From the time he is a small child, Asher Lev obsessively draws pictures of the world around him. As he grows older, however, various influences exert a strong pull on his art—especially the expectations of his family and community, to whom Asher feels responsible, yet whose perspectives he doesn’t always accept. As Asher grows up, his self-identity as an artist and his approaches to his art mature in tandem, especially as he questions the relationship between beauty, as understood by his community, and truth, as he sees it himself. By tracing Asher’s maturation as an artist, Potok argues that art must be primarily concerned with the truth, and that truth emerges from honesty about oneself and one’s view of the world.
When Asher is a child, he has a fairly simplistic view of art, but quickly learns that art isn’t reducible to “beauty.” When Asher’s mother, Rivkeh, is grief-stricken following the sudden death of her beloved brother, she asks Asher to draw her pretty things: “You should make the world pretty, Asher.” However, Asher notices that simply drawing cheerful birds and flowers doesn’t actually make his mother well; moreover, it doesn’t reflect the truth of the world around him, which is not “pretty.” Even as a little boy, Asher senses that it’s not his job as an artist to pretend that the world is other than it is. Later, Asher draws a picture of his father, Aryeh, speaking angrily on the telephone when Aryeh hears of the mistreatment of Jews in communist Russia. Asher tells his mother it was not a pretty drawing, “but it was a good drawing […] I don’t want to make pretty drawings, Mama.” Early on, Asher begins to recognize a distinction between “good” and beautiful. A good drawing, in other words, can express something true, even if it isn’t “pretty.” In art, the truth is paramount, even if the truth is not beautiful.
As a teenager, Asher studies with famous artist Jacob Kahn, and his understanding of art as an expression of truth becomes more complex. In fact, his understanding of art develops as his identity matures, and he comes to better understand the relationship between his creativity and his self-concept. When Asher haltingly tells Jacob that he feels responsible to his Jewish community, Jacob replies, “Listen to me, Asher Lev. As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the truth as you see it […] Anything else is propaganda.” If the artist’s role is to express truth, in other words, Asher can’t simply be a representative for his religious community; sooner or later, his art will be compromised by the expectations of his community.
While Asher can’t reduce himself to a representative of his community, he also can’t expunge his identity from his art. This is apparent when Jacob scolds Asher for concealing his earlocks (recognizable markers of a pious Hasidic Jew) in public: “Asher Lev, an artist who deceives himself is a fraud and a whore. You did that because you were ashamed. You did that because wearing payos did not fit your idea of an artist. Asher Lev, an artist is a person first […] If there is no person, there is no artist.” Jacob Kahn doesn’t care about Asher’s religious self-expression one way or the other—his point is about the relationship between art and truth. He thinks that Asher is aspiring to a certain image of what an “artist” is, rather than allowing his art to grow organically out of the truth of who he is. The former, he wants Asher to understand, is a betrayal of art.
Jacob Kahn also encourages Asher to move away from a representational, storytelling form of art to a more abstract form that better expresses his reactions to the world around him: “I see the world as hard-edged, filled with lines and angles. And I see it as wild and raging and hideous, and only occasionally beautiful. The world fills me with disgust more often than it fills me with joy […] The world is a terrible place […] I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this world truly is.” In keeping with Asher’s childhood instinct that “pretty” drawings don’t reflect the truth about the world, Jacob Kahn argues that abstract art allows a greater emotional range for telling the truth about the way the world really is. Art, then, is not primarily about beauty, but about expressing one’s feelings about the world and telling the truth in doing so. The truth about the world can only be expressed when the artist is secure in his or her stance toward the world—in Asher’s case, when he is neither embarrassed by his religious identity nor excessively beholden to the communal expression of that identity.
Early in his working relationship with Asher, Jacob Kahn says, “Art is whether or not there is a scream in [you] wanting to get out in a special way.” In other words, art is not a matter of mere technical mastery; it’s a question of whether Asher has something he must express, in a way that he alone can express it. This also suggests that art is an inherently individualistic and rather lonely quest to express the truth as one sees it, which seems to be borne out in Asher’s struggles to explain his art to his family and community, and his eventual estrangement from them.
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Creativity, Self-Expression, and Truth Quotes in My Name is Asher Lev
I am an observant Jew. Yes, of course, observant Jews do not paint crucifixions. As a matter of fact, observant Jews do not paint at all—in the way that I am painting. So strong words are being written and spoken about me, myths are being generated: I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years.
Well, I am none of those things. And yet, in all honesty, I confess that my accusers are not altogether wrong: I am indeed, in some way, all of those things.
“Asher, are you drawing pretty things? Are you drawing sweet, pretty things?”
I was not drawing pretty things. I was drawing twisted shapes, swirling forms, in blacks and reds and grays. I did not respond.
“Asher, are you drawing birds and flowers and pretty things?”
“I can draw you birds and flowers, Mama.”
“You should draw pretty things, Asher.”
“Shall I draw you a bird, Mama?”
“You should make the world pretty, Asher. Make it sweet and pretty. It’s nice to live in a pretty world.”
“What do they all want from me?” I said to my mother.
“They want you to study Torah. A boy your age should be studying Torah.”
I went into my room and stood by the window, staring out at the melting snow. I did not hate studying. I had no strength for it. My drawing needed all my strength. Couldn’t they see that? What did they all want from me?
I came into Yudel Krinsky’s store one day in February.
“You are a scandal,” he said to me in his hoarse voice. “The world knows you are not studying Torah.” He fixed his bulging eyes on me. “Your father journeys through Europe bringing Jews back to Torah, and here his own son refuses to study Torah. Asher, you are a scandal.”
