You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it. ... You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes - sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.

After the publication of Old Men At Midnight he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He returned to Philadelphia in 1977. [page needed] Brought up to believe that the Jewish people were central to history and God's plans he experienced a region where there were almost no Jews and no anti-Semitism yet whose religious believers prayed with the same fervor that he saw in Orthodox synagogues at home.

Potok is most famous for his first book The Chosen a 1967 novel which was listed on The New York Times’ best seller list for 39 weeks and sold more than 3400000 copies.