The Collected Plays of Chaim Potok

By Chaim Potok, David Bassuk, Carol Rocamora and Aaron Posner

First edition of the complete plays of Chaim Potok.. With the exception of the The Chosen, none have been previously published.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam Kadmon Books
• Release date: Oct 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781939681799

Chaim Potok

Chaim Potok was an American Jewish author and rabbi. Potok is most famous for his first book The Chosen, which was listed on The New York Times’ best seller list for 39 weeks and sold more than 3,400,000 copies

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Works by Chaim Potok

Fiction:

Novels

The Chosen

The Promise

My Name is Asher Lev

In the Beginning

The Book of Lights

Davita’s Harp

The Gift of Asher Lev

I Am the Clay

Short Stories and Novellas

Het Cijfer Zeven (The Seven of the Address)

Het Kanaal (The Canal)

The Golem’s Hand

Old Men at Midnight

Children’s Books

The Tree of Here

The Sky of Now

Zebra and Other Stories

Nonfiction:

Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews

The Gates of November: Chronicles of the Slepak Family

The Collected Plays of Chaim Potok copyright © 2018 by Rena Potok

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher except in critical articles and reviews. Contact the publisher for information.

Book and cover design by Colin Rolfe

Original layout by Samantha Krezinski

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Potok, Chaim, author. | Potok, Rena, editor.

Title: The collected plays of Chaim Potok / edited with an introduction by Rena Potok; contributions by David Bassuk, Carol Rocamora, and Aaron Posner.

Other titles: Plays

Description: Rhinebeck, New York : Adam Kadmon Books, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018020781 (print) | LCCN 2018021538 (ebook) | ISBN 9781939681799 (eBook) | ISBN 9781939681782 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Classification: LCC PS3566.O69 (ebook) | LCC PS3566.O69 A6 2018 (print) | DDC 812/.54--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020781

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-939681-78-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-939681-79-9

Adam Kadmon Books, an imprint of Monkfish Book Publishing Company

22 East Market Street, Suite 304

Rhinebeck, New York 12572

[phone]

www.monkfishpublishing.com

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction by Rena Potok

Out of the Depths

Preface: Plays of Memory by David Bassuk

Act I

Act II

Post-Performance Discussion of Out of the Depths with Chaim Potok, David Bassuk, and David Roskies

Sins of the Father

Preface by Carol Rocamora

The Carnival

The Gallery

The Play of Lights

The Chosen

Preface by Aaron Posner

Act I

Act II

Biographies

Acknowledgments

During my tenure as senior acquisitions editor at the Jewish Publication Society, I had the pleasure of editing A Heart Afire: Stories and Teachings of the Early Hasidic Masters, a luminous work by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Netanel Miles-Yépez. Some years later, Netanel approached me with the inspired idea of publishing a collection of my father’s plays with Adam Kadmon Books. This project has given me deeper insight into my father as a playwright and thinker; it also points to a sweet connection between his Hasidic heritage (echoes of which appear in many of his novels and plays) and the progressive Hasidism of Reb Zalman. I thank Netanel for suggesting this book, and for providing a patient guiding hand throughout the process of its preparation.

David McKnight, director of the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library at the University of Pennsylvania, helped me to access the notes, article clippings, reviews, and other supporting materials in the extensive and beautifully conserved collection of the Chaim Potok Papers at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books & Manuscripts.

I am grateful to Karen Strauss of Main Street Technology for preserving and updating electronic copies of Sins of the Father and The Play of Lights. If not for her prudence and foresight, the scripts of these plays might well have been lost.

David Bassuk, Aaron Posner, and Carol Rocamora graciously shared the plays they developed with my father and directed. They have written wonderful prefaces describing their individual experiences of collaborating with my father on the plays you now hold in your hands.

My gratitude and admiration to David Bassuk, who tirelessly helped me reconstruct the text of Out of the Depths. The only known surviving script is the penultimate version of the play. The final version exists in the form of a video of the 1992 staged workshop performance of the play by Novel Stages Theatre Company. David scanned the printed pages into PDFs and converted the video to readable media files. I then checked the script against the video, painstakingly reading and watching, listening to every word and phrase, and amending discrepancies between the written and visual texts. David’s memory proved invaluable in untangling inevitable sections of corrupted text and video files. The result is a final, authoritative script of the play. This project has rekindled our old friendship, and for that I am equally grateful.

