OF JEWISH COMMUNITYThe year 1881 is actually said to be a turning point in the history of the Jews as decisive as that of 70A.D. It was the time when Titus legions burned the temple at Jerusalem. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella decreed the expulsion from Spain. On March first 1881, Alexander II, Czar of Russia was assassinated by revolutionary terrorists; the modest liberalism of his regime came to an end; and within several weeks a wave of pogroms inspired mostly by agents of the new government, spread across Russia. For the Jews packed into the Pale and overflowing its boundaries, the accession of Alexander III signified not only immediate disaster but also the need for a gradual reordering of both their inner life and their relationship to a country in which Jews had been living for hundreds of years. The question had then to be asked was should the East European Jews continue to regard themselves as permanent residents of the Russian empire or should they seriously consider the possibility of a new exodus? To speak truth, there had already been a trickle of Jewish emigration to America - 7500 in the years between 1820 and 1870 and somewhat more than 40,000 in the 1870s. But the idea of America as a possible locale for collective renewal had not yet sunk deeply into the consciousness of the east European Jews. During the reign of Alexander II many of them had experienced modest hopes of winning equal rights as common citizens. Others hoped to pursue the less benighted agents of Russian autocracy that the Jews merited a share in its prospective enlightenment. By the 1880s that hope was badly shaken, perhaps was totally destroyedJEWISH IMMIGRATION TO AMERICA FROM EASTERN EUROPE For several hundreds of years this culture had flourished in Eastern Europe. Bound together by firm spiritual ties by a common language and by a sense of destiny that often meant a sharing of martyrdom; the Jews of Eastern Europe was a kind of nation yet without recognized its nationhood. Theirs was both a community and a society; internally a community, a ragged kingdom of the spirit, and external a society impoverished and imperiled. The central trait of this culture was an orientation towards other worldly values, though this may be too simple a way of describing it. For the world of the East European Jews, at least in its most serious and ideal ministrations, did not accept the Western distinction between worldly and other worldly. Kierkegaards dictum that between God and man there is an infinite, yawning, qualitative difference might have struck them as a reasonable account of their actual condition, but not as a statement of necessary or inescapable limits. In order to survive, the East European Jews had to abide by the distinction between the worldly and the other worldly, but they refused to recognize it as just or inevitable. In their celebration of the Sabbath and in the sharp line they drew between the Sabbath and the rest of the week, they tacitly acknowledged that they had to live by the ways of the world; this was the price of exile and dispersion. Ideally, however, the worldly and the other worldly should be one i.e. Here on earth. Every Jew would have recognized immediately the symbolic rightness in the refusal of Rebshloyme, a character in Peretzs drama Di golden keyt (The Golden Chain), to accept the week, those six mundane days that lie scattered beneath the glory of the Sabbath.(World of our Fathers P.8) The life of the east European Jews was certainly an ideal one. Given the pressures from without and a slow stagnation within, this world was bound to contain large portions of the ignorant, provincial and even corrupt. The picture scythed here of east European Jewish life is necessarily a static one; the reality was of course, full of internal conflict and change. Jewish life in east Europe, it can reasonably be said that it had been stagnant for centuries, in the sense, first, that the rabbinate had maintained its power and become more rigid in outlook and, second, that the relationship of the Russian empire remained one of the weaknesses and also dependence. Yet there had been upheavals and convulsions too. In the seventh century the false messianic of Sabbatai Zevi had shaken the Jews in a paroxysm of antinomian desire, which the Yiddish writer Hayim Greenberg has described it as, The absolute negation of the Galut (Diaspora) and all its manifestations, the revulsion was against the continued passive waiting for redemption, the stubborn refusal to be reconciled to the hobbled reality of Jewish life. (P.10) In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Hasidism, a movement of pietistic enthusiasm drawing upon the aspirations of pluvial Jews swept across Eastern Europe to brighten its spiritual life. And in the nineteenth century the Haskala, or enlightenment, brought modern thought to at least the middle-class segments of the Jewish population. The greatest formant came, however, in the last third of the nineteenth century. A phalanx of new political and cultural movements, all competing for intellectual hegemony in the Jewish world; a generation of thoughtful, and in some instances, distinguished intellectuals; an upsurge of the Jewish message to social awareness, revolt, and self-education; the blossoming of a secular Yiddish literature which, at its very beginning, thrust out such major figures Shalom Aleichem and I. L Peretz; above all, the widespread feeling in both the shtetl and city that Jewish culture had again come alive and certainly all these were signs of renascence. As long as the authority of the rabbis was supreme and east European Jewry remained self-sufficient in its religious life, a secular culture could not flourish. It could hardly be envisaged. But under the impact of the European enlightenment, especially that of Germany, change could be seen. After the internal fissures produced by competing movements of Jewish revival, including some within the tradition itself, such as Musar, an effort at ethical purification within the limits of orthodoxy, through the appearance of such worldly movements as Zionism, socialism, and various blends of the two, the Jews were really more comfortable. In short, as a result of the confluence of this and other forces, the east European Jews turned to the idea of secular expression. Turned, one might say, with religious intensity to the idea of secular expression.For several centuries the rabbis, intent upon reserving, the ancient Jewish faith, had served as armor for the Jewish people in their struggle for national existence. Not many rabbis would have acknowledged so mundane an end, but there is historical evidence that they did have some awareness of their distinctive social role. When, for example, Jewish reformers under Haskala influence proposed changes in the schooling of the young, the rabbis resisted such schemes on the grounds that even a partially secularized education would deprive Jewish youth of traditional ways of life without really enabling them to find a place in the gentile world. Motives apart, the rabbis were speaking to a reality.Had the persecution and poverty of the late nineteenth century occurred at a time of cultural stagnation or even stability, it would probably have led to the sort of internal convulsions that had previously broken out among the east European Jews. Perhaps a new version of the original would have been seen. But between 17th and 18th centuries, perhaps a new phase in the ecstatic Pietism of Hasidism was observed. An unforeseeable religious outburst started. Had the cultural renewal of the east European Jews occurred in relatively normal circumstances, without the bounds of external assault and internal hunger, Yiddishke might have established itself as the stable culture of a minority people slowly undergoing that process of assimilation that would later occur in the US. `But what now uniquely characterized the east European Jews was the explosive mixture of mounting wretchedness and increasing hope, physical suffer in and spiritual exaltation. And what was new in their experience was that for the first time they could suppose there was some place else to go, a new world perceived as radically different from the one in which they had been living. The spiraling energy, strength, hope, dream of the European Jews enabled many of their sons and daughters to make their escape to America, sometimes for mere personal relief, often with the wish for a fulfillment of those collective aspirations which have been unuttered but could not be realized in the old country. America, even as it drained millions of Jews from Shtewtl and city, helped the Jews of Eastern Europe to survive and for intervals and even flourish as a community. America was safety wall and haven, place for renewal and source of support.Serious debates were bound to arise as to whether immigration should now become a communal policy. As early as 1882 a conference of Jewish notables met in Saint Petersburg to discuss this question. The majority of the delegates cleared that mass emigration, officially encouraged by the Jewish community, would appear unpatriotic and might undermine the struggle for emancipation. Russky Everei, a Russian-language weekly edited by Jews, wrote:Pogroms are a result of rightlessness and when that has beenobviated the attendant evils will vanish with it. By supporting massimmigration the Jews would be playing into the hands of their enemies who hope they will flee from the field of battle. (P.25)In the 33 years between the assassination of Alexander II and the outbreak of the First World War, approximately one third of the east European Jews left their homelands. Rather a migration comparable in modern Jewish history only to the flight from the Spanish inquisition. Some with the blood of the Pogroms barely dry, fled in fear for their lives; others chose to leave in organized groups searching for a new soil in which to replant Jewish life; most went for personal reasons, to ease lives that had become intolerable and release ambitions long suppressed. Yet, in its deepest significance, the migration of the east European Jews constituted a spontaneous and collective impulse, perhaps even decision, by a people that had come to recognize the need for new modes and possibilities of life.Circumstances often made it unavoidable that the Jews flee from Russia, Poland and Romania; Circumstances sometimes made it convenient for them to leave; but