I heard her sigh. “I wish I knew what to do,” she said. “I hope the Ribbono Shel Olom will help me not to hurt your father. Look where it’s taken us, Asher. Your painting. It’s taken us to Jesus. And to the way they paint women. Painting is for goyim, Asher. Jews don’t draw and paint.”
“Chagall is a Jew.”
“Religious Jews, Asher. Torah Jews. Such Jews don’t draw and paint. What would the Rebbe say if he knew we were in the museum? God forbid the Rebbe should find out.”
I didn’t know what the Rebbe would say. It frightened me to think that the Rebbe might be angry.
“I wish I knew what to do,” my mother murmured. “I wish your father was home.”
“Now, between today and the middle of March is a long time. You will do something for me in that time. You will take a journey to the Museum of Modern Art, you will go up to the second floor, and you will look at a painting called Guernica, by Picasso. You will study this painting. You will memorize this painting. You will do whatever you feel you have to do in order to master this painting. Then you will call me in March, and we will meet, and talk, and work. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“It is in my nature to be blunt and honest. I shall ask you a question. You are entering the world of the goyim, Asher Lev. Do you know that? […] It is not only goyim. It is Christian goyim.”
“Yes.”
“You should better become a wagon driver,” he said, using the Yiddish term. “You should better become a water carrier.”
“You are entering a religion called painting. It has its fanatics and its rebels. And I will force you to master it. Do you hear me? No one will listen to what you have to say unless they are convinced you have mastered it. Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or to rebel against it […] it is a tradition of goyim and pagans. Its values are goyisch and pagan. Its concepts are goyisch and pagan. Its way of life is goyisch and pagan. In the entire history of European art, there has not been a single religious Jew who was a great painter. Think carefully of what you are doing before you make your decision. I say this not only for the Rebbe but for myself as well. I do not want to spend time with you, Asher Lev, and then have you tell me you made a mistake.
I did not understand what had happened to bring on the idea […] I drew with a pen, working slowly, calmly, and with ease, the segment from Michelangelo’s Last Judgment of the boat beached on the Styx and Charon striking at his doomed passengers with an oar, forcing them onto the shores of torment and hell. I drew much of it from memory, but I wanted to be as accurate as I could, so I checked it repeatedly against a reproduction in a book I had purchased on Michelangelo. I drew the writhing twisting tormented bodies spilling from the boat. I drew the terror on the faces of the dead and the damned. I made all the faces his face, pimply, scrawny—eyes bulging, mouths open, shrieking in horror. I exaggerated the talons and painted ears of Charon; I darkened his face, bringing out the whites of his raging eyes. I folded the drawing and went to bed. […] He said nothing to me about the drawings. But he began to avoid me. His thin face would fill with dread whenever he caught me looking at him. I had the feeling he regarded me now as evil and malevolent, as a demonic and contaminating spawn of the Other Side.
Often in the early mornings, I came out of the house and walked across the dunes to the beach. The dunes were cool then from the night. I wore sandals and shorts and a shirt and had on my tefillin. Those mornings, the beach was my synagogue and the waves and gulls were audience to my prayers. I stood on the beach and felt wind-blown sprays of ocean on my face, and I prayed. And sometimes the words seemed more appropriate to this beach than to the synagogue on my street.
“Asher Lev, an artist who deceives himself is a fraud and a whore. You did that because you were ashamed. You did that because wearing payos did not fit your idea of an artist. Asher Lev, an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist. It is of no importance to me whether you wear your payos behind your ears or whether you cut off your hair entirely and go around bald. I am not a defender of payos. Great artists will not give a damn about your payos; they will only give a damn about your art. The artists who will care about your payos are not worth caring about. You want to cut off your payos, go ahead. But do not do it because you think it will make you more acceptable as an artist. Good night, Asher Lev.”
The nobleman was a despotic goy, a degenerate whose debaucheries grew wilder as he grew wealthier. The Jew, my mythic ancestor, made him wealthier. Serfs were on occasion slain by that nobleman during his long hours of drunken insanity, and once houses were set on fire by a wildly thrown torch and a village was burned. You see how a goy behaves, went the whispered word to the child. A Jew does not behave this way. But the Jew had made him wealthy, wondered the child. Is not the Jew also somehow to blame? The child had never given voice to that question. Now the man who had once been the child asked it again and wondered if the giving and the goodness and the journeys of that mythic ancestor might have been acts born in the memories of screams and burning flesh. A balance had to be given the world; the demonic had to be reshaped into meaning. Had a dream-haunted Jew spent the rest of his life sculpting form out of the horror of his private night?
Trapped between two realms of meaning, she had straddled both realms, quietly feeding and nourishing them both, and herself as well. I could only dimly perceive such an awesome act of will. But I could begin to feel her torment now as she waited by our living-room window for both her husband and her son. What did she think of as she stood by the window? Of the phone call that had informed my father of her brother’s death? Would she wait now in dread all the rest of her life, now for me, now for my father, now for us both—as she had once waited for me to return from a museum, as she had once waited for my father to return in a snowstorm? And I could understand her torment now; I could see her waiting endlessly with the fear that someone she loved would be brought to her dead. I could feel her anguish.
Asher Lev, Hasid. Asher Lev, painter. I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. […] The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. Art was demonic and divine. […] I was demonic and divine. Asher Lev, son of Aryeh and Rivkeh Lev, was the child of the Master of the Universe and the Other Side. Asher Lev paints good pictures and hurts people he loves. Then be a great painter, Asher Lev; that will be the only justification for all the pain you will cause. But as a great painter I will cause pain again if I must. Then become a greater painter.
