One of America’s most popular Jewish writers, Chaim Potok b.

Poignant and profound, Chaim Potok s newest fiction is a major addition to his remarkable and remarkably loved body of work. And, finally, we meet her in The Trope Teacher, in which a distinguished professor of military history, trying to write his memoirs, is distracted by his wife’s illness and by the arrival next door of a new neighbor, the famous writer I. As a graduate student, she finds herself escorting a guest lecturer from the Soviet Union, and in The War Doctor, her sympathy moves him to put his painful past to paper recounting his experiences as a Soviet NKVD agent who was saved by an idealistic doctor during the Russian civil war, only to encounter him again during the terrifying period of the Kremlin doctors plot. In The Ark Builder, he shares with her the story of his friendship with a proud old builder of synagogue arks, and what happened when the German army invaded their Polish town. As a young girl, she offers English lessons to a teenage survivor of the camps.

Ilana Davita Dinn is the listener to whom three men relate their lives. Potok is also the author of a nonfiction volume, Wanderings: Chaim Potok's History of the Jews (1978), as well as several short stories and articles that have been published in both religious and secular magazines.From the celebrated author of The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev, a trilogy of related novellas about a woman whose life touches three very different men stories that encompass some of the profoundest themes of the twentieth century. Its sequel, The Promise (1969) was the winner of an Athenaeum Award. The Chosen was nominated for a National Book Award in 1967 and made into a successful film in 1982. Many of them explore the meaning of Judaism in the modern era, focusing on the conflict between traditional teachings and the pressures of modern life. This and later books have been both critically and popularly successful. Potok has held a variety of positions within the Jewish community, including directing a camp in Los Angeles, teaching at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles at a Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and working as an editor on various religious publications, Potok's first novel, The Chosen, was published in 1967, and he quickly won acclaim for this best-selling book about tensions within the Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. Eventually Potok returned to school and received his Ph.D.

After two years of military service as a chaplain in Korea, Potok married Adena Sarah Mosevitsky in 1958. He graduated summa cum laude (with highest honors) from Yeshiva University in 1950, and received an advanced degree from Jewish Theological Seminary in 1954, when he also became an ordained Conservative rabbi. Chaim Potok was born in New York City in 1929.

The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok