Chaim Potok (Feb. 17, 1929–July 23, 2002) was born as Herman Potok in Brooklyn to Polish Jewish immigrants Benjamin Max Potok and his wife Mollie Friedman. Enjoying Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, he decided as a teenager to become a writer. In 1949, Yeshiva University published his stories in its literary magazine, which he also helped edit. He graduated summa cum laude in 1950 with a BA in English Literature, then went on to be ordained as a Conservative rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary. Potok then enlisted as a chaplain in the U.S. Army, serving in South Korea from 1955 to 1957. On return, he joined the faculty of the University of Judaism (today American Jewish University) in Los Angeles and as a director of Camp Ramah in Ojai from 1957 to 1959. At the camp, he met Adena Sara Mosevitzsky, whom he married in 1958, and with whom he had three children: Reena, Naama, and Akiva.
The couple moved to Philadelphia in 1959, where he began graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and served as scholar-in-residence at Har Zion Synagogue. The Potoks were instructors at Camp Ramah in Nyack and in 1963 moved to Israel for a year of study, where Chaim completed a doctoral dissertation on Solomon Maimon. They returned to the U.S. in 1964 and Chaim became managing editor of Conservative Judaism and was appointed editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society in Philadelphia. The University of Pennsylvania conferred upon him a doctorate in philosophy.
In 1967 Potok published The Chosen, and in 1969 a sequel The Promise, which helped delineate differences between Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. The Chosen was made into a film in 1981. In the interim, the Potoks moved to Jerusalem in 1970, returning to the states in 1977. Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev was published in 1972; In the Beginning in 1975; The Jew Confronts Himself in American Literature in 1975; and Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews in 1978. Other works were The Book of Lights (1981), Davita’s Harp (1985), Theo Tobiasse (1986); The Gift of Asher Lev (1990) and I Am the Clay (1992) and others through 2001, the year he published Old Men at Midnight. He died of brain cancer at age 73. He bequeathed his papers to the University of Pennsylvania.
Tomorrow, February 18: Milos Forman
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SDJW staff condensation of articles in Wikipedia and Jewish Virtual Library.