the impetus and the desire were their own. They moved westward not only because life was hard under the Czar but because elements of strength had been forged in the Jewish communities and flashes of hope sent back by brother who had already completed the journey. They moved westward because they clung to the dream of national fulfillment while hoping individually to gain some decencies of survival. (P.27.)The first major exodus began during the summer of 1881, when thousands of refugees, in flight from pogroms that had spread across the whole of the Ukraine, poured into Brody. Starving and homeless, sometimes forced to sleep on the streets and treated for less well by the Austrian authorities than the legends about Franz-Josef had led them to expect, these refugees presented a problem not merely for the Jewish community of Brody, obviously unable to care for them, but for the entire Jewish population of Europe. Clinging to their acrid pride even in wretchedness, the east European Jews had harsh things to say about their more prosperous west European brothers. Yet the west European Jewish communities, through such agencies as the Baron de Hirsch fund and the Alliance Israelite universal, did help. Their responses were inadequate and, given the scope of the migration from the east, could hardly be anything but inadequate. But relief poured into Brody, refugees were enabled to travel to Hamburg and Bremen, quarters were set up- often miserable, but set up in the ports. In Paris a committee headed by Victor Hugo organized a public protest against the pogroms and liberal news papers undertook subscriptions to aid the refugees. The world, or at least a few decent portions of it, could still be moved by the sight of thousands of victims perhaps because it had not yet become hardened to the sight of millions.In the spring of 1882, after renewed pogroms in Russia, fresh streams of victims poured into Brody, which had now become a magnet for all the helpless who had heard of the relief and immigration depots in that town. During the early months of 1882, there were perhaps twenty thousand refugees clustered in Brody, which normally had a population of no more than fifteen thousand; and what had at first been envisaged as a limited relief operation by the Alliance now began to confront the Jews of Europe as the task of coping with a mass exodus. During the next few years permanent agencies, especially, after 1900, the Hilfsvereinder and the Deutschen Juden were created to help the east Europeans on their way. In view of the strained relations that would continue for decades between German and east European Jews, it is only fair to record that the German Jews worked hard and often well in behalf of the thousands pouring in from the east. They established information bureaus to help the travelers; they negotiated special rates with railway companies and steamship lines; they set up precautions against the hordes of scoundrels, both Jewish and gentile, who tried to fleece the emigrants; they negotiated with governments to ease the journeys. In the peak decade of immigration 1905 to 1914, some seven lakh east European Jews passed through Germany and two lakh and ten thousand of these were directly helped by the Hilfsverein. Mark Wischnitzer, a historian of immigration close to the institution created by east European Jewish immigrants, acknowledges that the German Jewish community always borne the brunt of the tidal wave of immigration from east Europe. Before 1900 its work was inadequate; orderly migration requires a long and through preparation by experts in the field. The voluntary committee of the nineteenth century created adhoc, were simply unable to perform this work. Later, things improved but the problem grew larger. Between 1901 and 1914 the number of Jews who left Europe, almost all of them were from Russia, Rmania, and Galicia, came to 1, 602,441. A leader of the German effort to help the emigrant Jews, Dr. Paul Nathen, came to the conclusion that in the period of 1900-1903 ninety percent of them went forth each year on their own initiative and at their own risk.Even an imaginative American, writes a Jewish memoirist, must find it very hard to form anything like a just idea of the tremendous adventure involved in the act of immigration. Tremendous adventure, yes, but only if that term comprehends a rich share of misery and trauma. The misery of journeying to America is by now a familiar story, but the trauma of undertaking the journey is often suppressed. The purposefulness of AM Olam, the bravado of the elating or exhilarating, but for more frequent were the wrenching of personal ties, the tearing away of sons distraught mothers and grim fathers. Young men were eager to escape, but were shaken by the thought of a lifelong separation. They would cultivate a secret ally, mother against father or father against mother, appealing to hopes that both shared but one was readier to act upon than the other. My father remembered Stanislaw Mozrowski, a Jew from Montenejro, Would not even let me talk to him about my hopes. My place he said emphatically was at home. Once in a while my mother would feel that he was in good mood - Wives can sense these things - and she would look at him put her finger over her mouth as if to say dont say anything , let me do the talking, and start by remaking about something I had done well, and of course he would agree. Then she would begin to talk about my future. He would immediately stiffen, but sometimes she would continue until he would pound on the table and yell, silence! No more do you hear?(World of Our Fathers P.34.)For those without legal passports, the first major crisis along the journey was the border crossing into Austria or Germany. Bands of smugglers, increasingly expert, worked on the fears of the immigrants. The imagination of these Jews was stirred and disordered; removed from the small circle of space in which they had spent their lives; they became easy prey to rapacious peasants and heartless fellow Jews. Only when they came under the guidance of the German-Jewish organizations in Berlin, Hamborg, and Bremen could they be shielded from sharpers and thieves. Abraham Cahans of his 1882 crossing of the Austrian border is classic; We were to leave the train at Dubno where we were to take a wagon through the region around Radzivil on our way to the Austrian border.(P.36.)Was the Atlantic crossing really as dreadful as memoirists and legend have made it out to be? Were the food rotten, the treatment as harsh, and the steerage as sickening? One thing seems certain; to have asked such questions of a representative portion of Jews who came to America between 1881 and 1914 would have elicited stares of disbelief, suspicions as to motive, perhaps worse. The imagery of the journey as ordeal was deeply imprinted in the Jewish folk mind - admittedly, a mind with a rich training in the imagery of ordeal.Whatever could be eased in trauma of arrival, the Jewish community tried to ease. When the immigrants reached Ellis Island, they found waiting for them not only the authorities with unnerving questions, but also their friendlier faces of Hias representatives. Hias is one of the few Jewish agencies that over the decades have been praised by almost every segment of the American Jewish world-no small feat in a community that has been notoriously contentious. It was also one of the first major institutions in America set up and administered by east European Jews on their own.The sheer magnitude of immigration from Europe during the last third of the nineteenth century made it that old-stock Americans, even if favouring in principle and open door for aliens, would begin to feel uncomfortable. From the vantage point of distance, what seems remarkable is not the extent of antiforeigner sentiment that swept the country but the fact that until the first world war it did not seriously impede the flow of immigration.In the 1860s and 1870s, when cheap labour was needed by the rail roads and both western and southern states were eager to absorb white settlers, American business interests sent special agents to Europe in order to attract immigrants. Popular sentiment remained attached to the notion that America was uniquely the land of refuge from tyranny and a country were fixed class lines gradually softened. Jews, to be sure, were already encountering social discrimination in the 1870s, some of it due to feeling that the recent immigrants from Germany unlikelier refined Sephardic cousins who had been here for a long time, were too loud and pushy in their social ascent. For the most part, however there was not yet any large-scale articulation of anti-Semitic prejudice, only because the Jews did not yet figure in the popular imagination as a major force in American life. Only during the last two decades of the century did the multiplication of aliens come to seem a national problem. Historians of immigration have distinguished, with rough usefulness, between old and new immigrants, the former mostly from northern and latter from southern and eastern Europe.Close in cultural style protestant American, the old immigrants seemed more easily assailable and there by less threatening than the new. By the 80s and 90s the mass influx consisted largely of new immigrants, ill-educated and often illiterate peasants whose manner could unnerve Native Americans. And most immigrant Jews were regarded as among the new.Although the several decades between the early 80s and the first world war, a struggle took place in American society between the partisans of free immigration and advocates of restrictions. Partly to regulate and mainly to limit immigration, a series of acts were passed by congress though, more important from the stand point of those who wished to enable the Jews to find refuge in the United States, most of the proposals for radically cutting down the number of immigrants were beaten back.The most difficult questions remain: who came? Which Jews? Rich or poor, city or shtelt, old or young, religious or secular? Are there verifiable distinctions of character, sensibility, opinion, and condition to be observed between those who remained and those who left? And were there differences between the kinds of Jews who came to America in the 1880s and those who came in the first decade of the twentieth century? All these questions remain unanswered.Strictly speaking, like most truly interesting historical questions, these do not lend themselves