Photo originally published in Collegedale Academy newspaper, March 1986, with permission of the Chattanooga Times (now the Times Free Press).

Chaim Potok: Report of an Interview

[In March, 1986, Chaim Potok visited the campus of Southern College (now Southern Adventist University). I attended all events of his visit and was able to have a private, hour-long interview with the author. This is the narrative report that I compiled as a result of his lectures and our interview. --RKD]

The audience was amused when Dr. Chaim Potok, author of The Chosen, The Promise, My Name is Asher Lev, In the Beginning, The Book of Lights, and Davita's Harp, called on a little girl with a question. He turned to quiet the audience with, "This will be the best question," and, indeed, it did seem to be just that: "How do you write a book?" Dr. Potok's answer had much to do with the content of his speeches while he was on the campus of Southern College, March 19 and 20 [1986].

How does he write a book? In response to the little girl's question, Potok said that he begins with an idea, a problem that bothers him for a long time. If that problem is rich enough, it begins to be surrounded by people and their worlds. It gets broken into sections, and he begins to see the implications of each part, "no matter who might be hurt . . . . Anything else is public relations."

Earlier on in the day, Potok had spoken on his actual writing process. When a book moves from the thinking stage to the writing stage, he writes all of the drafts in long hand with the exception of the final draft, now done on a word processor. The reason for this is simple, said Potok. He grew up during the Depression, and then World War II came along. Typewriters were simply not available, and he grew accustomed to writing everything in longhand.

When asked about his editor's role in the writing of his books, Potok said that he gives the completed book to the editor who then "reads and reacts." In Dr. Potok's opinion, his editor at Knopf is "the best in the business," a person who often latches onto a weakness that the author himself felt as he was writing but was unable to resolve. The editor might react with a suggestion for "more here or less here," and then Potok does any necessary re-writing. The only book that he did no revision on was The Book of Lights, which, he said, was picked up by a messenger from the publisher, and, the next time Potok laid eyes on the work, it was in galley proofs. All the other works required up to a month of revision done either at his home or at Knopf's. That is how he physically writes a book.

The specific answer Dr. Potok gave the little girl, however, dealt mainly with the thinking stage of novel creation, and in that answer he touched on a feature common to all his works. The books begin with a problem. Of course, the problems of the books are not all the same, but they spring from a single theme, that is, as Potok calls it, "core-to-core confrontation."

Much of Dr. Potok's lecture on the evening of March 19 addressed this subject. Everybody at this point in time, according to the author, grows up in a particular and small world, usually the world of our families, churches, or small communities. We learn the value system of that world. Then ideas come to us from outside, ideas that are alien to our value system. We develop a behavior to deal with this ongoing culture confrontation and come to hardly notice our adaptation. Then along comes a novelist, who opens the situation. What are we doing that we are not thinking about? We need a sense of uniqueness; we need to know that our group is important to the general civilization. But, when a person holding unique values from the core of one culture experiences conflicting values at the core of the general world, something happens. Potok calls this a "core-to-core confrontation."

His books are an attempt to explore the dimensions of that kind of confrontation. When western secular humanism, as Potok termed it, impinges on the person's core values, resolution is possible with some types of confrontation. For others, though, resolution is impossible to achieve.

To a certain extent the core-to-core confrontation in his novels mirror his own cultural confrontations. The novelist told this writer, however, that he would like to think that he is far ahead of the last character he wrote about. He writes 'behind' his own development, so to speak. That is not to say that works are autobiographical. Potok cautioned against this idea, but also said that an author must write from his own experience. He must write about what he knows best.

