Fiction Friday: My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

In Chaim Potok’s well-known novel, My Name Is Asher Lev, the main character Asher is a gifted artist and a member of the Ladover community, a small population of Hasidic Jews living in New York who follow a charismatic spiritual teacher known as the Rebbe. Potok uses this character to explore the complexities of faith and family at odds with the emerging worldviews of Modernity and postmodernity, skethcing these abstract concepts skillfully through the narrative of a family at odds with the world and with itself.

Although Asher’s art is dismissed as frivolous at best and idolatrous at worst, the irony is that it is through his art that the strongest themes of his family’s anguish bubbles to the surface. Asher’s mother has suffered a double tragedy in her life, the first with the loss of a close family member and the second at the hands of a husband – Asher’s father – who has given his life to the cause of the Rebbe, a cause that has taken his on frequent travels around the globe. As Asher grows, and as his artistic gift expands with him, he begins to discover that his painting offers the opportunity to give expression to his family’s suffering in ways that his mother’s faith never could. There are powerful touch-points in Asher’s art that speak to the story of his family, and reflect on the story of God as well.

Sadly, this exploration leads to powerful conflicts with his father, who doesn’t understand Asher’s desire to paint or deal with the difficulties of the past.

Consequently, there is a powerful divorce between Asher’s art and faith that reflect the wider divorce between these two expressions in the Modern world. Throughout most of the earlier portions of the book, especially as a child, Asher seems to be able to manage the tension between the two; perhaps because he is a child his parents condemn his gift less, and he antagonizes them less. But as he pushes his artistic gift to maturity, the two worlds become irreconcilable. Asher remains the child of this broken family – still able to visit and spend time with each of his “parents,” and in many ways (much like children of divorce) still trying to bring them together – but ultimately Asher chooses to live with his “mother,” the artistic gift within him, full time.

The author uses powerful symbols to depict this inner-divorce, depicting Asher’s artistic travels in Europe in parallel with his father’s travels in support of the Rebbe and his Ladover teachings. His father gave his life for the Rebbe and followed him all over the world in order to perpetuate his faith, and likewise, Asher follows in his father’s footsteps in an antithetical way – in pursuit of a different kind of “Rebbe” and a different kind of faith.

The novel reaches a kind of psychic climax when when Asher paints a crucifixion as a means of exploring his own mother’s torturous grief. This reprehensible, offesnive, and agonizing image becomes the most potent way for Asher to explore his mother’s pain, and perhaps the only way Asher could cause his father – a man who had largely dismissed the needs of his wife – to empathize with that pain. Asher’s use of the crucifixion becomes an instrument of empathy and self-sacrifice – Asher’s self-sacrifice from the Ladover community on his mother’s behalf.

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