There is no more beloved musician in the classical world than Isaac Stern, revered not only as a great violinist but also as a generous personality and a crucial figure in the world of the arts. One of the few people who has known every major classical musician of the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, he shares his personal and artistic experiences in this warm, passionate account of his life: the story of his rise to eminence; his feelings about music and the violin; and his great friendships and collaborations with colleagues such as Leonard Bernstein and Pablo Casals. Stern the...

From the celebrated author of The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev, a trilogy of related novellas about a woman whose life touches three very different men stories that encompass some of the profoundest themes of the twentieth century.
Ilana Davita Dinn is the listener to whom three men relate their lives.
As a young girl, she offers English lessons to a teenage survivor of the camps. In The Ark Builder, he shares with her the story of his friendship with a proud old builder of synagogue arks, and what happened when the German army invaded their Polish town.
As a...

"Potok writes powerfully about the suffering of innocent people caught in the cross-fire of a war they cannot begin to understand....Humanity and compassion for his characters leap from every page."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
As the Chinese and the army of the North sweep south during the Korean War, an old peasant farmer and his wife flee their village across the bleak, bombed-out landscape. They soon come upon a boy in a ditch who is wounded and unconscious. Stirred by possessiveness and caring the woman refuses to leave the boy behind. The man thinks she is crazy to nurse this boy, to...

For Davita Chandal, growing up in the New York of the 1930s and '40s is an experience of joy and sadness. Her loving parents, both fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely bright hope of a new and better world. But as the deprivations of war and depression take a ruthless toll, Davita unexpectedly turns to the Jewish faith that her mother had long ago abandoned, finding there both a solace for her questioning inner pain and a test of her budding spirit of independence.

From the Paperback edition.

"REMARKABLE . . . A WONDERFUL STORY."
--The Boston Globe

The father is a high-ranking Communist officer, a Jew who survived Stalin's purges. The son is a "refusenik," who risked his life and happiness to protest everything his father held dear. Now, Chaim Potok, beloved author of the award-winning novels The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev, unfolds the gripping true story of a father, a son, and a conflict that spans Soviet history. Drawing on taped interviews and his harrowing visits to Russia, Potok traces the public and privates lives of the Slepak family: Their passions and...

"A novel of finely articulated tragic power. . . . Little short of a work of genius." --The New York Times Book Review

Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels, even when it leads him to blasphemy. In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher's passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination.

Asher Lev...

Asher Lev is the artist who painted the sensational 'Brooklyn Crucifixion'. Into it, he poured all the anguish and torment a Jew can feel when torn between the faith of his fathers and the calling of his art.

Out of a baseball game that nearly becomes a religious war, two Jewish boys become friends. Danny comes from a strict Hasidic sect that keeps him bound in centuries of orthodoxy. Reuven is brought up by a father patiently aware of the 20th century.