Chaim Potok - The Collected Plays of Chaim Potok

D uring my tenure as senior acquisitions editor at the Jewish Publication Society, I had the pleasure of editing A Heart Afire: Stories and Teachings of the Early Hasidic Masters , a luminous work by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Netanel Miles-Ypez. Some years later, Netanel approached me with the inspired idea of publishing a collection of my fathers plays with Adam Kadmon Books. This project has given me deeper insight into my father as a playwright and thinker; it also points to a sweet connection between his Hasidic heritage (echoes of which appear in many of his novels and plays) and the progressive Hasidism of Reb Zalman. I thank Netanel for suggesting this book, and for providing a patient guiding hand throughout the process of its preparation.

David McKnight, director of the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library at the University of Pennsylvania, helped me to access the notes, article clippings, reviews, and other supporting materials in the extensive and beautifully conserved collection of the Chaim Potok Papers at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books & Manuscripts.

I am grateful to Karen Strauss of Main Street Technology for preserving and updating electronic copies of Sins of the Father and The Play of Lights . If not for her prudence and foresight, the scripts of these plays might well have been lost.

David Bassuk, Aaron Posner, and Carol Rocamora graciously shared the plays they developed with my father and directed. They have written wonderful prefaces describing their individual experiences of collaborating with my father on the plays you now hold in your hands.

My gratitude and admiration to David Bassuk, who tirelessly helped me reconstruct the text of Out of the Depths . The only known surviving script is the penultimate version of the play. The final version exists in the form of a video of the 1992 staged workshop performance of the play by Novel Stages Theatre Company. David scanned the printed pages into PDFs and converted the video to readable media files. I then checked the script against the video, painstakingly reading and watching, listening to every word and phrase, and amending discrepancies between the written and visual texts. Davids memory proved invaluable in untangling inevitable sections of corrupted text and video files. The result is a final, authoritative script of the play. This project has rekindled our old friendship, and for that I am equally grateful.

In the course of excavating his files and VHS tapes, David Bassuk discovered a video of the post-performance discussion on Out of the Depths, featuring Chaim Potok and Professor David Roskies. The transcript of that talk appears for the first time in print in this volume.

Thanks to Adena Potok, Bella Sobolofsky, and Sheera Zuckerman for filling in details of my fathers personal and family history.

My deepest thanks to my children, Maia and Erez, who inspire me every day with their tenderness, creative passion, and zest for life.

Rena Potok