In the course of excavating his files and VHS tapes, David Bassuk discovered a video of the post-performance discussion on Out of the Depths, featuring Chaim Potok and Professor David Roskies. The transcript of that talk appears for the first time in print in this volume.

Thanks to Adena Potok, Bella Sobolofsky, and Sheera Zuckerman for filling in details of my father’s personal and family history.

My deepest thanks to my children, Maia and Erez, who inspire me every day with their tenderness, creative passion, and zest for life.

Rena Potok

Introduction

Beginnings

At the heart of Chaim Potok’s writings are three major teachings: Never force anything. Ask good questions. And above all, there is no such thing as a single, absolute Truth.

The first principle I learned when my (then teenaged) brother tried to release ice cubes from a freezer tray by banging it against a brand-new ice bin, breaking both the bin and the tray. My father, watching with dismay, exclaimed, Never force anything in this world. That teaching soon expanded to the world of ideas for me: think things through, and think before you speak.

The second, I learned during my doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father audited several of my graduate seminars on James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. While my professors, classmates, and I honed responses to matters of critical inquiry, my father focused on the questions themselves, always intrigued by what was being asked, and why.

The third teaching is one that I cannot isolate in time or location, so engrained was it in my father’s way of being. His writing, his intellectual life, his religious practice—were all profoundly informed by the Hebrew phrase, eilu ve-eilu divrei Elohim chayim¹—these and these are the words of the living God. This precept—that there occur in the universe many coexisting and co-informing truths—flies in the face of fundamentalist views about singularity of religious or political beliefs and practices. Building upon this principle, my father developed the view that, like multiple truths, cultural identity and experience are malleable and mutually informing; the more open we are to confronting, or fusing with another culture, the more we grow as individuals, artists, and intellectuals.

This notion of culture confrontation and fusion is the deliberate, carefully constructed focus of my father’s writing. It works in tandem with the idea of multiple truths: we cannot confront the core of another culture if we believe that the core of our own culture holds the singular truth. Put otherwise: to encounter the core of another culture from within the heart of our own, we must believe in the inherent existence of multiple, equally valid ways of being in the world. Once we let go of the idea of a single Truth—once we can see another culture’s truth as equally valid and rich as our own—then we are primed for core-to-core culture confrontation.

The characters that populate the plays in this volume embody my father’s ideas about culture confrontation. They struggle to see and understand the truths of the worlds they inhabit—both the core cultures where they were born and raised, and the umbrella cultures that they grow to inhabit. The plays bring the journeys of these characters through this multi-layered cultural landscape to the stage with an immediacy that is palpable to audiences and readers alike.

Core-to-Core Culture Confrontation

The characters in the plays grow up in an insular culture governed by strict rules of religious belief and practice. At some point in their adolescence or young adulthood, these young men have a significant encounter with a key element at the core of the umbrella culture in which they live—Freudian psychoanalytic theory, modern art, Russian literature, or Asian culture and religion. This encounter and the conflicts resulting from it are the driving principle of my father’s writing: he wanted to depict the thoughts and feelings of individuals who are trying to come to terms with two universes of discourse that they love passionately, and that are, at times, antithetical to one another.² He wanted to figure out how they would maneuver in this collision and fusion of two equally-valid systems of values.

Raised in a strictly Orthodox Hasidic household—both of his parents were directly connected to great Hasidic lineages in Eastern Europe—my father discovered early on that the boundaries of his world could not contain his growing passion for aesthetic and intellectual knowledge and experience. As a young schoolboy, he encountered the world of art and literature, at first in a drawing class, and then in the writings of modern literature—Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. After studying English Literature at Yeshiva University and becoming an ordained rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he spent sixteen months as a U.S. Army chaplain in Korea. Raised deeply in the core of Jewish Hasidic culture, he encountered the core of Shinto faith and prayer, and that confrontation transformed the paradigm that had shaped his life up to that point. One day, he saw a Shinto priest praying with the same piety and fervor that he had witnessed time and again in the worship of Jewish men in the small Hasidic synagogue of his youth. And he understood that pagan idol worship—reviled by Jewish law and orthodoxy—had a beauty and piety that he could never have seen from within the boundaries of his core culture. Further, he recognized with a shock that the world of Jewish ritual and study—which had been the center of his life—had no role to play in Asia.

