SOURCE: "Sight Becomes Insight," in The Christian Science Monitor, July 20, 1967, p. 5.

In the following review, Schmidt offers high praise for The Chosen.

The Chosen is a very special book. It deals with a special era—the middle 1940's when war and the end of war was changing the shade of the world—in a special place, the quiet, vivid streets of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where the heavily Jewish population created an enclave and an atmosphere of special religious and intellectual urgency. The book is a chronicle of intense adolescent friendship between two rather extraordinary boys, and of the unusual relationship in which each stood with his father.

Inner Development

The book is also about a certain kind of passage to manhood. The rites are obscure, not the clear Bar Mitzvah that admits the Jewish boy to the community of responsible adults at age 13, but the far more difficult...