The Promise
by Chaim Potok
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Book Summary Information
Author: Chaim PotokEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-11-08
ISBN: 1400095417
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Anchor
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9781400095414
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Book Reviews of The Promise
Book Review: An "exercise in intellectual confrontation" presented as impassioned drama
Summary: 5 Stars
During a 1986 lecture Chaim Potok reflected on his fiction, and he addressed specifically the secular-religious conflict of "The Promise": "Danny Saunders chops up Freud, and Reuven Malter chops up the Bible and the Talmud, each for his own convenience. Is this an intellectually honest way to proceed?" Potok's answer was tentatively in the affirmative, noting that ever since the Age of Reason, writers have reached to their pasts and their frontiers to enrich the present: "We pick and choose those elements of that alien culture toward which we feel a measure of affinity."
Familiar to readers of "The Chosen," Danny and Reuven continue on the paths that lead them both to embrace and to challenge their heritage: Danny as the Talmudic wunderkind turned psychologist and Reuven as the more worldly youth studying to be a rabbi. But there are other stars around whom the students orbit: Abraham Gordon and Jacob Kalman, two scholars whose approach to the Talmud and to Judaism--and to life--represent bitterly opposing extremes. The liberal Gordon is a friend of Reuven's family, and the Orthodox Rev Kalman, a refugee from the Nazis, is the tyrannical teacher who has the power over Reuven's future. The intensely personal dramas of all three families--the Malters, the Saunderses, and the Gordons--become intertwined even further by the presence of Gordon's son, a deeply troubled boy whose experimental treatment is supervised by Danny. Like its predecessor, "The Promise" is as much about the impassioned tensions between its characters as it is about cerebral disputes over secularism and faith.
Potok acknowledged that both "The Chosen" and "The Promise" were "essentially exercises in intellectual confrontation." It must be said that the later novel's arguments--their premises, their presentation, and their resolutions--are almost too pat for such an exercise in fiction, and its characters all reach moral and emotional reckonings that seem to be based more on a Talmudic-like calculus than on the rough and tumble of real life. Nevertheless, "The Promise" is riveting and powerful and provocative, and the reader is enriched by and grateful for the uncertainties it raises rather than the dilemmas it resolves.
Summary of 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
Potok, Chaim Books
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