Out of these experiences, my father developed a four-part theory of culture confrontation, which he traced from the periphery of a cultural plane to its core. Periphery-to-periphery confrontation occurs when a person grows up along the edges of his or her subculture and experiences only the outer edges of the general culture; my father considered this type of encounter superficial and stagnant, calling it a rub-up of ignorances that generates effluvia, aberrations, ugliness.³ A core-to-periphery encounter occurs when a person grows up in the core of their small, particular world, and encounters only peripheral elements of the outside world. Conversely, a periphery-to-core encounter occurs when a person grows up along the edges of their small, particular world and enters the heart of the general culture. The final type of encounter is a core-to-core culture confrontation—when one grows up in the center of their subculture, the heart of their own particular reading of the world, and is confronted with a key element at the heart of the umbrella civilization. My father found this last type of encounter to be the most powerful, fascinating, and transformative. Not surprisingly, he considered these core-to-core culture confrontations the invisible scaffolding of his novels and plays.⁴

In an essay titled, The Culture Highways We Travel, he wrote that when we collide with another cultural system, we find elements that we are drawn to, and other elements that repel or antagonize us. We select out of another culture the elements toward which we feel the most connected, and we may experience a merging, or fusion, of cultural elements. In culture fusion, something is yielded by both sides—parts of the core of one culture fuse with parts of the core of the other. For the artist, the hope is that the fusion will yield something new and significant—that it will elicit creativity.⁵

The Plays

For my father, the impetus for turning to the stage was the desire to learn and hone a new craft, and the opportunity to work with people in the theatre world whom he respected, and who asked him to collaborate on bringing his novels—and the life and work of a fellow writer—to the stage. True to form, he didn’t merely write the plays and hand them over; he worked side by side with the directors, hungrily absorbing the myriad elements of stage work, helping to shape the final product.

The five plays in this volume were originally produced and premiered in Philadelphia. (Detailed stage notes from these productions accompany each of the plays.) The Carnival (1990), The Gallery (1990), and The Play of Lights (1992) dramatize scenes from his novels The Promise (1969), My Name is Asher Lev (1972), and The Book of Lights (1981). The Chosen (1999) is an adaptation of the world-renowned 1967 novel by the same name. Out of the Depths (1990) is an original work that depicts the life of the Russian-Jewish writer, ethnographer, and activist S. Ansky.

Out of the Depths was a fully-staged workshop production developed with director David Bassuk and presented by Novel Stages. The play was performed at Temple University Center City campus, April 20-May 13, 1990. Published in this volume, for the first time, along with the script of the play, is the transcript of a post-performance conversation with Chaim Potok, David Bassuk, and Yiddish literature scholar David Roskies.⁶

Best known for his play The Dybbuk,⁷ Ansky was a writer, ethnographer, and political activist who fled Russia when the Bolsheviks took power and Lenin sought to arrest him. A brilliant Talmud student, Ansky left home at an early age, and proceeded to teach, write, and conduct ethnographic studies in various communities of Eastern Europe.

For many years, my father had been interested in Ansky who, like him, had left the strict confines of Orthodox Judaism and engaged the broader world. In 1984, he collaborated on a screenplay adaptation of The Dybbuk with Hollywood director Fred Zinneman, and some time later he led a seminar on Ansky at Yale University.

Ansky struggled to balance the Jewish and secular worlds; to balance his emotional and spiritual ties to Jewish identity with the call to live fully as a writer and political activist; to balance the desire to teach and mold young minds with the fear and provincialism of his fellow countrymen. His inner conflict about living simultaneously inside and outside Russian culture is externalized in a conversation with his dear friend Chernin, in which he briefly contemplates conversion:

Better to live among the peasants as a Russian than to live in Europe and not know who I am… As a Russian among Russians. Entirely a Russian… No separations. No living between worlds. I am tired of feeling like an unwelcome guest in my own country… A simple ceremony, and it’s over. A few words, a little water. What does it matter? Why do I need this burden of separation from my Russia?

Ansky left Jewish religious observance until his late forties, when he wished to return to Jewish community and practice—but on his own terms, rather than conforming to the rabbinic dictates of return and reintegration. Toward the end of the play, Ansky makes his argument to two rabbis, who represent the perspective of traditional Judaism:

I decide how I will be a part of my people. Once I thought that only by obeying and believing everything—every law, every superstition—only by doing that could I remain inside my people. And I left. Because you had intimidated me. You had convinced me that there were no alternatives. Now there is a new set of rules. I believe in my people, its history, its culture, its identity—and not in every piece of blind and rigid obedience to law, in every bit of nonsense. Do you know how many years of wrestling it has taken me to come to this conclusion? Do you think it’s easy for me to say these words? But I say them anyway. I-return-on-my-own-terms.

