American author and rabbi. Herman Harold Potok was born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Poland. His parents, Benjamin Max (d. 1958) and Mollie (Friedman) Potok (d. 1985), gave him a Hebrew name, Chaim Tzvi. His Orthodox education taught him Talmud as well as secular studies. He decided to become a writer as a teenager, after reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
