The Chosen

What's inside (9 sections)

1. Five blocks apart
2. The quiz and the library
3. War, death, and the argument about Israel
4. Two years of silence
5. The state, and talking again
6. What Reb Saunders had been doing
7. Where the book stops
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

There is a moment near the end of this novel when an old rabbi explains, in a low voice and without once looking at his son, why he spent the boy's childhood saying nothing to him.

The explanation runs a couple of pages. By the time it is finished you understand that everything you assumed about cruelty in this book was wrong.

I did not see it coming. I went into The Chosen expecting a story about a boy choosing between the tradition and the world, and what I got was a novel about two fathers teaching their sons the same lesson in opposite directions.

Chaim Potok published it in 1967 with Simon & Schuster, in a hardback of 284 pages, under the ISBN 9780671136741.

It was his first novel. By then he was a Conservative rabbi, an Army chaplain who had served in Korea, and a Philadelphia editor, and the seed of the book was a year he spent in Israel in 1963 writing. Knopf issued a twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 1992 with a foreword by Potok himself. The novel became a bestseller and was filmed in 1981.

Five blocks apart

Reuven Malter tells this story, and he begins by telling you what he and Danny Saunders have in common, which is nothing.

For fifteen years they have lived five blocks apart in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and never met. Danny belongs to a Hasidic sect that came out of Russia and has kept itself apart, fiercely loyal to his father, who is a rabbi and a tzaddik, a leader whose word settles disputes and whose congregation follows him because the position passes from father to son. Reuven's father, David Malter, is a Talmudic scholar and a writer who teaches in a yeshiva in Crown Heights, a school that teaches more English than the others and so gets looked down upon in the neighborhood.

Different schools, different worlds, five blocks.

Reuven has no siblings. His mother died soon after he was born, and the household is run by his father and by Manya, the Russian housekeeper who cooks and cleans and keeps the two of them fed.

What opens the two of them up is the war. English teachers in the Jewish parochial schools decided to show the gentile world that yeshiva students were as physically fit as anybody else in America, so the schools formed leagues, and in June 1944 Reuven's team played Danny's.

The Hasidim arrived dressed identically, in white shirts and dark pants and small black skullcaps. The rabbi who ran them insisted on five minutes of practice on the field before the game, then stood by the fence reading a book. Reuven's coach was a gym teacher named Mr. Galanter, who thumped his fist into his palm and shouted about defensive holes. Danny Saunders was the best hitter on the other side, and he played as if the war had come to Brooklyn.

Reuven pitched in the last inning with his team ahead. Danny's line drive came back at him and shattered his shell-rimmed glasses, and a piece of the glass went into his eye.

His team lost. Mr. Galanter called a cab to Brooklyn Memorial Hospital, where Reuven spent a week in a ward with a boxer named Tony Savo, a small child called Mickey, and Billy, a blond boy who is blind.

Danny comes to the hospital to apologize and Reuven refuses to see him. His anger surprises him.

Then his father says the thing that organizes everything after it: when someone asks to be heard, you have to hear them. Danny returns the next day, and by the end of the visit the two of them are arguing about the Talmud, and Danny admits that what he wants to be is a psychologist.

The quiz and the library

The Hasidic half of the book has a pull of its own. Reuven is taken to the Saunders' brownstone, where the synagogue occupies the ground floor and the family lives above it.

At the Shabbat meal Reb Saunders preaches on the Torah and then quizzes his son in front of the room, slipping deliberate errors into his own reasoning and waiting to see whether Danny catches them. Danny catches the first one and is rebuked for not listening carefully enough afterward. Then the rabbi turns the same question to Reuven, a stranger, and Reuven finds a mistake in the numerology and feels, he says, as though he has passed a test. The scene makes the method of that world legible: knowledge is displayed, argued in public, and checked by other people.

The library is where the second thread runs. Danny has been going there on his own and reading whatever he can find, and the man who has been steering him is Reuven's father.