At the same time that he was developing Out of the Depths with Novel Stages, my father was adapting scenes from his novels The Promise and My Name is Asher Lev for a duo of one-act plays—The Carnival and The Gallery—with the Philadelphia Festival Theater for New Plays. He chose two incidents from the novels that he thought were emotionally captivating, and tried to make that emotion the center of the two plays. The plays were presented under the umbrella title Sins of the Father at the Harold Prince Theatre of the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, May 22-June 9, 1990. The idea of sins of the father stretches beyond this pair of one-act plays—it extends to complex father figures and their fraught relationships with their sons throughout the plays: In The Gallery, the devotion of Aryeh Lev—Asher’s father—to the Rebbe supersedes his dedication to his wife and son. In The Carnival, the old man, who initially adopts a fatherly role and identifies with Michael and Alex through the experience of the Holocaust, ultimately betrays their trust and reveals himself as a swindler. In The Chosen, Reb Saunders raises Danny in silence to teach him empathy and compassion so that he will be able to succeed his father as Rebbe. For Ansky, rabbis play the role of punitive father figures who criticize and shun him repeatedly in Out of the Depths.

The Carnival is based on the opening chapter of The Promise (1969). The central metaphor of the play is the act of gambling and winning or losing, and the cost of the game to those who play. It depicts a confrontation that ultimately pits two rabbinical students against the con men operating a seemingly innocuous carnival game. In the process, the students lose their money, their innocence, and some of their faith in human nature.

The Gallery—based on the final chapter of My Name Is Asher Lev (1972)—depicts the religious and familial conflict that arises when the Orthodox parents of a young artist come to his gallery exhibition and find themselves depicted in their son’s controversial paintings. The play explores the journey of a Hasidic Jew—Asher Lev—who enters the mainstream of modern Western art from the heart of his Jewish tradition. His mother initially supports his artistic endeavors, but his father does not; that difference creates a triangulated relationship between him and his parents. Eventually, he must choose whether to stay in his world and community or be true to his artistic calling. He cannot exist in both worlds simultaneously. His ultimate choice has painful, irrevocable consequences.

Asher Lev is committed to his tradition, but at the same time he is committed to his art. As a son, he is tormented by a lifetime of watching his mother’s sorrow and isolation. As an artist, he is confronted with the dilemma of how to represent those feelings through his paintings; for Asher, the only aesthetic symbol he can use, the only authentic expression of suffering and sacrifice is the crucifixion—the singular means of painting what he feels about his mother. He uses this motif "much as Picasso used it, much as Chagall used it, much as so many others in the modern period, who are not religious, use it. It is the theme, the motif par excellence, for solitary torment."⁸

There is no Jewish law against painting crucifixions (provided they are not painted for the purpose of worship). But when a religious Jew paints a crucifixion, he crosses an invisible line, he violates an unwritten moral code: this motif evokes what my father called rivers of Jewish blood… the hundreds upon thousands of Jews who have been slain for the deicide charge through the centuries.⁹ Asher Lev breaks with this code because as an artist, he has no other option. He chooses for his art. But the consequence is harsh: the crucifixion paintings cannot be tolerated by his Hassidic community, and he is asked to leave. In a conversation with his longtime artistic mentor (and surrogate father) Jacob Kahn, Asher asks, How else could I have depicted suffering? There was no other theme I could use. Jacob Kahn responds, Yes, I know, I know. A people that has suffered so much has no artistic motif for suffering. It is another of God’s bitter jokes.

My father believed that the artist possesses the power to create metaphoric visions of reality, and bears the burden of his or her art and cultural journeys; the price of entering the core space of another culture and living in both worlds simultaneously, is to be an outsider, an antagonist. To amplify this idea, he created characters that are pushed outside the parameters of their home culture and treated as antagonists by other characters in the plays, because of the choices they make—as artists—in the core-to-core culture confrontation. Nowhere is this dynamic more vivid than in the banishment of Asher Lev by the Rebbe, and in the ostracizing of Ansky by the rabbis and members of the Russian and Polish Jewish community.

The Play of Lights (1992) is an adaptation of the novel The Book of Lights (1981). It was presented by the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays at the Harold Prince Theatre of the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, May 13-30, 1992.

