★★★★★ What an artist owes...

My Name is Asher Lev

Chaim Potok

** spoiler alert **

...to their art, and to the world.

I read My Name Is Asher Lev as a high school student, perhaps 50 years ago. I still remember it vividly, though. I think it was the third Chaim Potok novel I read, after The Chosen and The Promise, which were so good that I wanted anything by Potok that I could get my hands on. Fortunately, I inherited my admiration of Potok from my mother, so there were several of his books lying around the house.

My Name Is Asher Lev took place in the Brooklyn Hasidic community that was familiar to me from The Chosen and The Promise. Asher's father Aryeh is something like a personal secretary of the leader of that community, the Rebbe. Aryeh has devoted his life to serving the Rebbe. Asher has a gift: he is a gifted artist. But his gift is demanding. He cannot stop himself from painting, and indeed gets caught stealing paints from a local art supplies store. After a great deal of tumult the Rebbe arranges for Asher to be apprenticed to painter Jacob Kahn, a nonobservant Jew.

Asher's interactions with Kahn are my most vivid memories of the book. Kahn is a kind but uncompromising teacher, not just of painting, but of the ethical challenges of being an artist. Kahn exhorts Asher to be an honest artist. But Asher's father wants him to be, above all, a devout Jew. Asher's mother is caught in the middle.

Asher, trying to express his feelings for his mother, creates the Brooklyn Crucifixion, a pair of paintings showing his mother crucified between himself and his father. This, of course, deeply offends both parents.

I was surprised to learn from the Wikipedia page for the novel that Potok is a painter as well as an author, and that he made a painting called "Brooklyn Crucifixion".

We don't really get a resolution to the question of how an artist should deal with the competing demands of art and the world in My Name Is Asher Lev. Well, duh... That's not a problem that's going to go away soon. If it is ever solved, the solution is personal to the artist him/herself. My Name Is Asher Lev is followed by The Gift of Asher Lev. In The Gift we see Asher as a middle-aged man and father, who has mostly conquered or at least exorcised his demons.

Even as a high-school student My Name Is Asher Lev was personal to me. I am not and have never been an artist, but I was becoming a scientist, and the conflict between my truths and the truths of the world in which we live are not all that different from Asher's conflicts.

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