I have no qualms about praising Chaim Potok's The Promise, a novel as orthodox as a Hasidic earlock, a novel which follows a definite canon of clarity, and which enters a most difficult terrain of experience without stumbling upon the obscure…. [The] ability to grasp village life and breathe into it the troubles of the world is not new to Jewish writing. One thinks, after the Old Testament, of S. Y. Agnon, who died this month. But Chaim Potok is a step onward, writing not about the Diaspora but about New York in the 1950s. Reuven Malter (the hero of Potok's The Chosen) is a student at a tightly Orthodox yeshiva. He is caught in a series of situations which force him to make certain basic choices affecting his family, friends and teachers. To say simply that the novel's conflict is about Reuven trying to reconcile the old...