SOURCE: "Sequels," in Commentary, Vol. 49, May, 1970, pp. 104, 106, 108.

In the following excerpt, Rabinowitz offers a mixed assessment of The Promise, faulting it for intrusive or overly academic psychologizing among the characters.

… [Chaim Potok's] The Promise is no disappointment as its fore-runner, The Chosen, is no masterpiece. The Chosen stayed at the top of the best-seller list for reasons which are easy enough to imagine. The story of Danny and Reuven and the Brooklyn Hasidic world begins, in The Chosen, with a now-famous baseball game in which Reuven's eye is fairly torn out of his head by Danny, batting fiercely for the Yeshiva team out to beat the apikorsim. Indeed, the first sixty pages of that novel gave fair promise of an interesting storyteller at work. Very soon thereafter in The Chosen, one sees that nothing of that promise will be sustained. After a first fine start, Mr. Potok declines...