Books |
My Name Is Asher Lev
Chaim Potok
By
Published: Apr 03, 2023
Category:
Fiction
My name is Asher Lev, the Asher Lev, about whom you have read in newspapers and magazines, about whom you talk so much at your dinner affairs and cocktail parties, the notorious and legendary Lev of the “Brooklyn Crucifixion.”
That’s the opening paragraph of Chaim Potok’s novel. They don’t overstate. His fictional artist was, at six, a talented draftsman, “a little Chagall.” By 12, he was clearly destined for a career in art. But he was also a Ladover Hasid, growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s; his family kept kosher, he wore side curls, he prayed three times a day, and the conflict between his heritage and his destiny couldn’t have been sharper.
I read Potok’s masterpiece when I was 15. Most of a lifetime later, I re-read it. This time I saw it speaking directly to the choices we all make and the price we pay for those choices — this is not a book about the creation of a great young artist, it’s about anyone with a dream who dares to go for it. In other words, it couldn’t be more personal. This is a book about you. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Lev probably had it harder than you and I did. In the history of Western painting, Potok notes, no great artist has ever been a Jew. And Asher’s father, though an important and well-informed man, sees no reason that his son should be the one to change that. Art, for him, is “foolishness.” But art is in Asher’s blood. After years of drawing, he turns to oil painting. “It was,” he says, “as if I had been painting in oil all my life.”
In the Lev’s community, every victory for art is a defeat for the soul. Paint nude women? “The Torah teaches us to practice modesty,” his mother reminds him. Asher not only copies European art, he draws Jesus. “Do you know how much Jewish blood has been spilled because of him, Asher?” his mother all but wails.
Asher’s father is a great man who spirits Jews out of Russia and starts yeshivas for their children. But this — this scandal in his own house, how can he begin to understand it? His response is rage, uncontrollable rage. It’s this bad:
I looked down and saw my father’s fingers clenched around my wrist. I stared in astonishment at the fingers, saw the bones jut out from beneath the flesh, saw the ridges of the knuckles, then felt the pain move up swiftly through my arm. He was squeezing the wrist of my right arm; his face, pale within its frame of red beard, was contorted with rage. I cried out. My mother shouted something…. I began to cry. My father released my hand. My wrist throbbed. I could not stop crying. My mother continued to shout. My father stood at the table, his face pale, all of him quivering with rage.
They were screaming at each other, my mother and father. They were screaming at one another and I sat there listening, wanting to run away but not daring to move, feeling the pain and the fear and knowing that it was because of me and not knowing what I could do about any of it.
Fortunately, the Rebbe is wise. “A life,” he tells Asher, “is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.” He gives Asher his blessing. And he sends him to study with Jacob Kahn.
Kahn is a great artist. And an honest man, honest to the point of tough love. “Do you have any idea what you are getting into?” he asks. “Become a carpenter. Become a shoemaker. Become a street cleaner.” And when Asher persists, he delivers the ultimate warning: “You are entering the world of the goyim.”
Now begins Asher Lev’s art training — and ours. No matter how much you know about art, you’ll be astonished by how much you’ll learn, and how painlessly you learn it; Chaim Potok has thoroughly mastered his subject. And what he knows about people is just as impressive: how family conflicts can’t always be resolved within the family, how surrogates can play important roles, how nobody gets anywhere unscathed.
Certainly not Asher Lev. “Strong words are being written and spoken about me, myths are being generated,” he tells us. “I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years.”
Yes, but he gets that greatest of all victories: He gets to be Asher Lev. Whatever price he paid, he got the prize of self-knowledge. And that lesson makes this book not just thrilling, but invaluable to every kid who’s searching for a direction in life and every adult who isn’t sure he/she has found one.
