Potok’s greatness lies in his simple faith in mankind and in his ability to evoke the tender, halting steps from boyhood into manhood. At the same time, he believes in allegiance to a cause larger than ourselves, so that we will be “worthy of rest” when the time comes. Few goals are worthy of greater dedication.
Quotations taken from The Chosen. Random House, New York. 1967.
Talk About It
Reuven and Danny are both Jews, yet their cultures are so different that they feel like strangers. The effort to include all of the diverse cultures that make up our schools and communities can be confusing. To what extent should we attempt to accommodate the different cultures that surround us? Is it even possible to do so?
About the Author: Chaim Potok
Chaim Potok, born Herman Harold Potok, was reared in an Orthodox Jewish home by Polish immigrant parents. His parents also gave him his Hebrew name Chaim, meaning “life” or “alive.” Born in 1929 in New York City, he attended religious schools. However, as a young man he became fascinated by less restrictive Jewish doctrines, particularly the Conservative side of Judaism. He attended Yeshiva University and earned degrees in English and Hebrew literature. Potok was eventually ordained a Conservative rabbi. He joined the U.S. Army as a chaplain and served in South Korea from 1955 to 1957, which he described as a transformative experience.
In 1967, Potok began his career as an author and novelist with the publication of The Chosen, written while he lived with his family in Jerusalem. It stands as the first book from a major publisher to portray Orthodox Judaism in the United States. After spending six months on the bestseller list, the book has remained extremely popular. Chaim Potok “wrote of what he knew best, Jewish-Americans in the 20th century struggling with two contradictory yet valid points of view.” (Shirley Saad, UPI). The conflict can best be summed up in Potok’s own words, “Is it possible to live in a religious culture and a secular culture at the same time?”
The Chosen was made into a film, released in 1981, which won the top award at the World Film Festival, Montreal. The novel was also adapted into a stage play by the author. He went on to publish a sequel to the book, The Promise, and many other fiction and non-fiction works.
In 1958, Potok married Adena Sara Mosevitzsky, a psychiatric social worker, whom he met in 1952 at Camp Ramah in the Poconos. They had three children: Rena, Naama, and Akiva. He died of brain cancer in 2002.
Source:Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews, Chaim Potok, Knopf, New York, 1978.
Art Imitates Life Imitates Art:
The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay
What makes us cling so tenaciously to life? What is the importance of each individual? These are the questions at the heart of a stirring novel by Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One. This autobiographical story of an English boy raised in South Africa is a daunting account of one small life pitted against a world of hatred and strife. In an environment where survival seems impossible, this lonely little boy finds a way to triumph over his enemies and remain true to his friends.
Synopsis
Peekay is in a difficult position. As an English boy sent to a South African boarding school at the age of five, he finds himself the whipping boy for the Afrikaaner students, Nazi sympathizers who hate the British for the atrocities of the Boer war. Peekay is too young to understand the motivations for the hatred and persecution that he meets at every turn, and his bewilderment is heart rending. The torments he suffers at the hands of his cruel schoolmates are recreated for us in grim detail.
As a defense against constant persecution, Peekay becomes a boxer, and learns to hold his own physically against those who threaten him. Through the influence of some gentle teachers over many years, he also becomes a horticulturist, a musician, and an academic scholar. What he does not become is a bitter, twisted man, because of the influence of these two or three guiding personalities in his life. Since his father is dead and his mother is emotionally childish, Peekay must find mentors to guide him. His Zulu nanny gives him love, and the conductor he meets on the train to school gives him a quest: to become the welterweight champion of the world. Peekay finds himself in the middle of a political and racial storm, as the Afrikaaners are forced to round up Germans (with whom they actually sympathize) as prisoners of war, while offering the English token support along with private hostility. A German doctor/horticulturist/musician befriends the lonely boy and teaches him to be proud of his good mind rather than try to hide it. Much of the book deals with Peekay’s attempts to soften the harsh effects of war on this old man. In the meantime he learns to fight, and pursues his boxing career with the same zeal as his studies, becoming a legend along the way through some remarkable successes.
Did You Know?
One of the most impressive things about this novel is the age of the author when he wrote it. Bryce Courtenay didn’t begin writing fiction until he was fifty-five years old, and his novel has had an impact on millions of people throughout the world. His story is clearly written with a purpose: to help us believe in the value of each individual and in the power of each individual to triumph over adversity and make a positive contribution to the world.
The violence of apartheid is a central issue in this novel. Peekay observes the workings of a violent culture in the prison, where the white wardens abuse black inmates, most of whom have had little education or opportunity. When Peekay and Morrie try to fight the hatred towards black culture by establishing a night school, they learn just how tenacious the cycle of violence is when imbedded into a culture. Though Peekay faces almost insurmountable obstacles, his courage and tenacity shine through at every turn.
What Makes it Great?
