[In The Promise, Mr. Chaim Potok handles his] material with a lucidity and compassion, and an intimate yet objective knowledge of detail which produces both a touching, convincing picture of family and synagogue and a wider comment on spiritual inflexibility and spiritual triumph.

Mr. Potok's Brooklyn is a severe, insulated community, sometimes even rather too remote and self-sufficent in its own values to be credible. The outside world impinges only in so far as Senator (Joe) McCarthy is frightening as a persecutor or reassuring because he has Jewish aides, Messrs. Cohn and Schine; and there is a moment of distasteful complacency about the fate of the Rosenbergs. These faults apart, The Promise is a moving, continually absorbing, account of how people come to terms with a puritanical background, discarding its (understandable) severities and deriving strength from its virtues. Mr. Potok's narrative is rigorously and beautifully straightforward: the crises...