Chaim Potok

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this modern classic from the National Book Award–nominated author of The Chosen, a young religious artist is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels, even when it leads him to blasphemy. 
“A novel of finely articulated tragic power .... Little short of a work of genius.”—The New York Times Book Review
Asher Lev...

Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders, two Jewish friends living in Brooklyn, choose to alter the destinies chosen for them by their fathers. Reuven, studying to be a rabbi, finds his vocation blocked by a challenge to his scholarship and his father's book. Danny, who is studying clinical psychology, risks his career by a decision, based on intuition, that he feels can save a young boy's sanity.

"From the celebrated author of The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev, a trilogy of related novellas about a woman whose life touches three very different men - stories that encompass some of the profoundest themes of the twentieth century." "Ilana Davita Dinn is the listener to whom three men relate their lives." "As a young girl, she offers English lessons to a teenage survivor of the camps. In "The Ark Builder," he shares with her the story of his...

Tells the story of an old man, his wife, and a young boy brought together by chance during the horror of the Korean War. As the Chinese and the army of the North sweep south during the Korean War, an old peasant farmer and his wife flee their village across the bleak, bombed-out landscape. They soon come upon a boy in a ditch who is wounded and unconscious. Stirred by possessiveness and caring the woman refuses to leave the boy behind. The man thinks...

In 1940s Brooklyn, New York, an accident throws Reuven Malther and Danny Saunders together. Despite their differences (Reuven is a Modern Orthodox Jew with an intellectual, Zionist father; Danny is the brilliant son and rightful heir to a Hasidic rebbe), the young men form a deep, if unlikely, friendship. Together they negotiate adolescence, family conflicts, the crisis of faith engendered when Holocaust stories begin to emerge in the U.S., loss,...

"At the center of the novel is Gershon Loran -- a young rabbi, the product of a parochial New York Jewish upbringing -- whose early life [was] shaped by darkly irrational circumstances ... It is this young man -- raised in the absolute belief that 'the Jewish religion made a fundamental difference in the world' --ho at the end of the Korean War, finds himself a chaplain in a country where Judaism has played no part ... Gershon begins to see his own...

Follows the experiences and conflicting ideologies of the Jewish Slepak family, focusing on the story of Solomon, who survived the purges of the 1930s in the Soviet Union, maintaining his loyalty to the Communist party, and of his son, Volodya, who spent five years in Siberia as punishment for his dissent.

A collection of stories about six different young people who each experience a life-changing event.

Reuven Malter and his friend Danny Saunders, grow up in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1940s. Reuven's father is a Modern Orthodox intellectual active in Zionist circles and Danny's is a Chassidic Rebbe.