The greatness of this novel lies in its message, which has inspired millions. Its central theme is first revealed to us as Peekay rides toward his future on the train. Along with a goal to become a fighter, the conductor offers Peekay a mantra that seems to speak directly from the tracks and guides his life thereafter:
“I stood there watching the early morning folding back. It can be very cold in the lowveld before the sun rises, and without a blanket I soon began to shiver. I tried to ignore the cold, concentrating on the lickity-clack of the carriage wheels. I became aware that the lickity-clack was talking to me: Mix-the-head with-the-heart you’re-ahead from-the-start. Mix-the-head with-the-heart you’re-ahead from-the-start, the wheels chanted until my head began to pound with the rhythm. It was becoming the plan I would follow for the remainder of my life; it was to become the secret ingredient in what I thought of as the power of one.” (104)
When it comes to actual technique, Courtenay is a good writer but not a great one. He has some fine descriptive passages, but is somewhat weak when it comes to really fleshing out a believable character. His good characters are a little too good to be true, and the bad ones are over-the-top evil. (The Zulu nanny, for example, exudes love and wisdom, while his white, Evangelical Christian mother is simply weak and hypocritical. Neither has the balancing traits that real people would have.) His strength lies in his ability to evoke a landscape and a culture that is completely unfamiliar to most of us, and use it as a backdrop for the more familiar emotional landscape that we all share. Here is a description of some lonely moments on a hillside, mourning the loss of his nanny, that reveals both his strengths and weaknesses as an author:
“As I sat on the rock high on my hill, and as the sun began to set over the bushveld, I grew up. Just like that. The loneliness birds stopped laying stone eggs, they rose from their stone nests and flapped away on their ugly wings and the eggs they left behind crumbled into dust. A fierce, howling wind came along and blew the dust away until I was empty inside.
I knew they would be back but that, for the moment, I was alone. That I had permission from myself to love whomsoever I wished. The cords that bound me to the past had been severed. The emptiness was a new kind of loneliness, a free kind of loneliness. Not the kind that laid stone eggs deep inside of you until you filled up w
ith heaviness and despair. I knew that when the bone-beaked birds returned I would be in control, master of loneliness and no longer its servant. You may ask how a six-year-old could think like this. I can only answer that one did.” (142)
It is natural for the narrator to be somewhat defensive, because it really is a bit of a stretch to believe that a six-year-old could elucidate such thoughts as these. With that nit-picking aside, I recommend this novel because of its untiring optimism in the face of overwhelming evil. Peekay finds beauty, grace and humor in the most trying circumstances. In an evil world he happens upon good people who become trusted friends. His ability to assimilate information and his persistence give him an advantage that overshadows his liabilities of size and status, and his stubborn belief in the power of one person to effect change has inspired millions of readers.
Note: Though it concerns a very small child, this is not a children’s book. It contains a good deal of foul language and some graphic violence. Yet when the book came out in 1989 teachers were so impressed with its inspiring message that they petitioned the author to create a version more suitable for children. Thus, an expurgated version of this novel is available, and I would recommend it for parents who want to share it with children, and for those who will find the swearing offensive.
Quotations taken from The Power of One. Ballantine Books, New York. 2008.
Talk About It
Bryce Courtenay (Peekay) was certainly the victim of bullying—an issue very much in today’s headlines—and he found his own way of combating it. Have you or your children experienced this kind of persecution and, if so, how would you recommend dealing with it?
About the Author: Bryce Courtenay
The Power of One is a fictionalized story of Bryce Courtenay’s childhood in South Africa. Courtenay was born illegitimately in Johannesburg in 1933 and spent his early years on an isolated farm in a small village. Like his fictional hero, Peekay, five-year-old Courtenay learned to box as a means of self-defense in private school. After the boy’s move to Barberton, a drunken German music teacher, Doc, gave young Courtenay his true childhood education, filling his mind with the wonders of nature as they roamed the high mountains. Courtenay acknowledges it was the best education he was ever to receive. He won a scholarship to a fine South African boarding school and later went on to study journalism in London.
Forbidden to return to South Africa after he started a weekend educational program for native Africans in the hall of his prestigious boy’s school, Courtenay moved to Sydney, Australia. He married a woman named Benita and had three sons, Brett, Adam, and Damon. Damon, a hemophiliac, contracted HIV from a blood transfusion during the early days of the disease. After Damon died tragically of AIDS, Courtenay wrote April Fool’s Day, the compelling novel that commemorated his son and brought attention to the AIDS epidemic.
Bryce Courtenay began writing fiction at age 55 and published The Power of One in 1989. It became one of Australia’s best-selling books by any living author. Courtenay is also in demand as a motivational speaker. Before his literary career, he worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director.
Sources:
Suite 101.com/ world literatures
www.brycecourtenay.com
Boys to Men: Take It Personally
One member of the Best Books Club that invariably has something interesting to say is Phillip Harris, an Englishman now residing in Texas. Chaim Potok is a particular favorite of this thoughtful and erudite reader. Of these three coming-on-age sagas he offers the following perspective:
“All three writers are not really writing about boys becoming men, but rather boys having the spirit to rebel against the perceptions of their time and their struggle to become individuals of meaning. Mark Twain is the American Charles Dickens—a social reformer dressed as a superb raconteur—and this is what him so engaging and his books timeless. We of the twenty first century, with all our fancy toys, long for the old days. Bryce Courtney has the same gift. He places a timid but staunch personality in the midst of one of the most despicable episodes in modern history with the foreknowledge that the reader will know and be comforted by the eventual historical outcome.
