The Frozen Chosen in Minnesota

Some theater company has decided to stage The Chosen by Potok in Minnesota. Years ago my wife and I went to see a Jules Feiffer play with Jewish characters in a Seven Corners theater on the West Bank in Minneapolis. One of the lead actors was a six foot Scandinavian trying to play a Jewish character. He did not look or sound the part and my wife and I laughed at all the wrong places because of that. Nobody else in the theater knew could fathom what we found so funny.

OnStage: 'Chosen' a timeless tale

By focusing on the specifics of two Jewish boys growing up in postwar Brooklyn, author Chaim Potok created a story with universal appeal.

By Graydon Royce, Star Tribune

Director Peter Moore began our interview with a question of his own. He had heard through the grapevine that Chaim Potok's 1967 novel "The Chosen" was among my favorites as a lad, and he wondered why.

Well, begin with Potok's fascinating glimpse of the Hasidim -- an East European Jewish tradition of deep piety. Then there was the sense of history, a window on Jewish life in the wake of the Holocaust and the arguments over the proposed state of Israel. Too, it was a story about fathers and their expectations of sons, of how those sons come of age, about loss and growth. Finally, and most profoundly, "The Chosen" gave us a friendship between serious young men for whom we cared deeply. It matters that Danny Saunders and Reuven Malter find spiritual fulfillment.[more]