David Malter has been feeding Danny the kinds of books Reb Saunders forbids, on the argument that Danny would read them anyway and might as well read them with a guide. Danny is teaching himself German so that he can read Freud in the original, and he has read a history of the Jews whose author reviles the Hasidim, which wounds him badly. The two boys are not friends in any comfortable sense yet, but they are in the same business of appetite, and Reuven has never met anyone who wants to know as much as Danny does.

Then the silence arrives.

Reb Saunders has raised Danny in silence since the boy was ten or eleven, speaking to him only when they study Talmud together, and nobody will explain why. Danny says his father is not just another human being. Reuven, who thinks that is a way of avoiding the truth, cannot argue with it.

When Reb Saunders realizes Danny has been reading forbidden books, he cannot ask his son about it, so he asks Reuven, and Reuven tells him everything except the German and the Freud. David Malter later explains what is really happening: Reb Saunders is using Reuven as a buffer, speaking to his son through a boy his son trusts. That arrangement holds the middle of the book together.

War, death, and the argument about Israel

The war arrives in pieces. Roosevelt dies in the spring of 1945 and Reuven, who had treated him as immortal, comes home from school with a fever and stays in bed for ten days.

Then the reports from Europe arrive, and the neighborhood learns what the camps were. David Malter weeps, and then says it is up to Jews in America to rebuild what has been destroyed, in America and in Palestine. Reb Saunders weeps too, and says the suffering was God's will and that the Messiah has not come yet, so no Jewish state may be built before he does.

Two fathers, hurt by the same facts, arriving at opposite conclusions. The book never pretends one of them is simply right.

David Malter's first heart attack comes that summer. Reb Saunders invites Reuven to live in the Saunders' house while the father is in the hospital, and Reuven moves into Danny's room.

He gets fat on the food Danny's mother keeps piling on his plate, is teased by Danny's sister, and watches Reb Saunders brood and break into tears for reasons nobody will name. Danny finally explains Freud to him properly, and Reuven is shaken by how much of it he understands.

When Reuven raises Zionism at the table, Reb Saunders erupts, screaming that the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob will not be built by Jewish goyim while he lives. Reuven understands that if his father were known he would be thrown out of the house.

Two years of silence

At Hirsch College, the Samson Raphael Hirsch Seminary, the two of them land in the same orbit again.

Danny is put in Rav Gershenson's top Talmud class, where he is the star, and Reuven sits one class below. Danny is miserable, because the psychology department teaches experimental psychology and nothing at all about analysis, and only after a long talk with Professor Appleman does he settle on clinical psychology, which will need a doctorate.

Reuven agrees to tutor him in mathematics. Between them they build a curriculum the college will not offer.

Then David Malter speaks at a Zionist rally at Madison Square Garden, and the next day Danny tells Reuven that his father has forbidden him ever to speak to Reuven again. The prohibition lasts more than two years.

It is the most painful stretch in the book and also the slowest. Reuven's grades go bad, the college splits into Zionist and anti-Zionist factions, leaflets go up on the walls and fistfights nearly start. Reuven sits in Rav Gershenson's class with Danny a few feet away, and they manage a few nods and a brush past each other in the corridor. When the United Nations votes for partition in November 1947, the argument gets louder.

David Malter's second heart attack comes at a Jewish National Fund meeting, and Reuven stays home alone with the silence, filling it with Talmud.

When Rav Gershenson finally calls on him for a passage nobody in the room can make sense of, Reuven answers it cleanly, using the old traditional methods rather than his father's audacious ones, and the old scholar praises him and then asks how his father would have handled it. Reuven explains, and understands afterward that Gershenson cannot publish, cannot put his name to a journal, because of what he believes.

That is the moment Reuven grasps the cost his father's scholarship has carried.

The state, and talking again

In May 1948 the state of Israel is declared and Reuven and his father cry.

The armies invade, and then a Hirsch graduate is killed in the fighting, and the college holds a memorial, and the anti-Zionist activity dies out along with the argument. Danny comes back to Reuven in the lunchroom with a smile and asks for help with math, and two years of silence go by in a single conversation.

