Portrait of the Artist as a Young Hasid

My Name Is Asher Lev a novel by Chaim Potok.  Anchor Books. 369 pp. $15.95. ****

When I was looking through Goodreads trying to decide if I wanted to read another Chaim Potok novel, I came across a reviewer who said—about this book, I believe—“Chaim Potok refuses to write a page turner.”  I thought that an odd comment at the time.  But having read My Name Is Asher Lev, I know what she means.

This is a novel about the development of an artist, and it begins with a child who is beginning to see the world differently from others and to represent what he sees.  There’s something fascinating about that (though it isn’t page-turner material), and it might be fascinating in any situation, but in this case the child is growing up in a Hasidic family where the only important thing is studying the Talmud.  A child has his nose to the grindstone in his studies or he isn’t living a moral life.  In Potok’s first two novels, both characters were brilliant scholars, in addition to other interests they had.  Asher Lev is an indifferent scholar of the Talmud at best, though he’s otherwise devout.  His obsession is art.

His parents are deeply serious.  His father Aryeh travels for the Rebbe—the leader of their Hasidic community—to bring the Hasidic message to people in Europe and perhaps help them flee the continent and come to this country.  The novel is set in the early 1950’s, when Stalin was persecuting Jews and the trauma of the Holocaust was a recent memory.  Asher’s mother Rivkeh lost a brother who was working for the Rebbe, so she spends Asher’s early life fighting depression and neglecting her son.  The parents are young and somewhat unformed.  They’re shadowy figures even to Asher.

Potok’s work is loaded with intergenerational conflict, father-son disputes, battles with authority figures.  It also deals with a religion that, to an astonishing degree, is dependent on study.  It’s almost as if the smart people go to heaven and the dumb people don’t, though that’s a slight exaggeration.  But these people study scripture as if their lives, and their immortal souls, depend on it.  At least if you’re a boy, you’re a scholar or you’re nothing.

Art doesn’t matter in this situation.  Everyone—his parents, teachers, fellow students—can see that Asher has talent, but for them art is the pastime of a child, something they hope he’ll soon get over.  Rivkeh is more sympathetic than her husband, and tries to understand her son’s world, but has no context for it.  Her husband is actively opposed to everything his brilliantly talented son does.  It’s as if the kid is a delinquent.

The person who finally comes through in this situation, remarkably enough, is the Rebbe.  He understands there are various ways of serving God, you don’t have to be a scholar of the Talmud, and though he understands Aryeh’s anxiety and concern, he doesn’t share it.  He connects Asher with an older artist named Jacob Kahn, who is an admirer of the Rebbe and knows a gallery owner who is scouting for talent.  Once Asher connects with Kahn, this becomes a more conventional novel about an artist’s development under the eyes of a mentor.

One problem with such a book is that it’s difficult to convey talent, or artistic vision.  That’s especially problematic when the protagonist is a writer, because there’s no excuse for not showing us his work.  In the case of Asher Lev all we have to go on is his developing sensibility, including visits to museums and galleries, and the reaction of others to his work.  It soon becomes apparent that this is a portrait not just of an artist, but of a genius.  But that situation brings with it a whole set of problems.

Jewish American literature is loaded with stories of artists—especially writers—who offend their community (see Philip Roth), but nothing like what eventually happens in this novel.  It’s bad enough when Asher paints nudes, which his parents refuse to go to the gallery and see, but as he gets older he has an honest wish to portray his parents’ lives, especially his mother’s anguish as she worried about her absent husband, and he eventually decides that the image of a crucifixion—a common symbol in the world of art—is what he wants to use.  He couldn’t have made a worse choice (though in a way it wasn’t a choice.  The image chose him).  The break with his family that this causes seems final, though I’ve noticed that there is a sequel to this book as well.

I do think Potok writes a page-turner from the time Jacob Kahn steps into the novel, and the suspense at the end, as we wait for his parents to see Asher’s show, in a part of Manhattan they’ve never even seen, they might as well be on Mars, is almost unbearable.  Like The Chosen, this novel was a slow starter but came on with a rush at the end.  It’s also a book of real integrity.  It wouldn’t be a bad introduction to Potok’s work.