Point of View

The point of view of The Promise is that of its author, Chaim Potok, and its main character, Reuven Malter. Chaim Potok was born in 1929 and died in 2002; he was an Jewish and American author who was also a rabbi. Potok was born in the Bronx to Polish Jewish immigrants. He was raised with an Orthodox Jewish education and graduated from Yeshiva University with a degree in English Literature; he then got his MA in Hebrew literature and his rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

The Jewish Theological Seminary was an important site of the conflict between Reform and Orthodox Judaism. And apparently, this conflict deeply shaped Potok's point of view. Many of his novels concern the conflict between those Jewish thinkers who wanted to adapt Jewish tradition to modernity and to see tradition as fluid and responsive to historical circumstance, and the...