My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok (25-Apr-1974) Paperback

This is my favorite book of all time! The writing is superb, and the subject---Orthodox Jewish son caught between devout parents and the requirements of his chosen work--is enlightening and intriguing.

This story is great illustration of the importance of being sincere in life. Asher was encouraged by his mentor, Jacob, to be brave and authentic even though his choices hurt the ones he loved. This story left me feeling empathetic for all parties involved... and a new found appreciation for staying true to oneself.

This story is great illustration of the importance of being sincere in life. Asher was encouraged by his mentor, Jacob, to be brave and authentic even though his choices hurt the ones he loved. This story left me feeling empathetic for all parties involved... and a new found appreciation for staying true to oneself.

This book plodded along like it was trying to escape from literary quicksand. Even though there was some interesting insight into the Hasidic lifestyle, story was stale and boring..... page after page of the same frustration and sadness. I kept waiting for 'the next page' to get better.... it didn't. After reading positive reviews before purchasing it, I was very disappointed and would not recommend this book to anyone.

In "My Name is Asher Lev," Chaim Potok explores a young Chasidic man's struggle to balance his religious beliefs with his extraordinary artistic talent. Asher's parents, who live in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, have raised him to observe the rituals and customs of Orthodox Judaism. However, from an early age, Asher has an affinity for art. Instead of interacting with friends, playing baseball, or concentrating on his schoolwork, he sketches constantly. Asher tells his story in flashback, explaining how and why he ultimately came to be viewed as "a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, [and] an inflictor of shame upon [his] family."

Asher's "unique and disquieting gift" puts him at odds with his father, Aryeh, who works closely with the esteemed Ladover Rebbe. Through young Asher's eyes, we view his mother's debilitating illness; Aryeh's travels across the United States, Canada, and Europe to assist fellow Jews in need of support; and Asher's growing alienation from his family, peers, and teachers. He lives in a bubble; his religious and secular studies are of secondary interest. Instead, he is obsessed with line, shape, shading, facial expression, color, and symbolism. As an only child, Asher is guilt-ridden when he fails to live up to his parents' expectations and indulges in what his father calls "foolishness."

Potok poses such provocative questions as: Does an individual bear a greater responsibility to his parents or to himself? Can someone live successfully in two incompatible worlds? Are the sacrifices that Asher makes for his art worthwhile? It is sometimes difficult to identify with the one-dimensional protagonist. He is perpetually anxious, a bit self-absorbed, has no friends his own age, and shows little interest in anything aside from drawing.

At the beginning, when the narrator is a small boy, the prose is simple and unadorned, as befits a character who has not yet mastered the nuances of language. As Asher grows into a young man and an adult, the writing becomes more profound, lyrical, and expressive. As he did in "The Chosen," Chaim Potok offers a compelling portrait of the rituals and customs of a Chasidic sect and takes us on a spiritual, psychological, and emotional journey with a talented young man. Asher Lev is torn "between darkness and light" --between his passion to communicate his vision and a strict adherence to his ancestors' way of life.

Asher Lev is a Hasidic Jew with an artistic gift. He spends all of his free time drawing all of the things he sees. His father finds his gift disturbing and dangerous to the Jewish way of life. Asher must choose between the powerful urge he feels to answer the call of his artistic abilities and the approval of his father. It was a heart breaking story to read of a little boy who must bear the burden of the rift he causes in his family. This same story has been repeated in families for generations. Fathers who feel their sons are not living to their full potential destroy family relationships rather than try to accept the road their son feels compelled to follow. It's hard to understand these types of behaviors.

The book was a fascinating look inside of the mind of someone driven by their art. I had a hard time putting it down.

I returned to reread this classic after reading Talia Carner's recent novel JERUSALEM MAIDEN, since the protagonists of both are talented artists raised within Orthodox Judaism, struggling to reconcile their art to their faith. To succeed, the writers must convey the nature of both religious belief and artistic inspiration, a challenge that Potok meets brilliantly. Consider one significant example. Both novels are full of Hebrew words -- Shabbos, Rosh Hadesh, Krias Shema, Hasidus, Rebbe, Mashpia, Torah, Chumash, Hashem, Ribbono Shel Olom -- but one comparison struck me immediately upon opening the Potok book: he never uses italics.

Trivial? I think not. Italics imply a gap between the writer and the reader. They say, "I know these words are foreign to you, so I'll mark them as such and explain them as we go along." But Potok's absence of italics takes away all foreignness; these are words that his characters use every day, as common as "overcoat" and "arithmetic." By using them matter-of-factly, without self-consciousness, Potok's Asher Lev invites us into his world as an equal, erasing any gap between us. He is also denying any sense of religious observance as something special reserved for the Sabbath, rather a part of ordinary life, every hour of every day. Though not Jewish myself, I have read a great many novels with Jewish settings, but cannot think of any that immerse me so deeply in the culture as Potok's novels: this one and THE CHOSEN.