“Chaim Potok’s approach is different. His book is a declaration from the heart. The characters are almost incidental to the story. It is what they believe and practice that makes the book so riveting. Rueven’s father’s declaration about the meaning of life is the central theme of the book (and also “the promise.”) It is difficult to read this passage without the tears marking the page.”
What do we learn about boys from these three novels? Perhaps it is simply an appreciation of the conflicting emotions that rage within each young man’s heart. Not only the longing for acceptance and love, but the yearning to be part of a cause greater than oneself is a driving force in the life of a young man, that can lead him to great achievements, or to acts of destruction, depending on the influences at hand. These novels encourage us to take a closer, more compassionate look at the young men in our lives.
Chapter Four
Road Trips
“The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
~St. Augustine
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
~Mark Twain
The picaresque novel (from the Spanish “pícaro”, for “rogue” or “rascal”) is a type of prose fiction that depicts the adventures of a roguish hero getting by on his or her wits in a dangerous and foreign society. Though this type of novel originated in Spain, there are examples of it in every language, and these are three marvelous examples. Rudyard Kipling takes us down the dusty Grand Trunk road in India and William Faulkner takes us joyriding down the equally dusty back roads of Mississippi. Then Mark Twain takes us down the Mississippi River on a raft with Jim and Huck, on a journey toward human understanding. Our three intrepid travelers, though taken by surprise at the dangers they face, prove equal to the challenge as they find a way to survive without sacrificing those ideals that will inform their adult lives. So, take to the road with Kim, Lucius, and Huck, and come home changed for the better.
A Good Boy On a Bumpy Road:
The Reivers, by William Faulkner
William Faulkner is the most famous American author that no one reads. My basis for saying this is an unofficial poll I have been conducting ever since I married into the Faulkner family (no relation to the author.) I simply ask everyone who comments on the name (usually to ask if I receive royalties) if they have actually read Faulkner, and they invariably answer in the negative! It’s not exactly scientific, but I think my poll reflects a pretty realistic view of this famously difficult writer.
Nearly everyone, it seems, has dabbled in Dickens and struggled through some Shakespeare, but the works of Faulkner, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and two Pulitzer Prizes, appear to be largely uncharted territory. One Faulkner scholar explains: “For many readers Faulkner remains an Everest too steep and craggy to climb. His dense, at times overwrought prose, his exceedingly complex plots; the intertwined genealogies that connect his books to each other, and the sheer immensity of his ouvre—these and other challenges scare people away.” (Jonathan Yardley, “William Faulkner’s Southern Draw: The Reivers,” The Washington Post, January 6, 2004, p. C01)
We know Faulkner is great, but we don’t know him. It’s time to change that, and an easy place to start is with the last book he wrote. The Reivers was published a month after Faulkner’s death in 1962 and won for him (posthumously) his second Pulitzer Prize. It is the most accessible and the most hopeful of all his works, both a serious moral tale and a very funny story.
Synopsis
Like most of Faulkner’s novels, The Reivers is set in rural Mississippi, in a fictional county called “Yoknapatawpha.�
�� (Try saying that five times quickly!) Though he began by writing of more exotic locales, Faulkner was advised by a friend to write about the place he knew best. He said, “Beginning with Sartoris (his third novel) I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.” (Lion in the Garden, 255.)
“Reiver” (pronounced ‘reever’) is an old Scottish word meaning “robber,” and this rollicking novel is actually the story of a series of thefts. The bit of larceny that starts everything in motion happens when “Boss” Priest, the venerable family patriarch, leaves town with his wife, son and daughter-in-law for a funeral. He entrusts his eleven-year-old grandson Lucius to the care of his black servants, and his beautiful new Winton Flyer automobile (one of only eleven in Mississippi) to the care of his white hired man, Boon Hogganbeck. To say Boon loves this automobile is a gross understatement, and Boon, left alone with the car, the key, and four empty days, cannot resist the temptation to take it to Memphis, an eighty-mile journey over dirt roads. Young Lucius comes along as his willing hostage, along with the black servant Ned, who stows away in the rumble seat. If you’ve read Dickens’s, The Pickwick Papers, or the adventures of Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows, you are familiar with kinds of crazy misadventures that distinguish a picaresque novel. Just about everything that can go wrong does. Lucius ends up staying in a house of prostitution, and the stolen car gets traded (don’t ask me how or why) for a stolen racehorse named Lightning. The racehorse must be ridden in a race to win back the car, and Lucius must ride it. Meanwhile the days pass, and Grandfather will be coming home soon. Inevitably Lucius and Boon will come to the bar of justice, but not before Lucius has taken his first steps toward manhood, and learned a great deal about life that he didn’t want to know.
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