He found such confrontation in his discovery of secular fiction as a teenager, a discovery that challenged his Orthodox religious beliefs. His time served as a U.S. Army chaplain after the Korean War further "rattled everything he thought he knew," according to Stevens. "Clash of cultures fills the . . . author's numerous novels, including
The Choice, The Promise, and
My Name Is Asher Lev," Stevens remarked. Potok used such seminal experiences as well as his rabbinical training to invent a believable world often populated by highly educated Jewish leaders and students. Above all, the writer's "primary concern is the spiritual and intellectual growth of his characters--how and what they come to believe," observed Hugh Nissenson in the
New York Times Book Review. Some critics have compared Potok to Sholom Aleichem, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russian-Yiddish author of short stories and novels, in that the conflicts contained in Potok's books are cultural, religious, and scholarly. "That his novels have been best-sellers requires some explanation given the rather esoteric nature of his subject matter," commented Edward Abramson in Chaim Potok. "Many non-Jews think that the Jewish community is a homogeneous one with each member having substantially the same beliefs as the other." The critic further explained that "there is a wide divergence in the interpretation of law and ritual among Liberal, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews." Alex Rubin noted in Newsweek that though Potok's "fictional characters remained bound within the insular world of Hasidic Judaism, .
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