Danny has been thinking about how to tell his father. He has applied to Harvard, Berkeley and Columbia for doctoral programs, all three have accepted him, and his father has certainly seen the return addresses on the envelopes. Danny has been counting on his younger brother Levi, who is sickly and silent, to take the dynasty instead. He mentions his sister, who was promised in marriage when she was two years old, and then refuses to discuss it again.

Reb Saunders, meanwhile, keeps asking after Reuven, first through Danny and then directly, and Reuven refuses to go, out of dislike.

His father gets angry with him for it: if the old man wants to talk to him, he should talk to him, because Reb Saunders is trying to speak to Danny through Reuven. At Passover, Reuven goes.

What Reb Saunders had been doing

The final chapter is a conversation in a third-floor study, and it opens like a trap sprung in reverse.

Reb Saunders says he has known for a long time that Danny and Reuven would go their separate ways. He talks to Danny through Reuven, still not looking at his son. The explanation: a person is born with a spark of goodness, and everything else about him is a shell, and a shell of intellect without compassion is worth nothing.

He saw early that Danny had an astonishing mind and almost no soul, and his own brother left religious observance for intellectual life and died in Auschwitz. So he raised Danny in silence, to teach him what suffering feels like, since carrying the suffering of the people is the tzaddik's whole job. He knew the silence would push his son away from the rabbinate. He did it anyway, and he says he would do it again, because what he wants is for Danny to have the soul of a tzaddik whatever job he holds.

He apologizes to both boys for the pain it caused, breaks down, and leaves the room.

Then the pieces fall. Reb Saunders announces to his congregation that Danny will study psychology, which means Levi inherits the position, and he withdraws the promise of marriage for Danny's sister. Both boys graduate summa cum laude.

Danny shaves his beard and his side curls, tells Reuven that he and his father talk now, and asks whether he will raise his own son in silence. He says he will, unless he can find a better way to teach a child the soul of a tzaddik.

Then he says goodbye and walks off down the sidewalk, and the last thing Reuven hears is his metal-capped shoes tapping.

Where the book stops

The ending is what people complain about, and the complaint has some justice in it.

Most of the novel comes down to one conversation in which the least sympathetic character is handed the final word, and his account of his own noble intentions is simply believed. Potok gives us Reb Saunders weeping, and we are asked to let the weeping settle it. Plenty of readers have said the novel stops too soon, that it hands the work of making peace to a reader who has just been told what to feel.

The sequel, The Promise, published in 1969, picks Reuven's life up from there. That is where the adult consequences actually land.

The other complaint is speed. The stretch from Roosevelt's death to Israel's declaration covers two years and a good deal of Talmud, committee meetings and illness, and some of it reads like a record kept for the sake of the record. The first half is mostly talk, and there are passages where Reuven's inner life is summarized rather than shown.

What survives that is the idea at the center of the book, and it is worth having.

Potok never lets the reader settle the argument between a father who raises his son in silence and a father who cannot stop talking, between waiting for the Messiah and building something in the present. Both men love their sons and both are partly wrong. The prose is plain to the point of austerity, and the book has none of the swagger that later Jewish American novels became known for, which is either its charm or its datedness depending on the mood you brought to it.

Read it if you like a first half of talk and a second half of consequence. Skip it if you need a plot that closes on the page, and if you are allergic to Talmud, which is discussed often enough to feel like a language lesson.

FAQ

Who are Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders?

They are fifteen-year-old Jewish boys who live five blocks apart in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and meet when a softball hit shatters Reuven's glasses in 1944. Reuven narrates the novel; Danny is the son of the Hasidic rabbi Reb Saunders.

Why does Reb Saunders barely speak to his own son?

He raises Danny in silence from the age of ten or eleven so that the boy will learn to feel the suffering of others. He explains the reasoning near the end of the book, and it is also why he used Reuven as a way to talk to Danny.

When was The Chosen first published, and by whom?

Simon & Schuster published it in 1967, in a hardback of 284 pages with ISBN 9780671136741. Knopf issued a twenty-fifth anniversary edition with a foreword by Potok in 1992.