to convenient answers. Few statistics and those usually inadequate, were kept among the east European Jews. (Many evaded legal registration in order to save their sons from the draft; others drifted about so much they were probably never counted.) In the United States, immigration statistics prior to 1899 were classified by country of nativity , not by race, religion, or nationality, so that with regard to the last 2 decades of the century students of Jewish immigration such as Samuel Joseph and Liebmann Hersch could do no more than work up estimates. Even the statistics for the years after 1899 did not provide answers to many questions one would like to ask - and in regard to the replies Jewish immigrants gave about their occupations, a decided skepticism is in order. There was certainly ambiguity among the people. Each questioned to self Where was I to go? An awkward, unkempt, timid youth of 16, with the inevitable bundles, I dumbly inquired my way from the Battery to the slums The only vantage point I had was an address on the letter my uncle had given me to deliver to a friend of his. I showed this to an officer who sent me in the direction of the East Side. I probably could have done it without an address, for where else did immigrant Jews congregate?In the early eighties the Jewish quarter was still small with much of the East Side under the control of Irish and German immigrants. East Broadway, in those days was an imposing avenue with wide sidewalks and distinguished homes. It was often called ulitza (the Russian word for street) because the Jewish intellectuals who made it their center felt it was more cultivated to speak Russian than Yiddish.NEW JEWISH COMMUNITY:Over the centuries they had accumulated a rich experience in living as a minority within a hostile culture. True enough for the Jewish immigrant experience as a hole, this observation needs qualification in regard to the eighties and nineties. During these early years, the nerves of the immigrant community were constantly exacerbated, frequently to breaking point. What might see is the most trivial problems signaled a need for major adjustment. A common theme in immigrant memoirs is the way family life suffered disruption because wives, daughters, husbands, and sons went to work in different times of the day, making it impossible for members of a family to eat together.Their life-style or the tempo of life in America, its intensity hurry, struck Morris Raphael Cohen as one of the major forces shattering traditional Jewish decorum. At 6 oclock in the morning, remembered Cohen, the alarm would wake us all up. His mother would prepare breakfast, his father says the morning prayers after snatching a bit of food, and then both father and old brother leave so as to be in the shop by seven. Alarm clocks were simple, even useful objects, yet they signified an entirely new world outlook. What does one do here for a livelihood? asked an immigrants in the eighties who had been a maskil, or learned man, in Russia. You do what everyone does, came the reply, you become a peddler. With a pack on his back and a garland of tin ware hanging from my shoulders, I began crawling up and down the stairs. (P.77.)In the soft glow of retrospect there has been a tendency among American Jews to donate peddling with certain glamour. Sometimes, perhaps, with reason: as in the stories that have come down to us of Jews wandering into small southern towns and being treated as if they had just stepped out of the Old Testament. But in the cities of the north, during the years of industrial expansion, peddling was backbreaking and soul-destroying work. There was only one reason to become a peddler: you had no skill and wanted to stay out of the shops.Was there no way for Jewish immigrants to escape both peddling and the sweatshop? A few hundred zealots, organized in Russia during the early eighties as Am Olam (external people), sought a radical escape from the economic rootlessness which centuries had imposed on the Jews. Am Olam proposed to establish farm co-operatives in America so as to (normalize) Jewish life which meant to abandon petty trade and the roll of middle man? Some wanted to build socialist agricultural communes, anticipating the Israeili kibbutz, while others were concerned mainly with national rehabilitation through a strengthening of the Jewish economic fabric. To the goal of founding Fcolonies in the spirit of Robert owen, Fourier, and Tolstoy the Am Olam movement brought the religious fervor that would mark so many Jewish political movements.Just north of Canal Street and extending from Mott to Elizabeth stood the Big Flat, an enormous tenement occupying six city lots. Water was supplied to tenants from one tap on each floor, set over a sink outside the north wall. These sinks, serving as the only receptacles for refuse, were loathsome, especially in the winter, when the traps beneath them would freeze. Each apartment had three rooms and drew its light from a single window in the living room. The two inner rooms were always dark and without ventilation, since the space allotted each resident averaged out to 428 cubic feet per head, far below the legal limit of 600. The annual death rate per 1000 for the years 1883, 1884, 1885 and the first nine months of 1886 came to 42.40, as compared with 25.72 for the city as a hole; nearly 62 percent of the deaths in the Big Flat were of children under 5 years of age, while in the city as a whole the percentage was a bit more than 42.The Jews ( also some Italians) living in the Big Flat, reported on investigator of the New York Association for Improving the Conditions of the poor, are locked in the rooms like sardines in a box. The ghetto Jew in Europe created a stocked culture, centered around his religion and thought in his holy tongue. Through the dark ages the ghetto was bright with literacy; and Jewish knowledge was as good as anything the outside offered, or better. There was no enlightenment, because there was little enlightenment to be had. (P.87)All this changed with the coming of Galileo and Newton, of Bacon and Voltaire, of Copernicus and Descartes. There were blazing suns outside the ghetto. Light shafted through the heavy timbers of the stocked. The first reaction of the leaders inside was to seal every chink and try to shut out the light. Whether this was an inevitable reaction or the mistake of week vision can be argued. But it happened.It is not hard to imagine the state of mind of the leaders. The impact of the new learning on the painfully won, smooth-running ghetto culture would, they feared, be destructive. The preservation of that culture was a life-or-death matter. Modernism had been suspect ever since Maimonides had thrown Jewry into two-century turmoil. The rabbis heard the rumors that the new learning was laying waste to Christian piety. They took up a delaying action. It was instinct.They could not have foreseen the catastrophe of their policy. Nothing in their experience allowed for the freeing of the Jews. But the new ideas of the Renaissance, the liberalism of the eighteenth century is said to be a significant factor in history. The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of American Jewry on the world Jewish scene. As the century opened, the United States, with about one million Jews, was the third largest Jewish population centre in the world, following Russia and Austria-Hungary. About half of the countrys Jews lived in New York City alone, making it the worlds most populous Jewish community by far, more than twice as large as its nearest rival, Warsaw, Poland. By contrast, just half a century earlier, the United States had been home to barely 50,000 Jews and New York's Jewish population had stood at about 16,000.Immigration provided the principal fuel behind this extraordinary American Jewish population boom. In 1900, more than 40 percent of America's Jews were newcomers, with ten years or less in the country, and the largest immigration wave still lay ahead. Between 1900 and 1924, another 1.75 million Jews would immigrate to Americas shores, the bulk from Eastern Europe. Whereas before 1900, American Jews never amounted even to 1 percent of Americas total population, by 1930 Jews formed about 3 percent. There were more Jews in America by then than there were Episcopalians or Presbyterians. This massive population transfer radically transformed the character of the American Jewish community. It reshaped its composition and geographical distribution, resulting in a heavy concentration of Jews in East Coast cities, including some (like Boston) where Jews had never lived in great numbers before. It also realigned as American Jewrys politics and priorities, injecting new elements of tradition, nationalism, and socialism into Jewish communal life, and seasoning its culture with liberal dashes of East European Jewish folkways. Although the American Jewish community retained significant elements from its German and Sephardic pasts (Sephardic Jews having originated in Spain and Portugal), the traditions of East European Jews and their descendants dominated the community. With their numbers and through their achievements, they raised its status both nationally and internationally. World War I confirmed American Jewrys new status in world Jewish affairs. America itself assumed greater international responsibilities at this time, and Jews followed suit.It reshaped its composition and geographical distribution, resulting in a heavy concentration of Jews in East Coast cities, including some (like Boston) where Jews had never lived in great numbers before. As early as 1914, the American Jewish community mobilized its resources to assist the victims of the European war. Cooperating to a degree not previously seen, the various factions of the American Jewish community - native-born and immigrant, Reform, Orthodox, secular, and socialist - coalesced to form what eventually became known as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. All told, American Jews raised 63 million dollars in relief funds during the war years and became more immersed in European Jewish affairs than ever before. They even joined in representing Jewish interests at the Paris Peace Conference after the war. Also, American Jews continued their intense involvement in Zionism - the movement to create a Jewish state in the Middle East (now Israel) - which further reflected their burgeoning sense of responsibility for the fate of Jews around the