Journal Entry 1 by ghir from Honolulu, Hawaii USA on Tuesday, October 18, 2005

An elderly Korean couple, evicted from their village by war, adopts a young injured orphan.

Signed by author, inscription to Loretta. 

Journal Entry 2 by potok-fan from Turku, Varsinais-Suomi Finland on Monday, August 10, 2009

I have come to realize that ghir is my fairy godmother. Every now and then, a package arrives, and each time it is something better than I could have imagined. This time it is a paperback copy of a book written by (and autographed by) my BC-namesake, Chaim Potok.

I've read this only once and it is certainly time for a re-read. Although I have a hardback copy on my shelf, this is the perfect reminder that I should give the book another try. Last time I was rather overwhelmed by how unlike his other fiction this one was. My clearest memory is the description of the Korean woman mimicking a comforting hand gesture that an American chaplain had used a lot - it gradually becomes clear that it is the sign of the cross.

Chaim Potok has said, I spent fifteen and a half months of my life in Korea and a little bit of that in Japan, courtesy of the United States military in which I became a chaplain. I came into that experience with a very neat coherent picture of what I was as an American and what I was as a Jew. All that neat, antique coherence came undone in the fifteen and a half months that I spent in that part of the world.

...The sheer beauty of that pagan world overwhelmed me.

I remember walking the streets of Kyoto one evening and suddenly feeling an overwhelming sense of freedom and openness. Asking myself why I felt this way, I suddenly realized that I was inside a world where there was no anti-Semitism. I cannot begin to even describe to you what it means to find yourself in a world where anti-Semitism at least in that point of time was simply not a category of thought. Nobody hated you for what you were, for what you had no control over, and this was a pagan world. A world that I had been taught to abominate. How about that for a question?

Walking through a Japanese market in Tokyo one afternoon, I came into a Shinto shrine where an old man with a long, white beard was praying to an idol. Dressed in a tattered grayish suit, unadorned, with a book in his hands, swaying back and forth he reminded me of the old Jews in the synagogue I used to pray in when I was a child. The intensity of the prayers in that synagogue was no more intense than that of this old man as he prayed to the idol. For a moment, I stepped outside myself, and looking down at what I was seeing, I asked myself, "What's going on here? Is the God that I pray to listening to this old man's prayers? Why not? Where are you going to have greater intensity of devotion in an act of prayer than at this moment with this old man in front of this idol? If the God I pray to is listening to this old man's prayers, what are Christianity and Judaism all about anyway?" There I experienced a dramatic confrontation of cultures.

(For the full quote go to http://potok.lasierra.edu/Potok.unique.html#Lights)