My Name Is Asher Lev
Chaim Potok
Language: English
Pages: 369
ISBN: 1400031044
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels even when it leads him to blasphemy.In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination.
Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time his gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant, a modern classic.
of weight. He looked weary and gaunt. He did not greet me. He ordered me to sit down. My mother looked small and pale. He knew about the oil-color set. He knew about the visits to the museum. He had seen the sketchbook filled with drawings of Jesus and nudes. He had spent half a year of his life creating yeshivos and teaching Torah and Hasidus all over Europe. Then he had returned to America and had discovered that his own home was now inhabited by pagans. He was in an uncontrollable rage. I had
waterfront, sketching the boats and the gulls and the boys diving and swimming. I watched them diving and swimming and I sketched their young bodies in the sunlight. Then I stopped sketching for a while and stood at the end of a long wooden pier and watched them in the water, swimming smoothly with the liquid ease of fish. I envied them their freedom. I went from the pier and walked slowly along the streets of the town, narrow crowded streets filled with cafés and restaurants and souvenir shops.
collected in puddles on the wooden floor. I saw Yudel Krinsky. What was Yudel Krinsky doing in Vienna? Hello, Reb Yudel Krinsky. Vienna is a city of waltzes and cafés, Yudel Krinsky whispered. Vienna is a city that hates Jews. It rained on the river and the gabled houses. I saw sand and a vast ocean in the rain. I saw dunes and white sunlight on shingled houses. Someone had me by the arm. I heard my mother and father. There was a quarrel. It swirled poisonously around me. I felt its rage and
written about you. Are those art magazines important?” “If you’re an artist, they’re important.” “What does the expression ‘Picassoid forms’ mean?” “The shapes that Picasso creates in his art.” “I didn’t like what that man wrote.” “I didn’t either, Papa.” “It was strange to see your name attacked with such cruelty. Were you upset?” “Yes.” “He was very cruel.” “We have different views about art.” “Goyim take art very seriously, Asher.” “So do many Jews.” We regarded each other for a
important to me as an artist.” “I understand why others paint nudes. But I don’t understand why you must paint nudes and exhibit the paintings.” “I paint and exhibit them for the same reason others paint and exhibit them.” “You’ll hurt your father, Asher. He won’t come.” I was quiet. “I wish you wouldn’t do it, Asher.” “I may have to, Mama.” “Why will you have to?” “I’m an artist, Mama.” “I don’t understand,” she said. “I only understand that you’ll hurt your father.” Jacob Kahn and