Chaim Potok Books In Order

Asher Lev Books In Publication Order

  1. My Name Is Asher Lev (1972)
  2. The Gift of Asher Lev (1990)

Reuven Malther Books In Publication Order

  1. The Chosen (1966)
  2. The Promise (1969)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. In the Beginning (1975)
  2. The Book of Lights (1981)
  3. Davita’s Harp (1985)
  4. I Am the Clay (1992)
  5. The Tree of Here (1993)
  6. The Sky of Now (1995)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. Zebra and Other Stories (1998)
  2. Old Men at Midnight (2001)
  3. The Collected Plays of Chaim Potok (2018)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Wanderings (1978)
  2. Tobiasse: Artist in Exile (1987)
  3. The Gates of November (1996)
  4. My First 79 Years: Isaac Stern (1999)
  5. Conversations with Chaim Potok (2001)

Asher Lev Book Covers

Reuven Malther Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

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Chaim Potok Books Overview

My Name Is Asher Lev

Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels even when it leads him to blasphemy. In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination. Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time his gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant, a modern classic.

The Gift of Asher Lev

‘Rivals anything Chaim Potok has ever produced. It is a book written with passion about passion. You’re not likely to read anything better this year.’
THE DETROIT NEWS
Twenty years have passed for Asher Lev. He is a world renowned artist living in France, still uncertain of his artistic direction. When his beloved uncle dies suddenly, Asher and his family rush back to Brooklyn and into a world that Asher thought he had left behind forever…
.

The Chosen

‘Anyone who finds it is finding a jewel. Its themes are profound and universal.’THE WALL STREET JOURNALIt is the now classic story of two fathers and two sons and the pressures on all of them to pursue the religion they share in the way that is best suited to each. And as the boys grow into young men, they discover in the other a lost spiritual brother, and a link to an unexplored world that neither had ever considered before. In effect, they exchange places, and find the peace that neither will ever retreat from again…
. From the Paperback edition.

The Promise

Reuven Malter lives in Brooklyn, he’s in love, and he s studying to be a rabbi. He also keeps challenging the strict interpretations of his teachers, and if he keeps it up, his dream of becoming a rabbi may die. One day, worried about a disturbed, unhappy boy named Michael, Reuven takes him sailing and cloud watching. Reuven also introduces him to an old friend, Danny Saunders now a psychologist with a growing reputation. Reconnected by their shared concern for Michael, Reuven and Danny each learns what it is to take on life whether sacred truths or a troubled child according to his own lights, not just established authority. In a passionate, energetic narrative, The Promise brilliantly dramatizes what it is to master and use knowledge to make one s own way in the world

In the Beginning

David Lurie learns that all beginnings are hard. He must fight for his place against the bullies in his Depression shadowed Bronx neighborhood and his own frail health. As a young man, he must start anew and define his own path of personal belief that diverges sharply with his devout father and everything he has been taught…
. From the Paperback edition.

The Book of Lights

Gershon Loran, a quiet rabinical student, is troubled by the dark reality around him. He sees hope in the study of Kabbalah, the Jewish bok of mysticism and visions, truth and light. But to Gershon’s friend, Arthur, light means something else, the Atom bomb, his father helped create. Both men seek different a refuge in a foreign place, hoping for the same thing…
. From the Paperback edition.

Davita’s Harp

For Davita Chandal, growing up in the New York of the 1930s and ’40s is an experience of joy and sadness. Her loving parents, both fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely bright hope of a new and better world. But as the deprivations of war and depression take a ruthless toll, Davita unexpectedly turns to the Jewish faith that her mother had long ago abandoned, finding there both a solace for her questioning inner pain and a test of her budding spirit of independence. From the Paperback edition.

I Am the Clay

‘Potok writes powerfully about the suffering of innocent people caught in the cross fire of a war they cannot begin to understand…
. Humanity and compassion for his characters leap from every page.’SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLEAs 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 she is crazy to nurse this boy, to risk their lives for some dying stranger. Angry and bewildered, he waits for the boy to die. And when the boy does not die, the old man begins to believe that the boy possesss a magic upon which all their lives depend…
.

Zebra and Other Stories

‘In six quietly powerful stories, Potok explores varieties of inner and outer healing, both in individuals and families: ‘Zebra’ begins to regain use of his crushed hand and leg creating art assigned by an intinerant teacher; ‘Isabel’ finds unexpected solace in the company of her new stepsister. In the collection’s haunting centerpiece, ‘Nava’ uses her father’s experiences in war, and his connection with a Navajo healer, to fend off a frighteningly persistent drug dealer. The families represented are all middle class or upper middle class, but the relationships, the feelings of loss, grief, regret, hope, and relief are universal; readers sensitive to nuances of language and situation will be totally absorbed by these profound character studies.’ Kirkus Reviews, Pointer

Old Men at Midnight

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 friendship with a proud old builder of synagogue arks, and what happened when the German army invaded their Polish town. As a graduate student, she finds herself escorting a guest lecturer from the Soviet Union, and in The War Doctor, her sympathy moves him to put his painful past to paper recounting his experiences as a Soviet NKVD agent who was saved by an idealistic doctor during the Russian civil war, only to encounter him again during the terrifying period of the Kremlin doctors plot. And, finally, we meet her in The Trope Teacher, in which a distinguished professor of military history, trying to write his memoirs, is distracted by his wife’s illness and by the arrival next door of a new neighbor, the famous writer I. D. Ilana Davita Chandal. Poignant and profound, Chaim Potok s newest fiction is a major addition to his remarkable and remarkably loved body of work. From the Hardcover edition.

