The Chosen

Rating: 5

Finished: Jan 29, 2026

The Chosen - Chaim Potok Rating - 9/10 This book will stay with me. It started slow, I had trouble getting through the first half of the book. Honestly, I was a bit confused about the point of the book. Then it all came together. My favorite character, and by favorite, I mean the most interesting character was Rev Saunders, Danny's father. I disliked Rev for much of the book and in the end still can't decide if I like him or not. His story is tragic, a Rabbi in Russia, his wife and child killed in a pogrom, hiding in total discomfort for days, then escaping Russia and finding his way, with his followers to America as refugees. This is traumatic and, honestly, I can't comprehend what this would have been like. I did not understand his treatment of Danny, not speaking to your child is foreign to me, I am a father of four children and I can't really comprehend having no speech with one of my children, but again, this was a different time. Rev is an anachronism; he is a relic of things past, I do not know Revs, I have known people who have aspects of his nature, and had connections or knew people of his kind early in their lives. I do not know if America today has a place for someone like Rev, and in some ways that makes me a bit sad. The Chosen takes place in an America that no longer exists. This was a time of immigrant communities who banded together and lived together, their living conditions were better than their parents, they had suffered the tenements, the depression and in their life times saw the transition of the horse to the car and the candle to the lightbulb; saw telecommunications develop. But a big change between then and now is community and how community and tradition fully percolate into the fabric of one's existence - both Reuvan and Danny lived Judaism in all aspects of their life. Studying Talmud was their grounding center, all other activities were peripheral or even taboo. For Danny, reading Freud in the library was a rebellion. Danny and Revuan's friendship is familiar to me, Potok wrote adolescent friendship so well, it brought me back, I remember having friends like this, where you spend every day together thinking and talking about life, imagining what life might bring, talking about all the things that seemed so important at the time. The father and son dynamics were moving too, Danny and Rev's relationship was foreign to me, but clearly they loved each other, their bond was one of mysticism not pragmatism. A final point of brilliance was the way Potok interweaved Jewish history into the narrative, the principal actors in the book lived through a monumental time. They saw the War, the Holocaust and then the foundation of Israel. David Malter (Reuvan's father) saw the founding of Israel as his mission, and gave the work his life, almost dying the process. He saw it as his duty - to make sense out of the holocaust, for the death of six million Jews to be worth something, then the Jews had to regain their homeland. This interplay of duty, history and a people's tragedy and destiny was brilliant.