The Chosen
By: Chaim Potok / Narrated By: Jonathan Davis
Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
Understated and slow crafting did NOT have me prepared for a tear-filled ending…!
Ya gotta understand, first thing, that I haaaaate baseball (Totally zone WAY out when my husband starts yammering about a particular game and then SOMEhow segues into how it’s The Thinking Man’s Sport… >yawn<), and The Chosen starts with one of the loooooongest baseball games out there. Reuven and his teammates are playing a team of killers who just so happen to be Hasidic UBER Orthodox Jews (As opposed to their own more relaxed version), and there’s a lot of flailing going on until Danny takes his place on First Base and tells Reuven that he means to KILL.
And the game becomes literally THAT: The Hasidic Jews haaaate these heathen Jews, and things become heated, hatred becomes palpable with every hit directed towards players, meant to knock them out. The Publisher’s Summary states that an accident on the field brings Reuven and Danny together, but it was nooo accident. Danny slugs one right towards Reuven, and Reuven takes one straight in the face, leaving him bloodied with a concussion and a piece of his eyeglasses in his eye. At first, Reuven hates Danny right back, continuing to hate the boy when Danny visits him in the hospital to ask for forgiveness. But Reuven has a very wise father, and his counsel leads the two, Hasidic and Non, to form a very odd friendship.
And that’s basically it as it becomes a Coming of Age tale whereby Reuven discovers just how extraordinarily gifted and intelligent Danny is, how he is destined to take over as Rabbi from his father, how he watches that Rabbi raise his son with a coldness that is confounding and enraging.
Going along with this is how WWII is evolving with victories celebrated and losses mourned. As the two boys grow, as the war ends, the secret of the Final Solution becomes known to all: Six million Jews, their brethren, murdered. Soon, Reuven’s Zionist father becomes The Last Straw for Rabbi Saunders, Danny’s father, who screams anti-Zion sentiment: They are to await the Messiah, NOT build a homeland by whom he terms “Jewish Goyim” and the two boys are separated from each other just as the issue of Israel separated the Jewish Communities at the time.
This book is sloooow going, but the wisdom of the fathers, and what I learned about Judaism and the various people who are believers, how they believe, how they study, was pretty danged fascinating. It was nice to read a story of Jewish people during WWII that was NOT about victimization and going to slaughterhouses, tho’ it was rather sad to know that, while there was most CERtainly a basic knowledge of the persecution going on, whispers with evidence to back them up, for the most part life simply went on as normal for everyone. Still, the boys were young, though this did follow them to becoming young men, men who wanted to live life on their own terms.
Jonathan Davis, oh Mr. Davis, SIR! How magNIFicent your performance was! Truly, each character was captured and delivered with authenticity and precision. Oh, the liveliness of the Shabbat discussions and arguments which stimulated the boys so (Altho’ Reuven was made sharper whereas Danny was such a savant he breezed right through them). I loved the portrayal of both boys’ fathers, their wisdom and the guidance they gave. And when it came to the ending, when both fathers are explaining how and why a father might raise his son in silence, in apparent coldness? When we hear straight from Danny’s father and watch the secondhand interaction? Oh how I was tearing up! Excellent performance, truly: Captured the Jewish faithful without turning them into silly-sounding caricatures…
You looking for an audiobook, a tale that zips along? Good golly gosh, stay away from The Chosen! Nope, this is two boys coming to be young men during a precise moment in the history of America, the history of the world. Beautiful, and aggravating until it becomes a heartbreaker.
And I do soooo love to feel my heart in pieces after an awesome jaunt in Audiobook Land!
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