The Book of Lights—the first of my father’s Korea novels (the second is I Am the Clay, 1992)—depicts a young man rooted at the center of Jewish theology and mysticism clashing with the core of Asian theology and practice. My father knew that America’s dropping the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 was a significant issue of conscience that should be highlighted in American public discourse. He felt it was something he himself needed to examine, and he did so through the protagonists’ conflicts and relationships in the novel and the play.

The Play of Lights depicts the friendship between Gershon Loran and Arthur Leiden; it also focuses on the theme of guilt, and on the motif of shadow and light. The drama moves back and forth between Gershon’s visit with Arthur’s parents, Charles and Elizabeth Leiden, and flashbacks of Arthur—in rabbinical school, and in Korea, where the two young men served as U.S. Army chaplains. The starkest of these flashbacks shows Gershon and Arthur standing at the site of the blast in Hiroshima, shaken to the core of their beings.

In this play, the sins of the father are visited upon the son: Charles Leiden’s commitment to science and patriotism opens a permanent chasm between him and his son. Arthur becomes obsessed with Hiroshima, consumed with guilt over his father’s critical role in developing the atom bomb that destroyed two Japanese cities. His inability to reconcile these feelings ultimately leads to the deterioration of his character.

The title, The Play of Lights, suggests not only a stage performance but the use of light as metaphor and design in this work. The lights in the play are the lights of Kabbalah and the Death Lights of the atom bomb. The lights of awareness and the lights of destruction. Lights are used to create various effects in the staging, too: Charles repeatedly opens and closes the blinds during Gershon’s visit, ambivalent about being shrouded in darkness and being exposed to sunlight. Even his family name, Leiden, signifies light.

The play The Chosen was developed with Aaron Posner. It ran March 18-April 18, 1999 at the Arden Theatre Company in Philadelphia. On April 23, 1999 the play moved to City Theatre in Pittsburgh. It won the 1999 Barrymore Award for Best New Play.

There had been earlier adaptations of the novel in theatrical form: a 1977 radio play (created by Shimon Wincelberg; broadcast on The Eternal Light, NBC Radio Network); the 1981 film (directed by Jeremy Paul Kagan, starring Rod Steiger, Maximillian Schell, Barry Miller, and Robby Benson); and a short-lived musical that opened on January 6, 1988 at the Second Avenue Theater in New York (book by Chaim Potok; music by Philip Springer; lyrics by Mitchell Bernard; starring George Hearn, Richard Cray, Gerald Hiken, and Rob Morrow).

In The Chosen, a boy from the center of Jewish tradition collides with a significant element from the world of Western secular humanism. This story is about two components of the particular world of Orthodox Judaism—one component looking inward and the other looking outward to solve its problems. The world of Danny Saunders, wary of contemporary culture, gazes with unyielding faith at a sacred, tortured past; the world of Reuven Malter, aware of the possibilities of new knowledge, opens itself to a resonating present. Both worlds are involved in a confrontation that is produced by secularism: one, the window opened into our deepest selves by Freudian psychoanalytic theory; the other the political Zionism of Theodore Herzl.¹⁰ Danny Saunders is raised by his father in silence as an education in pain and an antidote to his intellectual hubris. It is precisely this psychological pain that brings Danny to Freud. What does one do, my father asked, with the truths one senses in an alien system of thought? "Is blindness to any possibility of new, threatening knowledge the price one must pay for loyalty to one’s small and particular world? That’s the dilemma that confronts Danny Saunders in The Chosen."¹¹

In the novels and plays, my father created characters that acted out his theory of core-to-core culture confrontation. They are young men concerned with matters of identity, with the development and preservation of the individuated self. He saw them as extensions of his own being, growing up as he did involved in the world of the mind, and in the worlds of art and literature; their worlds are his world, their families, teachers, communities—all drawn in various ways from his own life. They struggle with both a love of their core culture and a love of the umbrella culture, which offers them enlightenment, assimilation, and cultural and intellectual development. In the course of the struggle, moral values collide, family systems are redrawn, and communities realign—as the characters try to balance the world of the core culture with the world of Western secular humanism (or, in the case of Gershon Loran, the culture and religion of the Far East).

At the heart of all the plays are powerful male friendships that carry the characters through these culture confrontations, and with them, the rising tides of family conflict (Danny and Reuven; Arthur and Gershon), war and persecution (Ansky and Chernin), and even the corruption of a carnival con game (Michael and Alex). Only Asher Lev—the artist-antagonist—is depicted without a strong peer friendship to sustain him in his conflict. His mother is his primary ally in his development as an