Asher is the only child of Aryeh and Rivkeh Lev, descendants of two of the most prominent families of Ladover Hasidim; the branch of the sect is fictitious, but clearly based on the Chabad-Lubavitcher movement in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The Rebbe, or leader of the sect, is a charismatic figure -- a marvelous creation on Potok's part, though undoubtedly inspired by the Lubavitcher Rebbe of the time, who preached a relatively liberal form of Orthodox Judaism at home coupled with widespread outreach abroad. Asher's father, like his father before him, travels widely for the Rebbe, and his mother takes a doctorate in Russian to help him in his work. The story, which begins in the fifties, is set against the persecution of Jews in Russia under Stalin and the Ladovers' attempts to bring them out after the dictator's death. It gives a strong undertone of historical fact to a story that, otherwise, is largely in the mind and home of its title character.

Asher is naturally expected to follow in the family tradition. But although he remains a pious and observant Jew throughout his life, he is consumed by a different force: a precocious talent for drawing. Here again, it is the absence of notional italics that convinces us of Asher's genius. Potok makes no attempt to highlight or explain; he writes no set pieces translating Asher's creations into picturesque words. Instead, he simply admits us into his thought, showing the process by which those pictures were created -- more than that, showing art as the language through which Asher processes his entire life and conflicted feelings. As Jacob Kahn, his teacher throughout his teens, says, "Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way."

And he has plenty to scream about. Although he will be very lucky in his mentors, Asher's gift isolates him from his classmates and alienates his father, who calls his pursuit of Art rather than Torah a "foolishness" -- the same accusation that Potok's parents had leveled against his own artistic pursuits.* Overruled by the Rebbe, who understands the different needs of both men, Aryeh Lev stores up increasing bitterness against what he sees as the irreligion of his son, especially when he starts painting subjects anathema to the Jewish tradition. Asher's mother, Rivkeh, is torn in two, not only between her husband and her son, but also between two radically different ways of honoring God -- through a life of practical good works, or through following the truth of a God-given spirit. The strife within his family and in his own mind will be the subject of the work which launches Asher Lev to notoriety and success: a pair of canvases known as "The Brooklyn Crucifixion." Asher mentions this in his very first paragraph, writing the book to explain how an observant Jew could reach such an unlikely pinnacle. But never to apologize: "It is absurd to apologize for a mystery." Potok's great achievement is to exalt the mystery of both God and Art, while sharing the pursuit of each as though it were the most normal thing in the world. Extraordinary things described in everyday words; the absence of italics.

*See first comment

Where to start with this moving book about the creative impulse and the conflict between individuality and community. Chaim Potok's layered novel about a young Hasidic boy with an artistic gift, so redolent with Jewish arcana, is as universal as the parent-child relationship. The fictional Ladover community, with its Rebbe both menacing and wise, is more defined than most, but Asher Lev's conflict with its strictures would be much the same in a middle class Midwestern community.

How this conflict tears at Asher Lev's soul and how his response to it tears at his parents and his community provides enough dramatic tension for several novels. How Potok brings this to a point in the climax of the book, foreshadowed from the beginning but still so unexpected, makes this a masterpiece.

From an early age, Asher Lev drew things. I did, too, when I was little, though not as compulsively as Asher. "A million people can draw," his uncle told him, so I suppose I was one of those million. It quickly became clear that Asher's drawing was beyond the ordinary and that he truly possessed a gift. The question for his father and the Hasidic community was whether the gift came from the Lord or from the "other side." When young Asher evinced a passion for drawing the crucifixion of "that man" as well as nudes, the question was settled, at least for Asher's father.

In simple family scenes, Potok shows how hostility grew between father and son and how Asher's mother was caught in between, and what it cost them all. Asher refused to go to Vienna when the Rebbe dispatched his father to establish Ladover yeshivas throughout Europe because he needed his familiar neighborhood to nurture his gift. So the father went alone. The Rebbe in his wisdom apprenticed Asher to a Jewish artist, the fabulous Jacob Kahn, in the hopes his pursuit of art, which clearly could not be denied, would not lead him away from Judaism.

If there's anyone who can read how Jacob Kahn schooled Asher Lev in art without being moved, they should not be reading fiction. The summers together in Provincetown, painting and walking on the beach and talking, are as close to idyllic as real life can get.

Asher grows older, but we are so well acquainted with him by this time that we never lose sight of that wondering young boy. Nor does Potok let us get distracted. The action is totally focused on Asher's development as an artist. By the time the artist Asher Lev is ready for his climactic one-man show at a Madison Avenue gallery, your heart is in your throat as you see what inevitably must come to pass. The powerful forces Potok has unleashed -- creativity and religion, filial devotion and artistic integrity, individual and community -- come crashing together in a climax that almost literally takes your breath away.

The best religious themed novel I have ever read. Author Potok clearly is a master at character development. He keeps the number of important characters to an absolute minimum, developing them in way that helps the reader grasp the fullness of the character's life view. Potok uses first person narrative beautifully, raising it to an art. I highly recommend this novel for readers seeking a deep, clear understanding of the Hasidic Jew's vision of world verses that of a committed artist for whom religious belief is secondary to artistic freedom. A wonderful and fascinating look into the world of classic Jewish faith and the world of classically trained artists.