My Name Is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
"My Name Is Asher Lev" and its sequel, "The Gift of Asher Lev," by Chaim Potok, explore the complex relationship between artistic expression and the constraints of a Hasidic Jewish community. The story centers around Asher Lev, a gifted painter born in 1943 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who struggles to reconcile his passion for art with his family's expectations and communal values. His talent emerges amidst personal challenges, including a tumultuous relationship with his father, Aryeh, who is often absent due to his commitments to the community, and the emotional fallout from family tragedies.
Asher's art confronts difficult themes, including representations of evil, which culminate in works that horrify his parents and challenge their beliefs. This conflict underscores the tension between faith and artistic freedom, as Asher's journey ultimately leads him away from his community, yet he remains committed to his spiritual roots. "The Gift of Asher Lev" revisits Asher in his forties, as he navigates family life while grappling with the legacy of his artistic calling. The narrative suggests that while his son Avrumel is destined for a role within the community, Asher's own path illustrates the dual nature of creativity—its capacity to both bless and burden. Through these works, Potok delves into the struggles of the artist within the confines of tradition, providing a poignant reflection on identity, duty, and the transformative power of art.
On this Page
My Name Is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published:My Name is Asher Lev, 1972; The Gift of Asher Lev, 1990
Type of work: Novel
The Work
A perennial theme in Potok’s work considers the place of the artist (painter or writer) within the Hasidic community. In My Name Is Asher Lev, the controversy is over representational art. Asher is born in Crown Heights in Brooklyn in 1943, and as he grows it is evident that he has a gift for drawing and painting. Asher’s father is frequently away on trips for the rebbe as the Ladover Hasid community (patterned perhaps on Lubavitch Hasidism) seeks to expand throughout Europe. While Aryeh Lev is arranging help for Jewish families emigrating to the United States, Asher and his mother spend long nights in loneliness. (Asher had refused to join his own father in Europe.)
When his mother’s brother is killed on a mission for the rebbe, Rivkeh Lev suffers a breakdown. Later, taking up her brother’s uncompleted work, she surrounds herself with her Russian studies to help her forget her heartache. Images of work completed and uncompleted pervade the novel, and Asher finds as he develops his gift that he must complete his understanding of the world by painting not only what he sees with his eyes but also what his inner vision shows him.
The pictures he paints often depict the reality of evil. At the end of the novel, Asher has revealed two crucifixion paintings to his parents. In both, the face of his mother stares from the cross, looking in abstract fashion at the ever-traveling husband on one side and at Asher the stranger on the other. Asher’s parents are horrified, and the rebbe tells Asher that the artist has passed a boundary beyond which even the rebbe is powerless to be of help.
Earlier, sensing Asher’s talent, the rebbe had turned him over to painter Jacob Kahn, a nonobservant Jew, who introduces Asher to the work of Pablo Picasso, especially Guernica (1937), the painting of the horror of the German bombing of the Basque capital during the Spanish Civil War.
In time, Asher will leave for France to work with Kahn, who tells Asher that the young man’s genius is the only justification for all the hurt his paintings will cause. Yet in his exile Asher will not cease to be a keeper of the Commandments (though the commandment to obey one’s parents must be reinterpreted); Potok is saying that the genuine artist must—perhaps inevitably—leave the Orthodox community but not necessarily Orthodoxy.
Asher frequently dreams of his “mythic ancestor” (a Jew who served a nobleman only to have the nobleman visit evil upon the world) and realizes that just as the ancestor might travel the world to redress the wrongs done by the nobleman, so the artist, as he reshapes the images of a world of suffering, himself can impart a kind of balance to that world as a sort of completion.
The Gift of Asher Lev begins many years later; Asher, now in his forties, is married to Devorah and has a daughter, Rocheleh, eleven, and a son, Avrumel, five. The family has returned from France to the home of Asher’s parents for the funeral of Asher’s uncle Yitzchok. The old rebbe convinces Asher to stay past the week of mourning, and soon it becomes clear that the rebbe, who had once put a blessing on Asher’s talent, is now blessing him for another of his gifts: his son.
Asher’s father will become the new rebbe someday soon, but to ensure continuity to the Ladover community, some successor must be guaranteed. Normally that would be Asher’s position; but, as Danny Saunders did in The Chosen, Asher removes himself from consideration. It falls upon Avrumel, the father’s grandson, to be next in the line of succession.
In the end, visited by visions of the dead (Picasso, Jacob Kahn), Asher returns to France alone to paint, promising a return trip to the United States to see his wife and their children. Death enfolds the story, with the funeral of Uncle Yitzchok and the “loss” of Asher’s son to the Ladover community framing the novel.
Asher is convinced that his painting gift is from the Master of the Universe, yet he cannot understand why that same God would exact such a price for that gift. Avrumel will be raised in the Hasidic tradition, but, though not an artist, he will also know art.
Potok seems to suggest that the child may one day bring a new appreciation of creative talents to the Ladover. As Asher lifts Avrumel over his head and hands him to Aryeh Lev, his father, Asher hears the voice of his mythic ancestor shouting something. In some way the artist has atoned for his gift, the gift that brings both blessings and curses upon the earth.
Bibliography
Abramson, Edward A. Chaim Potok. Boston: Twayne, 1986.
Greenstein, Stephen J. “The Chosen”: Notes. Lincoln, Nebr.: Cliff Notes, 1999.
Kauvar, Elaine M. “An Interview with Chaim Potok.” Contemporary Literature 28 (Fall, 1986): 290-317.
Potok, Chaim. “A Reply to a Semi-Sympathetic Critic.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 2 (Spring, 1976): 30-34.
Sternlicht, Sanford V. Chaim Potok: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Studies in American Jewish Literature 4 (1985). Special Potok issue.
Walden, Daniel, ed. Conversations with Chaim Potok. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001.