Wanderings

A fascinating history of the Jews, told by a master novelist, here is Chaim Potok’s fascinating, moving four thousand year history. Recreating great historical events, exporing Jewish life in its infinite variety and in many eras and places, here is a unique work by a singular Jewish voice.

Tobiasse: Artist in Exile

Book Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. First Edition. First Printing. 4to over 9 3/4′ 12′ tall. 198 pages. 323 illustrations. Both book and dustjacket are in pristine condition. Collectible.

The Gates of November

‘REMARKABLE…
A WONDERFUL STORY.’ The Boston GlobeThe father is a high ranking Communist officer, a Jew who survived Stalin’s purges. The son is a ‘refusenik,’ who risked his life and happiness to protest everything his father held dear. Now, Chaim Potok, beloved author of the award winning novels The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev, unfolds the gripping true story of a father, a son, and a conflict that spans Soviet history. Drawing on taped interviews and his harrowing visits to Russia, Potok traces the public and privates lives of the Slepak family: Their passions and ideologies, their struggles to reconcile their identities as Russians and as Jews, their willingness to fight and die for diametrically opposed political beliefs.’ A vivid account…
Potok brings a novelist’s passion and eye for detail to a gripping story that possesses many of the elements of fiction except that it’s all too true.’ San Francisco ChronicleFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

My First 79 Years: Isaac Stern

New in paperback: ‘His words have moved politicians and heads of state as eloquently as his fiddle playing has moved lovers of the violin.’ Chicago Tribune There is no more beloved musician in the classical world than Isaac Stern, revered not only as a great violinist but also as a generous personality and a crucial figure in the world of the arts. One of the few people who has known every major classical musician of the last two thirds of the century, he shares his personal and artistic experiences in this warm, passionate account of his life: the story of his rise to eminence; his feelings about music and the violin; and his great friendships and collaborations with colleagues such as Leonard Bernstein and Pablo Casals. Stern the man, the musician, and the cultural institution come alive in the most readable and revealing musical autobiography of the decade.

Conversations with Chaim Potok

One of America’s most popular Jewish writers, Chaim Potok b. 1929 is the author of such novels as The Chosen 1967, The Promise 1969, The Book of Lights 1981, and Davita’s Harp 1985. Each of his novels explores the tension between tradition and modernity, and the clash between Jewish culture and contemporary Western civilization, which he calls ‘core to core culture confrontation.’ Although primarily known as a novelist, Potok is an ordained Conservative rabbi and a world class Judaic scholar who has also published children’s books, theological discourses, biographies, and histories. Conversations with Chaim Potok presents interviews ranging from 1976 to 1999. Potok discusses the broad range of his writing and the deep influence of non Jewish novels in particular, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on his work. Interviews bear witness to Potok’s many other influences Orthodox Jewish doctrine, Freudian psychoanalytical theory, Picasso’s Guernica, and Jewish kabbalah mysticism. Though labeled an American Jewish writer, Potok argues that Flannery O’Connor should then be called an American Catholic writer and John Updike an American Protestant writer. ‘In his mind,’ editor Daniel Walden writes, ‘just as Faulkner was a writer focused on a particular place, Oxford, Mississippi,…
so Potok’s territory was a small section of New York City.’ Potok often explores conflict in his writings and in his interviews. Strict Jewish teachings deem fiction an artifice and therefore unnecessary, yet since the age of sixteen Potok has been driven to write novels. At the root of all of these conversations is Potok’s intense interest in the turmoil between Jewish culture, religion, and tradition and what he calls ‘Western secular humanism.’ As he discusses his work, he continually includes broader issues, such as the state of Jewish literature and art, pointing out with pride and enthusiasm his belief that Jewish culture, in the twentieth century, has finally begun to have a significant role in producing and shaping the world’s art and literature. Whether discussing the finer details of Talmudic textual analysis or his period of chaplaincy during the Korean War, Potok is articulate and philosophical, bringing deep consideration into what may seem small subjects. Although his novels and histories take place primarily in the recent past, the Chaim Potok that emerges from this collection is a writer deeply rooted in the tensions of the present. Daniel Walden is Professor Emeritus of American Studies, English and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. He has written or edited several books, including On Being Jewish 1974, Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 1984, The World of Chaim Potok 1985, and American Jewish Poets: The Roots and the Stems 1990.

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