world. World War I ended the era of mass Jewish immigration to the United States, as wartime conditions and then restrictive quotas stemmed the human tide. Soon, for the first time in many decades, the majority of American Jews would be native born. Where the central focus of American Jewish life had been concentrated on problems of immigration and absorption, American Jewry now entered a period of stable consolidation.The children of immigrants moved up into the middle class and out to more fashionable neighborhoods, creating new institutions synagogue-centers, progressive Hebrew schools, and the like-as they went.History had proved that East European Jews would Americanize with a vengeance. The question now was whether, as Americans, they would still remain Jews. Programs designed to ensure that they would become high community priorities. With stability and the rise of a new generation came a growing commitment to communal unity. Descendants of earlier Central European Jews and the more recent East European Jews had been drawing closer together in America even before World War I. After the war, with the growth of anti-Semitism at home and abroad as well as the economic and social challenges posed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, this process accelerated. Anti-Semitism peaked in America in the interwar years, and was practiced in different ways by even highly respected individuals and institutions. Private schools, camps, colleges, resorts, and places of employment all imposed restrictions and quotas against Jews, often quite blatantly. Leading Americans, including Henry Ford and the widely listened-to radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, engaged in public attacks upon Jews, impugning their character and patriotism. In several major cities, Jews also faced physical danger; attacks on young Jews were commonplace. When coupled with the economic hardshipwrought by the Great Depression, it is no surprise that Jews during these years sought to bury their differences and stress their interdependence. Leaving old world divisions behind, they began to coalesce into an avowedly AmericanJewish community - a community that could attempt, at least on some issues, to unite in self-defense. Even as the community was uniting, however, it was being rent asunder in new ways. The three-part religious division among Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jews, firmly institutionalized in this period, gave expression to longstanding intracommunal conflicts over rituals, beliefs, and attitudes toward tradition and change. Zionism and Communism proved even more divisive since they raised fundamental questions concerning the meaning of American Jewish life and the obligations of Jews to the country in which they lived. With the terrible destruction of the major European centers of Judaism, America in 1945 stood unrivaled as the largest, richest, and politically most important Jewish community in the world. Smaller Jewish communities turned increasingly to American Jewry for guidance and support. Thousands of Jewish refugees likewise turned to America and under more liberal immigration policies many gained admission. Within a few years, some had contributed in vital ways to American cultural, scientific, and intellectual life. Others, especially Hungarian and Hassidic Jews (who emphasize strict allegiance to tradition),added fresh dimensions to American Judaism, and helped to promote Orthodoxys postwar revitalization.With its establishment in 1948, the State of Israel became the focal point of American Jewish life and philanthropy, as well as the symbol around which American Jews united. At the same time, American Jews worked in the years following World War II to reinvigorate American Jewish life. Burgeoning economic growth, increasing popular acceptance of religious and cultural pluralism, the high education achievements of native-born Jews, and an overpowering desire on the part of many Jews to make it in America all contributed during these decades to a spectacular rise of American Jews to positions of authority and respect within the general American community.The Six-Day War of June 1967 marked a turning point in the lives of many 1960s-era Jews. The paralyzing fear of a second Holocaust followed by tiny Israel's seemingly miraculous victory over the combined Arab armies arrayed to destroy it struck deep emotional chords among American Jews. Their financial support for Israel rose sharply in the war's wake, and more of them than ever before chose in those years to make Israel their permanent home. In addition, something of a spiritual revival washed over the American Jewish community after 1967. Many turned religiously inward, some were born again into Orthodoxy, and every movement in American Judaism witnessed new interest in traditional religious practices, heightened appreciation for mystical and spiritual sources, and an enhanced desire for Jewish learning.Two movements with far-reaching significance for American Jews emerged during period, both of them influenced by Americas domestic struggles for civil rights. 1. The movement to save Soviet Jews.2. American Jewish activists, in concert with Israel and with memories of the Holocaust fresh in their minds, waged a relentless let my people go campaign that ultimately proved successful. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews subsequently emigrated to Israel and the United States.3. Jewish feminism. This movement advocated gender equality and promoted increased involvement for women in all areas of Jewish life, including the synagogue. The ordination of women rabbis beginning in 1972, the burgeoning Jewish education opportunities opened to women, the development of women's rituals and prayer services, the emergence of women in many positions of communal responsibility once open only to men, and the changing role of women in Orthodoxy all attest to feminism's impact.The waning days of the twentieth century found the American Jewish community at a crossroads in its history. Demographically, the community was stagnant. It had not grown appreciably since 1960, comprised a smaller percentage of Americas total population than it had in 1920, and seemed likely to witness an actual decline in numbers in the decades ahead. The great issues of the past, including Zionism, no longer inspired and united American Jews as once they had. Nor was there any large community of suffering or persecuted Jews anywhere in the world calling upon the American Jewish community for assistance. As a result, American Jewry turned inward. Its new rallying cry, born of a survey that showed more Jews marrying out of their faith than within it, was continuity. Guiding Student Discussion:Mass migration of Jews and Catholics transformed American society and raised the question of what kind of nation America would become. Jews played an important role in shaping this debate and its terms.1. The Melting Pot. The Anglo-Jewish writer, Israel Zangwill, in a play first produced in 1908 and dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt, attacked those who sought to fashion America on the European model and hailed instead the idea of the melting pot, which was both the title of his play and the ideal to which he thought Americans should aspire (Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God).2. Cultural Pluralism. By contrast, the American Jewish thinker Horace Kallen propounded what he called cultural pluralism. He compared America to an orchestra, where each group played its own instrument while together they produced beautiful euphonic music.Today, yet another model of American society has been propounded, the idea of multiculturalism. What are the pros and cons of these different models? How have Jews and others sought to balance adaptation and retention? In what ways have they accommodated to America, and in what ways have they resisted it? Zionism became a central theme of American Jewish life in the years between the world wars. Louis Brandeis, who became the leader of American Zionism on the eve of World War I, just prior to his becoming the first Jew to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, did much to make it fashionable, linking Zionism to the American ideal of democracy, of social justice and of liberty, and arguing that to be good Americans we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists. Opponents of Zionism, meanwhile, argued that Jews should strive to be accepted as full and equal citizens of the countries where they lived, and they feared that Zionism would raise the specter of dual loyalty. Where Zionists stressed that Jews were primarily apeoplewho needed a homeland, anti-Zionists insisted that Judaism was primarily areligionthat Jews should be free to practice anywhere in the world. Looking back, how do students evaluate this debate? Why did it arise during the interwar years, and which arguments, in retrospect, seem more persuasive?Historians Debate: Historians have long debated both the extent of anti-Semitism in Americas past, and the similarities anddifferences between American anti-Semitism and its European counterpart. Earlier students of American Jewish life minimized anti-Semitism, which they viewed as a late and alien phenomenon on the American scene arising in the late nineteenth century. More recently, scholars have pushed back the history of American anti-Semitism, discovering that no period in American Jewish history was free of this scourge: Jews encountered it from their earliest days on American soil. Yet the significance of anti-Semitism at different times, and the distinctiveness of the American encounter with the great hatred, remains subjects of intense debate: One can see Leonard Dinnerstein,Antisemitism in America(1994), David Gerber,Anti-Semitism in American History(1986), and John Higham,Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in America(1975).YIDDISH LETERATURE: One of the strongest unifying links between Jews throughout the world is the Hebrew language. From the time of Abraham in 2000B.C.E.until the Babylonians captured Judah in 586B.C.E., Hebrew was the everyday language of Jews. Since then, Jews have generally adopted the vernacular of the societies in which they have resided, including Arabic, German, Russian, and English. Hebrew continued to be spoken and read, but primarily in sacred contexts. Most of the Torah is written in Hebrew, and religious services are mostly in