The Chosen

Here's another book that plenty of high school peers had to read for English class. For the most part, they hated it. I don't blame them; it's much more of a "thinking" book than a "happening" book, and furthermore, no fourteen-year-old could appreciate some of the subtle tones about college boys becoming men. This book is also totally Jewish, something I was fine with (and even interested in), but certainly something I could see a bunch of high school kids finding unappealing. The novel is really about nothing more than two boys (one Hasidic Jewish, one Orthodox Jewish - a huge point of conflict, believe it or not) and their relationships with each other, their fathers, and one another's fathers. In fact, there are really only four characters of any relevance: the boys and their fathers. These relationships develop and change over the course of about eight years as the boys go through both high school and college. In the background, World War II comes to a close, the horrors of the Holocaust come to light, and a Jewish State (Israel) is hotly debated and ultimately formed. There was certainly a fair amount of history to take away from the book, both from the 1940s and from the Jews in Europe for the past 500 years or so. The story is also one about fathers and sons and the difficult relationships they have, especially in one case the consequences of practicing Hasidic Judaism (earlocks and all) in somewhat contemporary America. I'd be exaggerating if I called this book amazing or eye-opening, but it was a pleasantly surprising read. Coming in at just under 300 pages, it was also a short one. I think the biggest problem with having high school freshmen read it is that they're not quite ready to identify with some of the family-versus-self concepts that accompany it, no matter how hard a bunch of teachers try to make them "read between the lines" and look for symbolism that serves no purpose. Stick to Catcher in the Rye, ninth grade.