SOURCE: "Eternal Light: The Holocaust and the Revival of Judaism and Jewish Civilization in the Fiction of Chaim Potok," in Witness through Imagination: Jewish American Holocaust Literature, Wayne State University Press, 1989, pp. 300-23.

In the following essay, Kremer explores themes and issues surrounding anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Potok's fiction. According to Kremer, rather than "focus on the atrocities of the Holocaust period and burden of Holocaust survival, Potok generally concentrates on the possibilities of Holocaust restoration."

Chaim Potok is a rabbi, scholar, and novelist whose philosophic and ethical views are derived from Torah and Talmud and whose aesthetic theory is derived from Western philosophy, literature, and art. With Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Arthur Cohen, and I. B. Singer, Potok rejects alienation in favor of the affirmative position of Jewish idealism in the face of evil and suffering. Jewish history, including repeated outbreaks of anti-Semitism and...