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THE D ETROIT JEW IS H . 14
Friday; Jllfie 22, 1984 55
All Summer
Jewelry - Belts - Beach Bags
ind of person. She doesn't belong
nywhere. Most of contemporary
ealistic fiction has that sort of preoc-
upation. The (John) Updike novels
bout Rabbit Angstrom, for example,
epict that kind of world. Talk about
ndividuals who are peripheral to
heir own worlds! Rabbit Angstrom's
on the periphery of everything:
church, family, club, wife, child.
"On the other hand you get the
sort of novelist who seems to be
aught in the conflict that comes
rom the cores of culture. One exam-
le of this is James Joyce'sPortrait of
he Artist as a Young Man. Right
rom the heart of Catholicism. Right
rom the heart of literature. Two
earts in conflict. And that's essen-
tially what I'm interested in.
"I'm not denigrating the other
kind of Jewish writing. It's two dife-
rent worlds that are being written
about. People have a tendency to be-
come very upset by Roth. My own
feeling is that he has a very sharp ear
and, in his early works, a very sharp
wit. Nothing has been the same for
Roth since he wrote Portnoy's Corn-
laint. It seems that •was a kind of
watershed in his writing. But the
things he wrote before that are the
things I really like and that I have a
high regard for."
What does Potok think about
Saul Bellow? Says Potok, "Bellow
writes about an individual 'at the
heart of the secular world who very
often is peripherally located in the
Jewish world. So you also have a
peripheral core confrontation in his
work.
"But no one has staked out the
area I write about. I'm the first to do
that. No one has written about what
it's like to study a passage of Talmud,
or to be really confronted with what I
regard as the high drama of Bible
criticism. My challenge as a writer
was to make it interesting.
"I mean to have people glued to
their seats over a confrontation with
regard to Talmud . . . To me, when I
was growing up, those were very
dramatic and charged times, and
what I try to do is translate my feel-
ings onto paper. That's my world.
And I don't think it's any less impor-
tant than the world of the Snopes
clan that Faulkner writes about. If
anything, I think it's more impor-
tant.
"Nor do I think it's any less
American than the world of the
Snopes. To tell you the truth, it's as
American. And when you consider
the enormous emphasis put in this
country on scholarship, it's very
American. It is the drama of the
mind.
"We don't like to think of our-
selves as an intellectual country. It's
a very macho country — the whole
frontier legend and all that — but
there's a tremendous regard in this
country for the intellectual. Some-
body, I think it may have been the
New York Times, took a poll and
asked • ,pecqe what profession they
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regarded as the most powerful and
most important. One of those that
came in the highest was college pro-
fessors.
"Even the hard hat who sits in a
bar drinking knows about the impor-
tance of education. He may not be
educated, but he sure knows it's im-
portant. So I don't think studying
Talmud is any less of an activity in
this country than whatever it is that
Rabbit Angstrom is doing with his
life."
• Does Potok feel that his books
open a dialogue between himself as a
Jewish writer and those Gentiles
who avidly read his work? "I woud
say that most of my readers are not
Jewish," replies Potok. "One of the
ways we figure that is from the places
where the books are sold. I know that
the books are required reading in
schools and that there just aren't that
many Jews in small towns in Missis-
sippi."
Worldwide, Potok's books are
available in almost all languages
"except in Russia — the books were
banned there. And they're not avail-
able in China. Now, what the others
(countries) make of it is something
that isn't clear to me," insists Potok.
"Although from time to time I'll get a
letter from a professor or someone
like that. I just got a letter from
somebody in Communist China who
was reading my books in English. He
was so perceptive, so erudite. It's just
extraordinary the way he analyzed
the books. So obviously they have
crossed the cultural boundaries.
Potok attributes his interest in
writing as a career to having read
' Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revi-
sited while "still a kid. That was a
disturbing experience, and that's
what did it. The conflict between the
Catholic family and the secular
world caught my attention because
there was an incipient conflict in my-
self at that time. But more impor-
tant, what I liked about the book was
the absolutely exquisite writing, and
the fact that it was able to introduce
me to a world that I knew nothing at
all about and made me want to go
into that world and live inside it and
its people."
Since then, Potok has read other
Catholic writers like .Graham
Greene, Flannery O'Connor and, of
course, James Joyce who deal with
similar conflicts. "The problem is not
a private one," says Potok. "It is an
ongoing problem in Western civiliza-
tion today. How one confronts an-
other system of ideas from inside
one's own system of ideas, and what
happens in the confrontation.
"Sometimes your own system of
ideas is obliterated. Sometimes you
turn your back on the foreign ideas.
Sometimes you pick and choose
among the outside ideas and you fuse
with those you like. Those are the
dynamics I'm interested in. What the
confrontation is all about. What
gives. What holds. What yields.
What stays firm."
• '
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