Hebrew, though Progressive synagogues will make greater use of the language of the community. The use of Hebrew in religious worship enables Jews from all parts of the world to enjoy a common bond. In the twentieth century, Hebrew regained its status as an everyday language in Israel, where it is the official language. During the Diaspora, as Jews left Palestine to settle in various parts of Europe, two distinctly Jewish languages emerged. The Sephardic Jews of Spain and Portugal developed Ladino, a mixture of Spanish and Hebrew, while Ashkenazic Jews in central and eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, a combination of medieval German and Hebrew. These two languages were spoken by immigrants when they came to America, but were not typically passed on to the next generation. The exception to this occurred during the turn of the century when Russian Jews helped Yiddish gain a strong foothold in America through Yiddish newspapers and theater. At its high point in 1920, Yiddish was spoken by half of the Jewish population in America. By 1940, however, the proportion of American Jews who spoke Yiddish had dropped to one-third, and its presence as a world language was severely threatened by the Holocaust, which killed most of the Yiddish-speaking Jews. Today, a small but growing minority of Jews are attempting to revitalize Yiddish as a language uniquely capable of transmitting Jewish cultural heritage. As Jews have spread to Europe and America after being forced out of Palestine, their cultural heritage has depended on strong family and community relations. One of the chief ways in which Jews, particularly Orthodox Jews, have maintained family and community values has been through the keeping of Shabat,the Sabbath. Observing Shabat,or the day of delight, is one of the Ten Commandments and is essentially a matter of taking a break from work to devote one day of the week to rest, contemplation, and family and community togetherness. Just prior to Sabbath, which lasts from sunset on Friday to late Saturday night, the family must complete all the preparations for the day because no work should be done once the Sabbath begins. Traditionally, the mother starts the Sabbath by lighting candles and saying a special prayer. Afterward, the family attends a short service in the synagogue, and then returns home for a meal and lighthearted conversation, perhaps even singing. The following morning the community gathers in the synagogue for the most important religious service of the week. On Saturday afternoon observant Jews will continue to refrain from work and either make social visits or spend time in quiet reflection. A ceremony called havdalah (distinction) takes place Saturday night, marking the end of Sabbath and the beginning of the new week. The relative importance of Shabat and the synagogue for American Jews has declined over the years. In fact, the history of Jews in America reflects an ongoing secularization of Jewish values. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the Jewish community center developed as an important nonsectarian counterpart to the synagogue. Modeled after the Young Men's Hebrew Association, Jewish community centers became dominated by the 1920s by professionals who wanted to establish a central place for younger Jews to acquire such American values as humanism and self-development. While such community centers continue to play a role in Jewish population areas, many of today's American Jews no longer associate with a synagogue or community center, but may live in a Jewish neighborhood as the only outward sign of their Jewish identity. According to Judaism, marriage is the fulfillment of one of Gods purposes for human beings. Consequently, all Jews are intended to experience both the joy and hardship of matrimony, including rabbis. To facilitate the finding of a mate, the matchmaker plays a role in Jewish society of bringing together suitable but perhaps reluctant individuals. The matchmaker only helps the process along; the final choice must be made freely by both partners according to Jewish law. Traditionally, intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles has been forbidden. A Jew who married a Christian faced ostracism from family and community. Jews who immigrated to America during the Colonial period and after, however, intermarried with non-Jews with relative impunity. This tolerance of religious freedom lasted until the 1880s when the arrival of Russian Jews ushered in a conservative era with a more traditional view of marriage. For the first half of the twentieth century, intermarriage among Jews remained low, with only about five percent choosing to marry non-Jews.By the 1960s and 1970s, however, intermarriage became more common, with as many as 20 to 30 percent of Jews choosing non-Jewish mates, and by 1999 had risen to 52 percent. Increased assimilation and intermarriage has sparked concern over the continued existence of American Jewry. A recent survey of American rabbis found opinion divided on performance of mixed marriages by rabbis, with disagreement on whether performing such marriage ceremonies encourages those marrying non-Jews to maintain their connection with Judaism and perhaps encourages the non-Jewish partners to convert. The question of whos a Jew in Israel also has American Jews concerned. Recent legislation makes conversions to Judaism legal only when performed by Orthodox rabbis. This has political implications, given the close relationship of religious affiliation and political power in Israel; for example, 150 religious councils distribute more than $70 million in government funds annually. More important for American Jews is that along with the authority over conversions comes the authority to determine eligibility for automatic Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Eighty-five percent of American Jews are Reform, Conservative, or unaffiliated and thus feel that such legislation is shutting them out, in effect telling them that they are not really Jews. In 1997 many withheld charitable contributions or redirected them to more secular organizations in response.Jewish babies usually receive two names, an everyday name and a Hebrew name used in the synagogue and on religious documents. The naming of the baby occurs after birth at a baby-naming service or, for many male babies, when they are circumcised. Since the emergence of Judaism some 4,000 years ago, Jews have observed the tradition ofbrit milah(covenant of circumcision). Although the practice of cutting the foreskin of male babies probably served a hygienic purpose originally, circumcision has come to represent the beginning of life in the Jewish community.To be sure, many non-Jews are circumcised, and being born of a Jewish mother is sufficient to make a baby Jewish. Nevertheless, circumcision is traditionally associated with the keeping of the covenant between Abraham and God as well as with physical and ethical purity. The britmilah must occur eight days after birth, unless the baby is sick. The ceremony takes place in the home and is usually performed by a mohel an observant Jew who may be a rabbi, doctor, or simply one skilled in the technique. After the circumcision, who occurs very quickly and without much pain, a celebration of food, prayers, and blessings follows. Bar mitzvah,which varies according to local traditions (Ashkenazic, Sephardic, or Oriental) is the ceremony that initiates the young Jewish male into the religious community. By reading in the synagogue, he becomes an adult. According to Talmudic tradition, this usually occurs at the age of 13. Following the reading in the synagogue, there is a celebration (seudat mitzavah). In the twentieth century, the bas or bat mitzvah has been introduced for young girls; however, this occurs more frequently in the Reform and Conservative groups than the Orthodox ones. JEWISH AMERICAN WRITERS:A great number of contemporary Jewish-American writers such as Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth and others have had literary success. The language employed by these writers is standard American English, they are socially accepted, and their works are read by a wide Jewish and non-Jewish audience. For this reason it is widely considered that their texts form part of a recognized literary canon, and belong to the American literary center or mainstream, as far as this may still be defined today. As much as one agreed to this idea one cannot ignore several facts which underline the necessity to view Jewish American literary productions as shaped by strong ethnic forces, and Jewish American literature as both belonging to and standing out in the multicultural American landscape. There are two main reasons why American Jewish cannot be successfully identified with the culture of the establishment. First if at all, it is a fact that, as much as they tried to ingratiate themselves with the white mainstream majority, Jewish Americans just like any other ethnic writers have an acute sense of doubleness, a double consciousness (Sollors, P.243) and they confront an actual or imagined double audience, composed of insiders and of readers, listeners, or spectators who are not familiar with the writers ethnic group, from both of whom they must have felt alienated at times. This sense is widely pervasive in their work and differentiates them from other mainstream writers who are single-consciousSecondly, just like in many other ethnic communities there is a strong tendency to resist assimilation into the mainstream. Werner Sollors points out to the fact that: Americans perceive themselves as undergoing cultural homogenization (P.245), that is Americans of different backgrounds share larger and larger areas of an overlapping culture. To fight against this tendency there have been made efforts to maintain symbolic distinctions, a process known as ethnicization. The Jewish American community is very active in this respect. One such effort belongs to Dean J. Franco. In his book published in 2006, Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing he tried to provide a strong corrective to the tendency of other minority traditions to dismiss Jewish literature as being of the center, drawing from border theory as well as diasporic and postcolonial theorists and pointing to the acute social vulnerability, painful histories, and cultural anxieties that inform much of the Jewish literature of the past century.A third aspect, supporting distinction