Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Name is Asher Lev, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Divine vs. the Demonic
Art and Religious Faith
Creativity, Self-Expression, and Truth
Family Conflict
Summary
Analysis
That summer, Asher goes with Jacob Kahn and his wife, Tanya, to Provincetown, Massachusetts. In the mornings, he stands on the beach and prays. He prepares his own kosher food in his room. In the mornings, he and Kahn set up easels at the edge of the sand dunes and paint.
Asher begins to understand Kahn’s approach to painting. Kahn believes that trying to convert three-dimensional objects onto a two-dimensional canvas results in a falsehood. Therefore, it’s necessary to either represent objects two-dimensionally or else paint using only color, texture, and form. Asher cannot yet paint this way himself. Kahn tells Asher that he is “too religious to be an Abstract Expressionist.” Asher is too much a mix of the emotional, sensual, and rational—the latter coming from his Ladover background. Kahn tells Asher that a person doesn’t need to give up his background in order to become a great painter, and that in fact, painting should reflect or comment upon a painter’s background in some way.
Kahn teaches Asher that he’s not trying to make Asher a clone of his own style or methods; art must be based on a person’s background in order to be authentic, and it might be that Asher’s devoutly religious identity doesn’t lend itself to Kahn’s abstract approach. In no way should he muffle his religious identity in order to suit his art; if he did that, he couldn’t produce real art.
Themes
Jacob Kahn also teaches Asher how to swim in the ocean. It reminds Asher painfully of his summers in the Berkshires with his mother. In the afternoons, they paint. In the evenings, they often walk through the art galleries in town. One evening, an artist introduces himself and rambles about the art world’s impending shift to Tokyo. After the man leaves, Jacob tells Asher, “Every trade has them […] they are called whores.”
Jacob Kahn continues to occupy a parental role in Asher’s life, teaching him life skills like swimming. He also teaches Asher how to navigate his new world—for example, whom to emulate and whom to avoid.
Themes
As they stand on the beach later that night, Jacob tells Asher that he must not become a “whore.” He says that Asher is already on the way to becoming one—he observes that Asher has started tucking his earlocks behind his ears. He tells Asher that Asher did this out of shame, because earlocks didn’t fit his idea of an artist. He tells Asher that an artist is an individual before anything else. He is glad to have spoken bluntly and upset Asher in a matter as important as this.
Jacob explains to Asher that becoming a “whore” means aspiring to a certain image of an “artist” that isn’t a truthful reflection of one’s individuality. By hiding obvious signs of his Hasidic piety, Asher risks become such a pretender, in Jacob’s view. Although Jacob isn’t a religious Jew, himself, he clearly cares about authenticity and staying true to one’s identity, echoing Asher’s own desire to capture truth in his art.
Themes
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Asher feels ashamed. After this, he wears his earlocks loose once again. He also remains Sabbath-observant, refraining from painting and spending his time reading the Torah and Hasidic works. He fasts on Tisha b’Av. That day, Jacob invites him on a walk. He tells Asher that he has never understood fasting, despite many discussions with the Rebbe about it. He says it is good that Asher has not abandoned the things that are meaningful to him. Jacob himself has little that is meaningful to him besides his art. He sculpts his self-portrait in the sand and remarks that he hopes to live past 80. He tells Asher that sometimes Asher reminds him upsettingly of his own past.
Asher remains conscientious about his religious observance, showing that this remains central to his identity, not something that can be sidelined or muffled for the sake of his art. Jacob admires this about Asher. Asher’s fasting on Tisha b’Av (a day commemorating major calamities in Jewish history such as the Holocaust) seems to spark painful memories for Jacob; though he is not an observant Jew, Asher’s piety leaves Jacob wistful and conflicted.
Themes
The next day, Jacob doesn’t get out of bed. Tanya calmly says that her husband is “in a mood,” and she won’t let Asher see him. She tells Asher that the Nazis melted down a decade’s worth of Jacob’s sculptures. The next day, several local artists come to see Jacob. Even Anna Shaeffer comes. She assures Asher that although Jacob’s spells are unpleasant, he always comes out of them within a few days. Tanya adds that one must “[learn] to live with [the] fear” that he will not. That evening, Jacob emerges from his room and begins painting again. He and Asher don’t discuss his mood. He tells Asher that he will make it past 80, if only he can stop thinking about the past.
Jacob’s pensive mood spirals into a depression. Much as Rivkeh has learned to cope with Aryeh’s absences, Tanya Kahn has learned to live with the fear that such an episode will prove to be Jacob’s undoing. This suggests that, no matter one’s particular background, reckoning with one’s past is often a lifelong, painful process.
Themes
One day as Jacob and Asher visit a Cubist exhibit in Boston, Jacob shares some memories of Picasso. He says that Picasso was “frightening” in his genius, able to “use up a lifetime of ideas of an ordinary good painter in a few weeks.” People would hide their work so that Picasso wouldn’t see their ideas. Jacob says that “there is something demonic about such a gift […] or divine.”
Jacob observes that one’s artistic gift might have elements of both the demonic and divine in it. This conflicts with Aryeh’s notion that Asher’s art is from the “Other Side,” and is an idea that Asher will come back to later in the process of understanding himself as an artist.
Themes
A few days later, Jacob drops off Asher at the Provincetown docks for a day of sketching. Later Asher sketches sharks in the town aquarium. People gather and gawk. Asher signs one of his drawings and gives it to a little boy. He walks through town and sketches old women and wrinkled fishermen “with whom [he] felt a strange kinship.” He gives away some of his sketches. When he rejoins Jacob later that day, he tells Jacob, “I am going to be a great artist.” “You have been an artist for a long time, Asher Lev,” Jacob replies. Not long after, the summer comes to an end.
Asher’s day of sketching shows his growth as an artist in that he’s no longer constrained to his own familiar environment; he’s able to improvise and create sought-after pieces, even in a place very different from what he’s used to. After this summer of mentoring and growing independence, Asher is comfortable claiming himself as an artist in the making—something he didn’t do while living with his parents.
Themes
