On her NPR program Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Chaim Potok in 1985. Here is a transcribed excerpt:

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POTOK: I remember, for example, wandering through Tokyo once, and stopping off at a Shinto shrine in a market district, and seeing there an old man praying before an idol, a Shinto idol. Dressed in a bedraggled coat and a felt hat and a brownish suit, and holding in his hands some sort of prayer book and shaking back and forth in front of the idol.

Looking at him the first thing I remembered were the old Jews that I used to pray with in this little Hasidic synagogue I grew up in. And I remember asking myself at that point, what am I looking at? Is the god that I pray to listening to this man's prayers? If the god that I pray to is not listening to this man's prayers, why not; because I cannot conceive of a human being praying with greater devotion than I was witnessing in that Japanese man at that point. And if the god that I pray to is listening to this man's prayers, then what is Judaism and Christianity all about?

So I came away from the Far East with a spectrum of questions to which to this day I don't have full answers. And what happened was my whole world was rendered ambiguous. And it is this world that I'm trying to explore in my fiction.

And what I did is I started backwards. I began to explore the components of the fixed world that I brought with me to Korea, and slowly began to experiment with and explore the world that I actually encountered in Korea, and what happened when those two worlds met.

GROSS: The first novel that you wrote was The Chosen.

POTOK: That's right.

GROSS: What were some of the personal and religious themes that you were wrestling with at the time that ended up in your novel The Chosen?

POTOK: I was wrestling essentially with the problem of what happens when an individual who grows up inside the core of a particular tradition, knows that tradition really well, attended its best schools, and is committed to that tradition, loves it ... comes up at the same time against elements from the general civilization in which we all live, and finds himself passionately committed to those elements. Isn't quite sure why, but suddenly these elements open tremendous windows, powerful personal visions into the nature of the world or the nature of man. The Chosen particularly deals with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which is thoroughly inimical to the Western religions' view of the human being: man and his relationship to other men, and so on and so forth. That's the essential thrust of The Chosen.

In other words, how do you come to terms with a system of ideas that seems to be hostile to your own system of ideas, and at the same time you see in that hostile system of ideas elements of real truth, of profound insight into the nature of man that your own system of ideas doesn't have? What do you do in a situation of this kind, when you find yourself falling in love with opposites? Opposites.

That was the central thrust of The Chosen. It's an intellectual problem. I deal with it on a feeling level because novels shouldn't be enterprises or experiments of the intellect as much as they really should be explorations of human relations and human feelings. And I'm interested in the feeling component of this kind of culture confrontation. And as I said earlier, all of us have experiences of this kind, because all of us come from particular worlds and bump up against ideas from worlds outside our own.

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[listen to the rest of the interview from Fresh Air - requires Real Audio]