Chaim Potok and the Problem of Assimilation for the American Jew
America has been a country of immigrants since Europeans first settled it over five hundred years ago. America has always faced the problem of assimilation, a challenge faced by every country with a considerable immigrant population. Because immigrants founded America, her culture is a combination of the cultures of other countries. Should these immigrants isolate themselves from the mainstream American culture, or should they sacrifice the culture of their homelands for the benefits American culture has to offer? Judaism, one of the world's oldest religions, has remained strong over its six thousand year history by remaining distinct - and isolated - from other cultures. Chaim Potok, in his books The Chosen, My Name is Asher Lev, In the Beginning, and The Book of Lights, focuses on this conflict between Orthodox Judaism and the secular world.Many of Chaim Potok's characters want the American Jewry to remain isolated from the mainstream American culture:The world kills us! The world flays our skin from our bodies and throws us into the flames! The world laughs at Torah! And if it does not kill us, it tempts us! It misleads us! It contaminates
His son, however, is plagued with a mind so brilliant that he cannot have a soul as compassionate as his father would like. My Name is Asher Lev focuses on a Jewish child with an amazing gift for art. But to the students of most of the parochial schools, an inter-league baseball victory had come to take on only a shade of less significance than a top grade in Talmud, for it was an unquestioned mark of one's Americanism, and to be counted a loyal American had become increasingly important to us during these last years of the war (The Chosen 12). Potok's novels feature characters whose extraordinary gifts cause them to interact with the secular world as well as their Jewish communities. American Jews, however, face a dilemma: "Ideas from this secular world inevitably impinge upon an individual born in a church community or a synagogue community, especially when that individual embarks ona college experience" (Potok 2). Chaim Potok's works often focus on main characters whose talents draw them to the outside world:When individuals are brought up in the heart of such a community or culture [as Danny's and Reuven's] they learn to commit themselves to its values . Ah, how the man suffered! And my Danny enjoyed the story . The baseball games were advocated primarily by the English teachers:To the rabbis who taught in the Jewish parochial schools, baseball was an evil waste of time, a spawn of the potentially assimilationist English portion of the yeshiva day. In this novel the characters handle the news of the Holocaust in different ways: Reb Saunders seeks an answer from God, while David Malther becomes a Zionist, working in the world to prevent such travesties from occurring again (Young). To Reb Saunders, compassion is more important than intelligence. David Malther, because he is a teacher and a scholar, is more open to secular ideas and is willing to let his son choose his career. In that novel, Gershon Loran travels to Korea and Japan, two countries that have never been influenced by Judaism. Chaim Potok's books often focus on the pain characters cause themselves and their communities when they choose to embrace the secular world rather than Orthodox or Hasidim Judaism (switt@thayer. These books, in addition to The Book of Lights and In the Beginning, also focus on the problem of Jewish assimilation into mainstream American culture.
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