Two Novels by Chaim Potok

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

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m Asher calls aesthetically blind, from constant worry about Asher's moral blindness (MN 304-5). Under Kahn's tutelage-by-example, meanwhile, Asher takes on the persona and develops the talent of an artist. He paints stripped to the waist in Kahn's studio, and it is there that he first draws nudes from life. On the other hand, he majors in sociology in college. This is partly to avoid overt confrontation with his parents, but it is also partly because he perceives sociology as a nondemanding major that will not interfere with his real passion: painting. The tension between highly traditional Jewish piety and art that Asher comes to embody is articulated by Asher's mentors, who are symbols of the opposite worlds. As his parents leave the country for Vienna and he prepares for a life increasingly devoted to art, the Rebbe counsels him: "I pray to the Master of the Universe that the world will one day also hear of you as a Jew. . . . Jacob Kahn will make of you an artist. Bu only you will make of yourself a Jew" (MN 243). Elsewhere, Kahn challenges Asher from (so to speak) the other side: "As an artist you are responsible to Jews? . . . As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the truth a
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Approximate Word count = 1959
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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