Daniel Saunders In Chaim Potok's The Chosen

In The Chosen by Chaim Potok, Daniel Saunders or Danny, a fifteen year old boy living in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1940s, has an inherited career path. In fact, he lives in a neighborhood “heavily populated by the followers of his father, Russian Hasidic Jews in somber garb …” (3). The only problem is, Danny doesn’t want to be a rabbi, and instead he wants to study psychology. Even though Reuven, Danny’s acquaintance at the time, thought, “Danny Saunders, in his Hasidic clothes, seemed to me to be about the last person in the world who would qualify as an analyst” (70), Danny does display significant traits that show he is capable of conquering his dream of being a psychologist. Danny is an avid reader, and reads “about seven or eight books a week” (80). He tells Reuven about how he reads different genres, like novels about evolution to
From the start, Reuven and his teammates say how “They’re murderers” (7). During the game, Danny shows violent and troubled characteristics. This could be because we don’t know much about him yet, but it could also be the fact that Danny says he wants to kill Reuven and actually nearly does. Since the baseball hit Reuven right in the eye. However, Danny isn’t the only person showing violent characteristics. Danny’s whole team is playing to win, and not stepping down their game one bit. They hit hard, and run the bases without even hesitating about trucking a defender. Though we don’t know much about Danny, we find out that Danny lugs around anger, and frustration. His frustration could come from the fact that his dad only wants him to use his intelligence for Talmud and nothing else, and the way his dad is giving him, basically a silent treatment. Danny has to sneak off to read books from the library, and even though they are banned books, it shows that he has to break rules to be