The novelist must not only write about what he knows best, but must write about it, said Potok, with the firm conviction that no one else can tell about this world better than himself. No one knows the world of My Name Is Asher Lev better than Potok, for this work is a "metaphor for all my struggles as a writer," said the author. This is the one book he would leave to posterity if he were limited to only one, and, not surprisingly, Asher is his favorite character, for Potok has "felt his struggles." Potok's father was critical of his writing, and even his mother found it difficult to accept, although she was supportive, as Asher's mother was. Apparently, when Potok told his mother that he was going to be a writer of stories, she said to him, "So you want to write stories, darling? That's nice. You'll be a brain surgeon on the side." Said Potok, "Writing stories is somewhere in the basement in the edifice of things Jewish." Talmudic scholarship is given top priority, not story writing. So Potok experienced an aesthetic confrontation that could not be resolved--just as Asher's core-to-core confrontation with modern art had no resolution. Potok left the Orthodox tradition and now considers himself a conservative Jew.

In Potok's first novel, The Chosen, there is an attempt to define that core of Orthodoxy. There are two parts of that definition. First is the world represented by Reb Saunders that says, "The outside world is disgusting: we don't need the outside world." Second is the world of the Malters, also Orthodox, but a world that says, "Wait a minute . . . . There are really beautiful things out there. Let's bring the good in and enrich ourselves." This Orthodox core is brought into confrontation with, first, Freudian psychoanalytic theory, and, second, the idea of a Jewish state, an idea with a secular socialist political thrust. This is a confrontation for which resolution is possible. Danny is in a position to be able to pick the best of both worlds and at the same time remain within his religious tradition.

In The Promise (the sequel to The Chosen), Reuven confronts scientific text criticism--methodology abhorrent to the very Orthodox for whom "all Jewish law is predicted on belief that the Torah was dictated word for word by God" and that it is inviolable. He is able to resolve this confrontation, also. He decides to apply scientific text criticism only to the Talmud, not Scripture. Both Danny's and Reuven's confrontations are resolved by picking and choosing.

Potok then thought, "What about a problem that you can't compartmentalize," cannot resolve? My Name Is Asher Lev and its aesthetic confrontation, previously mentioned, was the result. David Lurie of In the Beginning also has a core-to-core confrontation that cannot be resolved. He confronts scientific Biblical criticism and "becomes committed to this methodology." He leaves his world because his community cannot countenance such treatment of the Scriptures.

In The Book of Lights there is a confrontation for which there are no answers at all. The Orthodox tradition regards paganism as "intrinsically an abomination." Yet, in the Far East during the Korean War, Potok found loveliness he could not have imagined in a pagan world. He had always been raised with a reason for Jewish suffering, but he saw horrific suffering in Asia. "Why do Asians suffer?" There were no answers. For the first time he had no answers for suffering. The Book of Lights leaves one in a "world of ambiguity."

Potok's latest book contains a resolution different from the previous five novels. In Davita's Harp there is a confrontation between secular fundamentalism (Marxism and Stalinism) and Jewish fundamentalism. There are deeply hurt people on both sides. The narrating character in this work, Davita, finds comfort in a return to the Orthodox tradition that her mother abandoned.

Potok is still writing. Just as Asher could not stop painting, Potok feels this way about writing. He considers fiction writing a "calling." He could do nothing else. "An author is never separated from writing," says Potok, and he cannot live outside the frame of reference of a writer. He is constantly "filling his senses." A writer does not choose writing as a career; writing chooses him. Potok's comment about the effect of his critics illustrates this. Apparently he used to read his critics assiduously, but he does not so much now. He says they have their job to do, he has his life work to get out, and they are not going to stop him.

Where will his life work take him from here? In response to a question about the stage at which his next novel is right now, Potok said it's in the "deep thinking stage." He suggested that it will be a sequel to Davita's Harp, but he cautioned that one must be very wary of believing everything a novelist says about a work in progress. Each of his novels is an exploration, and at the onset he knows not where the exploration will take him. It may end up being something very different. Whatever the result of the ideas currently churning in his brain, one can expect a very readable, thoroughly enjoyable, and sometimes painfully thought-provoking novel to result--if the previous six novels are any indication. His readership in Collegedale and Chattanooga, much enriched by his recent visit, anticipates its appearance.

-- Rosemary Dibben