More Chicken Soup

THE CHOSEN by Chaim Potok. 284 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95.

If some future sociologist were to analyze the character of New York City solely on the basis of certain of its novels, he might conclude that the bulk of the population was Jewish, lived in broken-down Brooklyn brownstones and consisted largely of boys, half extremely Orthodox, the other half rebellions. The fathers of these boys, he would discover, were physically infirm but wise and gentle. Of women there were few: a strong, sad-eyed mother or two kneading kreplech day and night, and an occasional gentile girl with dirty underwear. Inevitably, rebellious and Orthodox boys alike resolved their socio-theological dilemmas and went off somewhere to become either novelists or dentists.

In this first novel, Chaim Potok, 38, editor of the Jewish Publication Society of America and graduate cum laude of a New York Jewish boyhood, brews up a hearty bowl of the same old chicken soup whose recipe was laid down a generation ago by Henry Roth in Call It Sleep and Daniel Fuchs in his Summer in Williamsburg trilogy. Potok, however, adds a slightly different flavor: the conflict of his youthful protagonists is resolved against the waning days of World War II on the home front--a back ground that, in the hands of novelists of all creeds, is becoming a genre in its own right.

Inevitable Break. Potok's confrontation begins when 15-year-old Reuven Malter, brave but bespectacled star of his yeshiva (parochial school) softball team, clashes on the base paths with Danny Saunders, intense, blue-eyed and a sort of Jewish Frank Merriwell. Danny deliberately slams a line drive into Reuven's glasses, Precipitating a 58-page hospital sequence, during which the two boys' enmity grows toward friendship even as the Allies invade France and push out of Saint-L6 toward the Rhine.

Danny is a Hasid--a member of the ultra-Orthodox sect that affects earlocks, broad-brimmed hats and long, black overcoats--while Reuven, the novel's narrator, practices a more liberal Judaism. As the son of a tzaddik (as the Hasids' hereditary rabbis are called), Danny must follow his father as the sect's leader, though his personal bent is toward psychology. Gradually, the two boys work toward Danny's inevitable break with tradition and discover along the way that the humanistic content of Judaism far outweighs its rigid ritualism.

Flat Shofar. As an insight into the self-righteous intricacies of Hasidism and the endlessly wrenching interior dialogue of the faithful Jew, Potok's novel is sound and satisfying. In craft and characterization, particularly in the passages dealing with a boy's reaction to World War II, it rings as flat as a shofar blown by a gentile. Listening to a radio report on the Normandy invasion, Reuven thinks miserably of the "broken vehicles and dead soldiers" on the beaches. No base ball-playing American kid--Jewish or otherwise--thought for a moment of bodies on that glorious day; he imagined brave jut-jawed soldiers in spotless khakis charging through the cringing, craven "Nazzy" lines.

Reuven mopes over the Battle of the Bulge; no American kid doubted for a moment that the Bulge would bend the other way, and quickly. No American kid really wept with horror when the bombs went off over Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he grabbed two garbage-can covers and clashed them together and cheered. All that doubt and grief came later, much later than Chaim Potok remembers it. In that sense, this book is the way things were not and more's the pity.

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