Chaim Potok

The Promise takes up where The Chosen left off, with Reuven Malter studying for ordination and Danny Saunders training as a psychologist, and sets them against a scholarly quarrel over how to read sacred texts that decides careers and friendships. Chaim Potok published it in 1969, two years after the first book, and it took the Athenaeum Award. He was a rabbi ordained in the Conservative movement, served as an army chaplain in Korea, edited for the Jewish Publication Society and led the new translation of the Hebrew Bible it produced. His fiction returns to the same problem: a gifted young man inside an observant community whose gift pulls him towards a world the community distrusts. My Name Is Asher Lev, about a painter, is the sharpest version of it. Potok was born in the Bronx in 1929 and died in Pennsylvania in 2002.