from both mainstream literature and other ethnic literatures, is that Jewish literature has always been the fruit of a culture of exile, diaspora, homecoming; of a literary world in which Jewish authors from one country read and interact with Jewish authors from other countries; of a community in which Jews from America are intimately concerned with the European Holocaust and with the fate of the State of Israel (Wirth-Nesher and Kramer P.7)Jews have an entirely different notion of country of origin from European Americans. After all, not all Jews (including Jewish Americans) trace their ancestry to Europe, and even when they do, immigrants did not consider themselves to be Russians, Germans or Polish. Besides, Jews have for millennia understood their ancestral homeland to be not in Europe but in the Middle East And for these very reasons, some scholars have become increasingly skeptical of the specific reconfigurations of Americas multicultural map around what David Hollinger has called the ethno-racial pentagon of European, Asian, African, Hispanic, and indigenous peoples. This foregrounding of race relegates Jews to a dehistoricized and culturally vacant category (idem). Between the dominant position of the white majority and the marginal position of peoples of color (having been perceived as such for most of Americas history), American Jews have no clearly designated place on Americas multicultural map which acknowledges their differenceIn view of all the arguments brought so far, one concludes by quoting Wirth-Nesher and Kramers verdict in their Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature: Given that the Jewish American experience cannot easily be assimilated into existing models of multiculturalism, it poses a challenge to them - a challenge that has not as yet been satisfactorily answered( P.8)Bellow vs. RothAs with other Bellow protagonists, Herzogs mind is a means to both salvation and ruin. Still, thats more than can be said for Roths bedraggled men, who turbulently spiral toward damnation. Thats one of the crucial differences between the two postwar Jewish writers: For Bellow, the mind offers moments of transcendence, however fleeting and hallucinatory; for Roth, its just a receptacle for grief and the detritus of life. These implicit ideologies are brought to bear in each writers prose. Bellows characters interior monologues are like leavening agents, inflating and softening the action around them. Roths prose, on the other hand, remains flat and forbidding, precluding flights of fancy and instead expanding the narrative through calcified, matter-of-fact memories that, happy or sad, are just more bullets in the hearts of characters like Sabbath, deepening their cynicism and subservience to the only fate they have narrow-mindedly conceived for themselves. In a way, Bellows prose style is his characters salvation. It lifts them out of the drab, shambling circumstances they so often find themselves in, gives their life meaning (or at least an ambitious, wildly demonstrative gesturing toward meaning). With Roth, there is little meaning outside the story itself, its bones, muscles and tendons. And as the narrative frame ofAmerican Pastoral- in which Nathan Zuckerman hears of the tragic demise of Swede Levov at a high school reunion - attests, the ability to tell the story, to recount and relive it in excruciating Faulknerian detail, may sometimes be enough. But theres no choosing between Roth and Bellow. Both havechronicled American life in fearless, painstaking detail and shown the readers how Jewish literatureisAmerican literature, rather than some subgenre to be ghettoized by scholars and Wikipedia editors. However, in his highly original stream of consciousness style and towering ambition to synthesize so many strands of intellectual inquiry in a search for meaning and order, Bellow has more thoroughly inherited the aims and innovations of modernism. But he was also writing, for the most part, 20 years prior to Roth and so was not so far removed fromUlyssesandMrs. Dallowayor evenIn Search of LostTime. Bellow could, and did, successfully draw on that fresh legacy of authorsmixing memory, imagination and the longing intellect - like Herzog, eager to encompass everything. More than anything, the stark differences between Bellow and Roth show one just how much American literature changed in less than two decades. Sure, there are the postmodernists like Wallace, Pynchon and DeLillo, employing metafiction andbending reality through sustained irony, strung-out paranoia and warped historiography, but it seems Roths brand of heavy-handed realism and intense focus on the vagaries and breakdowns of family life have won the day. Bellows heroes - Charlie Citrine, Augie March, Moses Herzog - are great literary characters; they are tragic, funny, raven by strife, self-reflective, realized with incredible depth and utterly memorable.Although they are unmistakably Jewish-Americans, they would probably manage just fine in another country, thrive shambolic ally in England, Italy or France. Roths heroesand antiheroes, on the other hand, are incontrovertibly American. Their lives represent the perversion anddegradation of the American Dream, and theres just no stickingthem in Paris or London or Venice. In that one crucial difference between the two authors, one can see how American literature has shifted from a transatlantic art form in Bellows time to onedeeply obsessed with its own country in Roths, and the litany of shatteredpromises that country makes to man and his family. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RELIGION AND LANGUAGE:The relationship between literature and religion goes a long way back, in fact, it goes back to the dawn of literature, since mans first literary explorations were religious in their very nature. One only has to read the Bhagavad Gita, the Yogi scriptures, the Norwegian legends, the Greek myths and of course the Old Testament or even runic inscriptions to see how true this is. Literature was used for religious education and even Chaucer was of the opinion that all that is written is written for our instruction. (G.B Tennyson, Edward E. Ericson. Introduction in Religion and Modern Literature Grand Rapids (MI): William B. Eerdmans P. C., 1975, 13) There by paraphrasing St. Paul, who had preached this message to Christians centuries earlier? Only gradually, literature separated itself from religion and came to be written because of various secular motives.However, this development has not been without its problems, literature has been viewed as replacing religious books such as the Bible, fulfilling a similar purpose, while at the same time, filling peoples heads with fabrications from a non-divine source. Consequently, literature has become one of the flagships of secularism, testing Gods truth with stories written by men. As steadfast faith in religion started to dwindle and science gained authority, the word God itself became a term of poetry, as stated by Matthew Arnold in Literature and Dogma, which redressed the relationship between sacred and secular literature again. Truth claims of religious literature aside, when a poet or novelist attempts to write about religion, he or she stumbles upon the problem indicated by Arnold: God is not exact science; in fact, God is very difficult to understand or even perceive at all, never mind put into words. Arthur McCalla eloquently states that God is not a captive of human categories, for this reason, Hegel, Schelling and Hugo resorted to calling him the Absolute or Infinite as God is incommensurable with human knowledge. Language cannot bridge the gap between God and man, yet, it can describe, and through writing attempt to understand, individuals and communities utterly and completely devoted to God. Literature can open up, or at least allow us a glimpse into religious communities that are completely unfamiliar and inaccessible to most readers in a way non-fiction cannot. One of the authors who has been able to do this well is Chaim Potok. His first novel, The Chosen, written when he was working on his doctorate in the early 1960s, captured the minds and hearts of both Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike. Not a major accomplishment one could argue, when looking at the success Bellow, Malamud and Roth enjoyed amongst a gentile audience, but Potok chose to write about Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities, far removed from the secular worlds of his esteemed colleagues. In The Chosen, Potok fundamentally sketches the conflict between Orthodox and Hasidic Jews during the 1940s in America. The narrator, Reuven Malter, is an Orthodox Jew who forms an unlikely friendship with Daniel Saunders, the son of a Hasidic Tzaddik, the religious leader of a Hassidic community. In the first pages of the novel, Potok re-orients the reader so that she sees the world through Reuvens eyes, committed to Orthodox Judaism, but also committed to some level of participation in American life. This brings him into conflicts with other Jews, most significantly the Hasidic world of Danny and Rebbe Saunders. (Kathryn McClymond, The Chosen: Defining American Judaism, (Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies25.2 (2007), 10) A quick digression is required to explain why these two denominations might be in conflict with each other. Orthodox Jews are of the conviction that they adhere to the Jewish practices and beliefs that existed from the time of Moses all the way through to the rabbinic era up until the present day, without ever truly changing or adapting Judaism. Orthodox Jews came to define themselves as Orthodox in reaction to the Age of Enlightenment or the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, when certain groups of Jews, although respecting and observing the Jewish law wished to modernize and reform certain aspects of Judaism, in line with the spirit of the time, while Orthodox Jews resisted this. Hasidism, on the other hand, is largely founded upon the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov, a mystic from eighteenth century Poland, who Kabbalist texts, such as the Zohar, the writings of Isaac Luria and Chaim Vital, rather than Talmud. Through his practices and beliefs, the Besht reached out to the masses as he broke away from the intellectual and presumably difficult to comprehend tradition of an elitist group of scholars, yet at the same time, presenting those scholars with a type of