My Name is Asher Lev Study Guide

Chaim Potok was the eldest of four children born to Jewish immigrants from Poland. The family were observant Orthodox Jews, and each of the children either became a rabbi or married one. Although his parents discouraged secular literature, Potok read Brideshead Revisited as a teenager, which inspired him to become a writer himself.  He began publishing his work while studying at Yeshiva University, from which he graduated in 1950. He then studied at Jewish Theological Seminary and was ordained as a Conservative rabbi. After earning a master’s degree in English literature, he served as a U.S. Army chaplain in South Korea, which he described as a transformative experience. While working as the director of a Jewish summer camp, he met Adena Sara Mosevitzky. They were married in 1958 and had three children. Potok later earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and worked for the magazine Conservative Judaism and the Jewish Publication Society. Over the years, the Potok family lived in Brooklyn, Israel, and Philadelphia. Of nine published novels, Potok’s most famous is National Book Award nominee The Chosen, which he published in 1967. His novels helped bring questions of Jewish identity and culture before a wider, non-Jewish audience. He also left a legacy of highly-regarded Torah commentary.

In My Name Is Asher Lev, Asher’s father, Aryeh, is involved in secretive missions to the Soviet Union to help Jewish people who are being persecuted under Stalin; most members of the family’s Hasidic synagogue are described as having suffered under communism in some way. Judaism was, in fact, harshly suppressed under Stalin, though antisemitism was often expressed, in euphemistic terms, as opposition to “rootless cosmopolitans” or “bourgeois nationalism.” Measures included Siberian exile, removal of Jewish people from leadership positions, and attempts to liquidate Jewish cultural institutions. Two specific events alluded to in Asher Lev include the Night of the Murdered Poets (August 12, 1952), when 13 Soviet Jews, many of them writers, were executed for alleged treason and espionage; and the so-called Doctors’ Plot, when a group of mostly Jewish doctors were arrested and tortured on suspicion of trying to assassinate Soviet leaders. Also in the novel, Asher’s family belongs to the Ladover movement, which is a thinly-veiled reference to the Chabad, or Lubavitch, movement. Chabad emerged in Eastern Europe in the late-18th century, emphasizing both a mystical and intellectual approach to the Torah and other sacred writings. After World War II broke out, Chabad headquarters moved to Brooklyn, New York. The most recent Rebbe (leading rabbi), Menachem Mendel Schneerson, placed great emphasis on global outreach, especially to secular or unaffiliated Jews—the kind of work in which Aryeh and Rivkeh Lev are involved. The Rebbe in the novel is likely based on Schneerson.

Potok described Brideshead Revisited as one of his biggest literary influences, later striving to create a Hasidic “world out of words” much as Evelyn Waugh did with the aristocratic English Catholics in his novel. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen Dedalus leaves behind his Irish Catholic upbringing in order to pursue his calling as a writer, was another inspiration for Potok. Elie Wiesel, Potok’s contemporary and an admirer of his, also came from an Orthodox Jewish background and described his personal experiences of suffering in a Nazi death camp in Night, perhaps the most famous Holocaust memoir. Finally, Potok saw My Name Is Asher Lev as a continuation of his earlier novel, The Chosen, in the sense that Asher Lev deals with the clash between different aesthetic worlds, whereas The Chosen deals with an intellectual clash.