This research examines the philosophy of life held by the Chaim Potok character Asher Lev in the two novels that bear that character's name, My Name is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev. The research will set forth the evocation of the character's intellectual discipline, religious awareness and commitment, and the scope of his commitment to social justice, with a view toward identifying the nature of the tension between art and ethno-religious heritage that drives the action of the novels.
The Asher Lev novels form a portrait of the emergence and maturing oeuvre of an artist as a young and middle-aged man. Abramson notes the critical view that My Name Is Asher Lev owes a great deal indeed to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The fact that the young man is also an Orthodox Jew is a built-in conflict for the artist, for the cultural custom of learned Orthodox Judaism is to focus on intellectual and religious pursuits. But in fact, Lev's Jewish background very much shapes the rigor and dedication with which he pursues his calling as an artist. My Name Is Asher Lev refers to the family "triangle seminal with Jewish potentiality and freighted with Jewish responsibility. But [Asher] was also born with a gift" (MN 5). There is a seriousness of purpose in the entire Lev family that has its source in the scholarly lineage and pursuits of Asher's mother Rivkeh and the political activism of his father Aryeh. Over the course of My Name Is Asher Lev, Rivkeh obtains a Ph.D. and takes on a professorial career, while Aryeh continually travels, sometimes for long periods, as a leading advocate of the Ladover movement, a strict strand of Orthodox Jewish thought and evangelicalism.
The seriousness of Asher's parents' pursuits seems partly responsible for the seriousness of purpose he forms as an artist; however, their pursuits do not conflict with Jewish piety. His artistic gift, or more exactly the way he uses that gift as a consci...