mysticism they could accept. (Kathryn McClymond Chosen: Defining American Judaism, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies25.2 (2007), 10) Inevitably, there were conflicts with the Mitnagdim or ultra-orthodox Jews, almost from the beginning of Hasidism. Yet, the more time passed, the more Hasidism changed, institutionalized and in part because of their conflicts with the Mitnagdim,( See Mordecai L. Wilensky. Hasidic-Mitnaggedic Polemics, in Essential Papers on Hasidism, Ed. David Hundert. New York, NYUP, 1991, 266.) Hasidic Jews returned to studying Talmud instead of Kabbalah. Hence, to the outsider, both Jewish denominations may appear quite similar, with the exception of how the respective members are dressed, but that is not the way Orthodox and Hasidic Jews see themselves, they truly believe they have distinct identities. To those unaware of this conflict, The Chosen quickly makes it abundantly clear and through a typical American sport, baseball. In an effort to demonstrate to the gentile world that Orthodox and Hasidic teenagers are just as physically religious schools, in New York decide to hold a baseball competition. The game does not indicate the difference between American gentiles and Jews, but between two different Jewish denominations. In that baseball game you have two aspects of Jewish Orthodoxy in contention. You have the Eastern European aspect, which prefers to turn inward and not confront the outside world. You have the Western European more objective scientific aspect... that is not afraid to look at the outside world that produces scientists. These are in interaction with one another inside the core. Thats the baseball game.( Harold Ribalow, A Conversation with Chaim Potok, (in Conversations with Chaim Potok. Ed. Daniel Walden. University of Press of Mississippi. Jackson, 2001) 13) On the one hand, one has the introvert, non-communicative Hasidic Jews who play in their full Hasidic attire, black suit, visible tzizit(Ritually knotted fringes attached to the four corners of the tallit katan (a garment that is a smaller version of the prayer shawl), which Hassidic Jewish men usually wear under their clothes) and dangling earlocks, with a Yiddish-speaking Rabbi as their coach (who spends most of the game studying Torah) and on the other, the more Americanized Orthodox Jews, dressed as non-Jewish teenagers save for the skullcap, speaking English amongst each other and whose coach is a gym teacher at a public high school. All the players are wrapped up in the conflict inherent to the game of baseball and the conflict between their opposing denominations. The animosity between the two groups, Dannys and Reuvens, is quickly felt, both parties shout abuse and mutual loathing reaches a peak when Danny hits Reuven in the eye with a baseball, which results in him having to be taken to the hospital to undergo extensive eye surgery. This tragic event is in fact what forms the basis of the friendship between Reuven and Danny, as Danny decides to come to the hospital to apologise for his actions and attempt to understand why he hated Reuven so much he wanted to kill him, which he actually says on page seventy, I dont understand why I wanted to kill you. (Chaim Potok. The Chosen. (New York: Penguin Books, 1967, P. 190)70 At first, Reuven is naturally none too pleased to see Danny, yet he quickly becomes intrigued by him, for a number of reasons. Daniel has to become the next Tzaddik succeeding his father, since it is an inherited position, although he prefers to become a psychologist. He also has a fondness for secular literature such as Ivanhoe, which, due to is absolute memory, he is able to recite by heart. Reuvens father would like him to become a mathematician, whereas he wants to become a Rabbi, something Daniel cannot understand, since Danny is searching for more freedom and is hungry for secular knowledgeHe reads Darwin, Huxley and Freud, even though he has to learn German in order to do so. This is how he meets Reuvens father, David Malter, since he can only read safely in the library, the library where Reuvens father, who is a yeshiva teacher, likes to read as well. Slowly but surely, Reuven, encouraged by his father,is taken into the Hasidic world and the reader is taken with him. Reuvens father explains to him, and thus to the reader, the story of the Baalshem Tov and how Hasidic communities work. Reuven is taken to a Hasidic Shabbat service, which is how the reader is introduced to Hasidic religious services and certain more accessible forms of Kabbalah, such as gematriya, which gives all Hebrew letters numbers, in order to add and subtract words from each other to uncover different layers of meaning in the Torah.Soon Reuven learns about another unusual aspect of Daniels world, his father has chosen to raise him in complete silence and will not talk to him unless they are studying Talmud, a mystery the reader is left to contemplate till the end of the novel. For three years, they are close friends, both diving deeper into each others worlds, discussing methods of studying Talmud (Reuvens father is an advocate of using secular, text-critical approaches), discussing theories such as evolution, Freud and choosing to attend the same college, Hirsch College. Then, World War II ends; the news of the concentration camps and the six million murdered Jews reaches America. Reuvens father decides that people have waited long enough for the Messiah and becomes actively and publicly involved in Zionism. Dannys father, however, tries to understand why God brought the Shoah upon the Jewish people and is opposed to forming a Jewish State without the Messiah How the world makes us suffer. It is the will of God. We must accept the will of God... God will build the land, not Ben Gurionand his goyim.(Potok, P.196.) A secular Jewish state is an abomination in the eyes of Reb Saunders, a violation of Torah and he commences to fight against it with all his might. It should be clear by now that, as McClymond states, the threats and temptations Danny and Reuven face do not [only] come from secular America but from crises within their core communities: the influx of textual critical methods into yeshivas, the worldwide devastation and theological challenges of the Holocaust, and the deeply passionate stances for and against Zionism. (McClymond P.17).In the end, it is the conflict about Zionism that temporarily severs the friendship, as evidently the son of a Zionist could not be friends with the son of an anti-Zionist and for two years, they do not speak. When this conflict has mellowed down and they finally speak again, many things have changed, Daniel has decided not to become a Tzaddik, but to follow his heart, attend graduate school and become a psychologist. He knows this will pain his father and quite possibly jeopardize his position in the Hasidic community. It would also mean ending an arranged marriage which his father had set up for him - a Hasidic tradition. Reuven has made up his mind to become a Rabbi, despite his great talent for logic and mathematics and his critical method of studying Talmud, which got him into trouble at Hirsch College. [Danny] shook his head. I cant get over you becoming a rabbi. I cant get over you becoming a psychologist. And we looked at each other in quiet wonder. (Potok P. 257)By that point, Danny has embraced his fathers way of raising him in silence, listening to it and learning from it in the manner of a Hasidic sage. Towards the end of the novel, the reader finally understands the reason for this strange method of child rearing. When Danny was very young, Reb Saunders had recognized the brilliant jewel that is his sons mind and he was afraid it would dehumanise him and turn him away from Judaism. Hence, he raised Daniel in silence to teach him compassion, for his heart to stay close to God in secular America, where his great mind would go wandering. This interaction between father and son will come to shape Dannys life and he admits that he himself may want to raise his own son this way, when the time comes.In an interview, Chaim Potok makes the comparison between Reb Saunders and Daniel and God and the Jews, or in fact all religious people in the twentieth century. Theres something going on that Danny doesnt understand, and its the metaphor for precisely what it is that the religious person does in terms of his relationship to God in the twentieth century. Something is going on, and we dont understand it. Theres a silence between the Jewish people, or indeed all religious people, and God in this century. But whatever it is - and I dont understand it - the silence is not a break in communication. Its a communication of a different kind, and what we try to do is tap into it and see what its all about.( Chaim Potok quoted in Elaine M. Kauvar An Interview with Chaim Potok (in Contemporary Literature, 27.3 (Autumn, 1986), P.309). In the twentieth century, people seemed to turn away from God and God appeared to remain silent throughout some of the greatest crises of the last millennia, incomprehensible to a lot of religious people, but Potok offered an attempt to make it meaningful, at least to himself and his readers. In the final pages of the novel, Reb Saunders accepts Dannys decision not to succeed him, saying let my Daniel become a psychologist. I have no more fear now. All his life he will be a tzaddik. He will be a tzaddik for the world. And the world needs a tzaddik.