Chaim Potok to Speak at PUC
by Jonathan Watts
Acclaimed Jewish writer Chaim Potok will speak at Pacific Union College on February 16, 1998, at 7 p.m. His lecture is entitled "The Writer and the Community: a Personal Journey."Potok is the author of several thought-provoking best-sellers based on his Jewish heritage. These include The Chosen, The Promise, My Name is Asher Lev, In the Beginning, The Book of Lights, Davita's Harp, The Gift of Asher Lev, and I Am the Clay. Potok is also the author of plays, short stories, non-fictional works, book reviews, and children's books. His books have received several awards, including The Edward Lewis Wallant Award, The Athenaeum Prize, and The National Jewish Book Award for Fiction.
Potok's writings deal with the struggle of individuals to reconcile the beliefs and values of their faith communities with those of the outside world. Potok understands this theme well from his own personal experience. Like Asher Lev, one of the main characters in his books, Potok grew up with a love of painting which was frowned on by his conservative Jewish father. And as a teenager, he read Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and knew that he wanted to be a writer.
"My particular natural life experience has been that of cultures clashing in a certain way-confrontation of core elements," said Potok. "From my Jewish culture to literature, for example. I grew up at the heart, at the core, of one culture. And then I encountered an element from the core of the general culture in which I was living, and that element was modern secular literature."
Potok pursued an education in both of the cultures he lives in. He attended the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and was ordained a rabbi in 1954. He also earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965.
"I got a rabbinic ordination so that I could know my own tradition better because I knew I wanted to write about it," said Potok. "And I went and got a doctorate in secular philosophy because I wanted to know Western civilization better, because I knew I wanted to write about that."
Chaim Potok's February 16 presentation will be the third lecture sponsored by the college's Longo Lecture Series. The Longo Lecture Series was founded in 1992 by Lawrence D. Longo, M.D., in honor of his parents, Frank and Florine Longo. This endowment was intended to establish a lectureship with the goal of increasing the breadth and depth of ideas in the Christian experience. Previous Longo Lecture Series speakers include Robert Bellah, author of Habits of the Heart; and Martin Marty, author of the Fundamentalism Project series as well as numerous other books.
Because of the enormous response to the lecture series, the event has been moved to the PUC Church Sanctuary. Admission is free.
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