Shame on us - going on and on about R.A.Lafferty and not one word that I could find about Chaim Potok, who died last Tuesday, July 23.

His novels were moving and evocative portraits of gifted and often precocious children growing up. In The Chosen, My Name is Asher Lev, Davita's Harp and several others, he chronicles their struggle to reconcile their strict upbringing with the more permissive but sometimes oppressing realities of modern society. At the same time the same drama unfolds in microcosm as they painfully grow away from their parents and their expectations.


On the lecture circuit he described the phenomenon as a "core-core culture confrontation." Most of his stories were about Orthodox Jews, but he recognized that the quandary is one faced by any culture with firm and deeply-held beliefs...