(Potok P.277).Reb Saunders is certain that Dannys identity will always remain that of a Tzaddik and he will be able to help, in whichever way, the interaction between God and his people. Saunders is right, although Danny shaves off his beard and earlocks, he knows and he promises his father he will always remain a Hasidic Jew, an observer of the Commandments, which the reader is able to witness in the sequel of The Chosen, The Promise.It is important to note that Danny and Reuven, despite of their struggles, never consider abandoning Judaism, rather they try to negotiate their Jewish identity within secular American society, in what Potok calls core-to-core confrontations (McClymond 19). A process Potok himself was acutely familiar with, since he had grown up in a Hasidic community which he chose to leave during his university years. According to his college roommate and lifelong friend Rabbi Gerald Wolpe, it was the most devastating crisis of his life. (Leslie Field , Chaim Potok and the Critics: Sampler from a Consistent Spectrum, inStudies in American Jewish Literature: The World of Chaim Potok, no. 4 Ed. Daniel Walden (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985)3.Yet, in the end it helped Chaim Potok become the excellent writer he is, for, as Philip Toynbee wrote, few Jewish writers have emerged from so deep in the heart of orthodoxy; fewer still have been able to write about their emergence with such an unforced sympathy for both sides and every participant. (Philip Toynbee quoted in Chaim Potok: A Critical Companion. Ed. Sanford V. Sternlicht. Westport (CT): Greenwood P, 2000, 6. Potok did not forsake Judaism all together either, he chose to become a member of the conservative movement, a less orthodox form of Judaism, in which he remained until he died. Chaim Potok shows his readers Orthodox and Hasidic Judaism, two worlds which are different degrees of alien to gentiles and even secular Jews. He illustrates how religion both shapes identity and forms an obstacle to finding ones individual identity within a closed and isolated group, which is at odds with modern day society. However, the characters The Chosen also demonstrate how to negotiate their religious identity within a secular society. Literature proved to be an excellent medium, giving the reader a moving and colourful account of the lives of these Jews and helping us understand their various problems in a way a sociological study would not have, while, at the same time, attesting that the relationship between literature and religion need not be so complicated after all. In this chapter Introduction it is said to be proper to summarise each selected novel briefly.The ChosenPotoks novel opens with a heated baseball game between two teams, one Orthodox, the other Hasidic. A main character is Reuven Malter who is modern Orthodox and narrator of the story. Reuven is struck in the eye with a baseball hit by Daniel Saunders, son of the Hasidic rebbe. He is hospitalized and during recovery, becomes unusually good friends with Danny. The plot revolves around Danny and the trials he is experiencing. Danny is highly intelligent and possesses a photographic memory. Danny lacks compassion and from the time he was seven years old his father did not speak to him, raising him in silence, It was Reb Saunders method of teaching his son to suffer and have compassion for others. Not only does Danny not have a father in whom to confide but he is also surrounded by the secular world whose ideas and areas of study beckon him. With Reuven Malters help, Danny learns how to manage his feelings and desires. His fathers silence also teaches him a great deal and in the end, though Danny does not inherit the rebbeship from father, he does gain compassion for others. The PromiseThe Promise continues the story of Danny Saunders and Reuven Malter, with more of an emphasis on Reuvens life. Danny and Reuven are both in college, Danny studying psychology and Reuven studying to be a rabbi. World War II is over and the Jewish people are left with not only the reality of the Holocaust, but the survivors. The Promise deals with the religious zeal of these survivors, in particular one Rav Kalman, Reuven Malters Talmud professor. Reuven is not the only person affected by Holocaust survivors; a young boy, Michael Gordon, is psychologically impacted by their virulent attacks against his father, Abraham Gordon, a liberal Jewish scholar. Abraham Gordon does not believe in God, but man, while the survivors believe only in God and have lost faith in humankind. It is between these two types of Judaism that Reuven finds himself, and he is forced to make a choice between the two. By the novels conclusion we see maturity in all the characters and good or bad, they have made their choices. The beginningIn The Beginning, the title of Potoks fourth novel, through direct allusion to the Hebrew Bible, foregrounds Genesis and foreshadows the books complex layering of biblical and later Jewish themes and texts. The novel recalls Berashith Bara Elohim , In the beginning, God created...With its confident assertion of a good God creating good things, the sacred account predicates all subsequent biblical narrative on elemental goodness. In Potoks and readers post lapsarian world, his novel rightly begins, All beginnings are hard (P.1.) The growing complexity of the beginning-phrase reflects Jewish and of non-Jewish history. Potok writes in the shadow of the biblical imagination, as in Herold Blooms notion of the anxiety of influence (The Anxiety of Influence 1973), and draws to the modern readers attention the complexity of this first assertion. Hugh Nissenson suggests in his review My name is Dvid Lurie that an important intertextual relationship exists between In the beginning and The Book of Genesis: (the novel is) a recapitulation of the book of Genesis from the Creation to the Flood (P.36).For instance, he points to Davids fall on the stairs as a mythic element echoing the biblical fall (p.10). Structurally, Nissensons idea is workable. However, it is thought that thematically Potoks Dvid Lurie is foiled by his important biblical name sake, the ancient king David, and that stylistically, the more important influence on Potoks novel is the Wisdom Literature.Perhaps, the most psychologically complex and elaborately presented narrative cycle in the Hebrew Bible is the story of David. Lore Segal, in his article on David, II Samuel (in Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible), writes of the king: David plays more roles, in more situations than any modern protagonists: He is boy warrior, musician with healing powers, poet laureate, and court favourite; For a while he is the leader of a band of marauders who massacre alien cities. He is monarch, general, diplomat, a natural at public relations, a public man With a private life- a careful son, an irritating younger brother, a loving and Faithful friend, the husband of a harem that includes one angry wife; the Father of children who make him howl with grief, an adulterer who plots murder, A penitent , a frequent mourner, and an old man, at last who meets a new Goliath And cant do anything about itcant make love, cant keep warm. (P.109)In the beginning is the novel in which Potok deals most directly with violence as a central psychological and religious problem in the Jewish tradition and in the secular world. In this book violence is monolithic and omnipresent and occurs in various forms. In fact, it is located in David LURIES outer and inner worlds. Violence creates enormously complex problems for David, including the question of theodicy, the investigation of the justice of GOD; is it possible to defend the goodness and omnipotence of God in view of the existence of overwhelming evil? Another problem violence generates for David is its valorisation within his Jewish community, including the family, school, and traditional society. David intuits himself to be a pacifist, yet he is the son of a competent, clever soldier and a mother terrified by war. His community of JEWS exists largely because, as history and myth recore, its member have fled violence in EUROPE, and America has, until this century heeded George Washingtons directive in his second inaugural address, to avoid foreign entanglements. But in Davids life violence is everywhere. Potok explores these issues by location the discussion in Davids present reality of street racism in Brooklyn, in the growing Nazi threat, and in the traditions and sacred texts of the Jewish faith.My Name is Asher LevIt is written in the first person by the main character; Asher Lev. Potok weaves a story about a boy who is caught between two worlds. He lives in the nucleus of the Ladover Hasidic world, but is driven by an aesthetic passion into the secular world of art. Secular artistic endeavours are not valued in the Hasidic world, so Asher meets with disapproval from his parents and community.Ashers father travels for the Rebbe, so Asher and his mother are frequently without a father and husband. Ashers mother, Rivkeh, worries not only about her husbands travels, but also the deteriorating relationship between Asher and his father. Rivkeh is in the middle as she tries to maintain peace between father and son. In the end, Asher depicts her suffering in two crucifixion paintings resulting in his excommunication from the Lad over Hasidic community in New York. The Gift of Asher LevThis novel is the sequel to My Name Is Asher Lev. Asher is residing in France and is married to a woman named Devorah. They have two children, Rocheleh and Avrumel. It has been twenty years since Ashers exile from New York and he is now a famous artist. The novel focuses on Ashers return, along with his family, to New York to attend the funeral and week of mourning for Ashers Uncle Yitzchak. The week extends into months as Devorah and the children desire to become acquainted with Ashers parents. Once again Asher is confronted with the Hasidic world of his childhood which continues to misunderstand him as an adult. In addition, Asher must make a decision that might cost him a great price. Basically he must choose between his family and his art, resulting in complete exile and seclusion.Thus in this first chapter named Introduction Jewish immigration to America from Eastern Europe and other countries has been given reasonable room. A brief introduction of the author is mentioned. New York Jewish community, early Jewish American literature, Yiddish literature and a few Jewish-American novels are also described briefly. The following chapters of this thesis deal with a critical study of the chosen novels of Chaim Potok.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:PRIMARY SOURCES:Potok, Chaim. The Chosen. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Crest Books, 1982. Print.Potok, Chaim. The Promise. Potok, Chaim. In The Beginning. Potok, Chaim. The Gift of Asher Lev. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986. Print. Potok, Chaim. My Name is Asher Lev New York: Fawcett Crest Books, 1991. Print.SECONDARY SOURCES:D.H.Lawrence Classic American literature (1924), S.Lillian Kremer, Chaim PotokIrving Howe, World Of Our Fathers. Copy-Right 1976 by Irving Howe. Printed in the US. Wirth-Nesher and Krame Leonard Dinnerstein,Antisemitism in America(1994), David Gerber,Anti-Semitism in American History(1986), John Higham,Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in America(1975). G.B Tennyson, Edward E. Ericson. Introduction in Religion and Modern Li