Book Reviews

Book: My Name Is Asher Lev

Author: Chaim Potok

Rating:

Date reviewed: 3/15/03

Summary: Asher Lev, an observant Jew, lives with his family in an apartment in Brooklyn. At an early age he has the ability to draw - not just doodling, but actual drawing as an artist would. He is taught by Jacob Kahn to paint, while growing apart from his father and mother. His father wants him to become a messenger for the Rebbe, and almost sees him as evil for devoting his life to artwork. His parents move to Europe to work on starting Jewish schools for the Rebbe, and Asher stays with his uncle's family in Brooklyn. The book follows Asher from a very early age to after college, and is very moving.

Review: The book is very moving and inspiring. I found it very easy to understand while at the same time very thought-provoking. Asher Lev tells the story, about his hardships and success as an artist; the book was very fast-paced and I not once found myself bored.

Purchase My Name Is Asher Lev at Amazon!

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Below is the essay I wrote for my class. It is my work (don't take it) that made me suffer and worry for about 13 hours total, so don't even think about swiping it. I got an A+ on the assignment, too. *Preens*

WARNING: SPOILERS.

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Asher’s Use of the Crucifixion in His Art

Adrienne Wolter, 7W

I have chosen the essay topic ‘discuss the meaning of Asher’s use of the crucifixion in his art’ because it is the most interesting to me after having read My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok.

After and while being taught by his teacher, Jacob Kahn, Asher Lev became a famous artist. He painted not for money but for himself. He was an observant Jew that came from an important Jewish family–his father worked for the Rebbe, setting up yeshivas (schools which focus on religion but teach other classes) where there was nothing. Although Asher’s early life was successful in the area of painting, his family life wasn’t. Over the years his father and he became more and more distanced by religion and by artwork; this was rooted in Asher’s early life and increased as he grew older. Asher’s mother, a strong-willed woman who kept the family together, is also a Jew like her husband and son.

After he graduated, Asher traveled to Florence to continue his painting. He settled into an apartment, and stayed for months. Now that he was somewhere that had no memories for him (at the time), old memories buried under the years began surfacing and he found himself thinking over very many aspects of his life.
“Away from my world, alone in an apartment that offered me neither memories nor roots, I began to find old and distant memories of my own, long buried by pain and time and slowly brought to the surface now by the sight of waiting white canvases and by the winter emptiness of the small Parisian street.” My Name Is Asher Lev, pages 306 and 307.
He thought of his mythic ancestor, a figure from his childhood perhaps rooted in memories of family and stories told to him as a child. He painted him many times then.
Asher also remembered his grandfather and other members of his family during certain times of need, such as his father when he was grounded to an office instead of traveling for the Rebbe and his mother during her illness. He continued thinking of his mother.
“Now I thought of my mother and began to sense something of her years of anguish. Standing between two different ways of giving meaning to the world, and at the same time possessed by her own fears and memories, she had moved now toward me, now toward my father, keeping both worlds of meaning alive, nourishing with her tiny being, and despite her torments, both me and my father.... She had kept the gift alive during the dead years; and she had kept herself alive by picking up her dead brother’s work and had kept my father alive by enabling him to resume his journeys.” My Name Is Asher Lev, page 309.
He found that he couldn’t paint for a while afterward. He wandered through streets and museums. Then, one day in April, he found that an idea had lodged itself in his mind and he couldn’t get rid of it unless he painted it.
“....I think it had been coming for a long time and I had been choking it and hoping it would die. But it does not die. It kills you first.” My Name Is Asher Lev, page 310.
All his thinking had planted an idea in his mind. The idea was to turn his knowledge of his mother’s anguish, her sacrifice for her family into a painting. He drew and painted his mother being crucified by the blind on the window of his parent’s living room window, and painted it in gloomy colors. It was a finished painting, but to Asher it was, at the same time, incomplete.
“I had brought something incomplete into the world. Now I felt its incompleteness. ‘Can you understand what it means for something to be incomplete?’ my mother had once asked me. I understood, I understood.” My Name Is Asher Lev, page 312.
He had troubled days and nights. Then he stretched a canvas like this painting had been and drew a different version of the same painting in charcoal. This time, he positioned the window and his mother differently. Asher drew himself to her left and his father to her right. His father held onto an briefcase in exaggerated size and he himself held onto a pallette and paintbrush. He split his mother’s head into three sections, one looking at Asher, one looking at his father, one looking upwards. He made her expression one of torment and anguish and pain. When he finished it, it was a good painting. He thought about destroying the paintings, but found he couldn’t do it. Anna Schaeffer came one day in late summer and picked up all of Asher’s paintings, packing them up and taking them with her to Brooklyn, where she would hang them for him. Asher spent the rest of the year wandering around in dread of the exhibition for his paintings.
In late January, he flew back to New York, five days before his show. He had not alerted his parents of his plans beforehand, and found the apartment silent and empty. His parents got home in the evening, and when he got back from a meeting with Anna Schaeffer they were waiting for him.
Many people welcomed him home that day. Asher talked with his parents about the exhibition. They told him that if there were no paintings of nudes in his show, they would go. There were none. They planned to go Sunday, the night of the opening. On Sunday, Asher left for the show early. He was there when the wave of people came in early because they were blocking the lower levels of the building. He was there when his parents joined the crowd of people that had come to see his work. He joined them and led them around the walls until they reached the final wall, where the crucifixions were hung. His mother could not see above the crowd, but his father pushed through and looked at the paintings of Asher, Asher’s mother, and himself.
“He turned and looked at me. His face wore an expression of awe and rage and bewilderment and sadness, all at the same time.” My Name Is Asher Lev, page 342.

Asher had realized and thought about his mother’s sacrifice of herself to keep her family together and well. He wanted to describe this in a painting, but found there was nothing within his religion to describe the magnitude of her suffering, so he looked into the Christian religion. The crucifixion, a Christian symbol of great sacrifice for the people, fit the bill.

In accordance to Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development, Asher was in stage four, respecting law and order, by the end of the story. This can be derived from the fact that he respects the laws and his religion throughout the book, being an observant Jew. This is also shown by his primary reluctance to change his religion to fit the needs of becoming an artist when he first met with Jacob Kahn. He follows the rules because he does respect them and he believes in them. Asher’s father was probably between the stages of four and five, having a very high respect for rules but also believing they can be changed to benefit society as a whole. He did not question the Rebbe when he was sent to travel all around Europe and the States, feeling it was his duty. Asher’s mother, in accordance to Gilligan’s Theory of Moral Development, was at stage three. She thought of others (namely Asher and her husband) before thinking of herself, and gave a lot of herself up to keep her family together.

In conclusion, Asher’s use of the crucifixion in his art was to portray his mother’s torment while keeping her family together and surviving the dead months while in her depression after the death of her brother. Even though much of the local Jewish world saw him as spawn of the sitra achra, he succeeded in getting across the real level of his mother’s suffering.