Asher Lev is born into a deeply religious and driven family—his father, Aryeh, travels around Europe helping to reestablish strong Jewish communities; his mother, Rivkeh, eventually assists Aryeh by earning her Ph.D. in Russian studies. While Asher shares his parents’ faith, his own ambition manifests as a passion for art, which places him at odds with his parents’ callings and even undermines their bonds. Although Asher eventually recognizes his similarity to his parents and develops compassion for them, he and his parents are unable to achieve full understanding by the end of the novel. Through the Lev family’s loving but apparently irreparable relationships, Potok argues that, even where genuine love exists, the differences between parents and children are sometimes irreconcilable.
Asher’s calling as an artist creates conflict between himself and his parents, especially his father. The long-simmering tension between Asher and Aryeh comes to a head when Aryeh returns from six months in Europe, teaching Torah and establishing schools. After discovering that Asher has spent this time neglecting his own Torah studies and creating “pagan” art instead, “He was in an uncontrollable rage. […] Whose son was I? […] Did I want him to regret all the work he had done in Europe? Did I want to destroy the task he had chosen for himself? Did I want to shame him?” Aryeh sees Asher’s art as a direct affront to his own life’s work, even casting doubt on the reality of their father-son bond.
When Asher reaches the age of religious maturity and is about to celebrate his bar mitzvah, the community’s Rebbe intervenes in the family conflict and provides an artistic outlet for Asher by asking the famous sculptor Jacob Kahn to mentor him. This further grieves Aryeh: “My father’s right to shape my life had been taken from him by the same being who gave his own life meaning— the Rebbe […] In some incomprehensible manner, a cosmic error had been made. The line of inheritance had been perverted.” Because of Asher’s failure to follow in his father’s footsteps, or even to follow a path that’s comprehensible to Aryeh, Aryeh feels that the family line has been disrupted in some inexplicable way. Thus what should be an occasion for paternal pride is a source of deeper estrangement.
Ironically, Asher and his father actually have an insatiable creative drive in common. When Asher, fearful of losing his artistic gift, refuses to move to Europe with his parents, his father takes this as an affront to his own dreams: “[Aryeh] carried, too […] the burden of the years it would take him to realize his dream [of reviving Ladover communities in Europe]. He had his own dream. He needed all his strength for that dream. Interference drained his strength […] It was clear enough that he now regarded me as a serious interference.” Much as Asher’s art demands all his strength, Aryeh’s work demands all of his; father’s and son’s shared drive nevertheless creates a stalemate between them, as each becomes an obstacle to the other’s irrepressible dreams. When Asher later travels in Europe on his own, he finally sees some of the Ladover schools that his father built from the ground up over decades of toil—“it was creation out of nothing,” a Ladover Jew in Rome tells him—and recognizes firsthand Aryeh’s own passion to create. Asher seems to have inherited this single-minded drive from his father, and it could therefore create an opening for common ground between the two of them.
However, despite their similar drive, and despite efforts to find common ground, Asher and his parents are ultimately unable to reconcile with one another. As a young man, Asher painstakingly tries to explain his art to his father, but finds that “there was nothing in [my father’s] intellectual or emotional equipment to which he could connect my words […] My world of aesthetics was as bewildering to him as his insatiable need for travel was to me.” While this is a genuine attempt to find common ground, Asher and Aryeh ultimately fail to speak the same language. This is portrayed as not really being the fault of either man; their natural frameworks are simply foreign to one another. When Asher travels to Europe and gets some distance from his parents, he’s able to gain a clearer perspective on the pain they’ve put each other through, especially when he considers Rivkeh’s mediating position between himself and Aryeh. “Standing between two different ways of giving meaning to the world […] she had moved now toward me, now toward my father, keeping both worlds of meaning alive […] I could only dimly perceive such an awesome act of will.” Asher is now able to appreciate both his and his father’s work as “different,” albeit equally legitimate “ways of giving meaning to the world,” and the toll both of these pursuits took on Asher’s strong, loving mother.
Yet the only way Asher, within his artistic framework, can express his feelings about his family’s shared torment is to paint the “crucified” figure of his mother at their apartment’s front window, tormented between the figures of himself and Aryeh: a picture of “the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other’s throats.” Naturally, this painting causes anguish to his deeply religious parents, forcing them further apart even as Asher attempts to express his hard-won empathy and gratitude. At the end of the novel, Asher bids his tearful parents goodbye before moving back to Paris: “I turned in the [cab] and looked out the rear window. My parents were still watching me through our living-room window.” Though the family members still look toward one another in love, Asher’s parents remain framed in the window he’d portrayed in his “Crucifixion” paintings—suggesting that, even if there’s some hope for ongoing relationship, the agony caused by their divergent callings will continue.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family Conflict ThemeTracker
Family Conflict 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.
“Is Siberia really very cold?”
He looked at me closely, his eyes clouding. “Siberia is the home of the Angel of Death. It is the place where the Angel of Death feeds and grows fat. No one should know of it, Asher. No one. Not even my worst enemies, all of whom, thank God, I left behind in Russia. Only Stalin should know of it. But even he should know of it only for a little while. I have a Jewish heart even where Stalin, may his name and memory be erased, is concerned. Now, what else do you need? Paper, pens, erasers? It is a big store and we have, thank God, everything.”
I did not need anything else. I thanked him and hurried home in the dark.
“Asher, you have a gift. I do not know if it is a gift from the Ribbono Shel Olom or from the Other Side. If it is from the Other Side, then it is foolishness, dangerous foolishness, for it will take you away from Torah and from your people and lead you to think only of yourself. I want to tell you something. Listen to me, my Asher. About twenty-five years ago, all the yeshivos in Russia were closed by the Communists, and the students were scattered in different places in small groups. The only groups who continued to fight against this destruction of Torah by the enemies of Torah were the Ladover and Breslover Hasidim […] Asher, we have to make passageways to our people in Russia. We have a responsibility to them. […] They cannot make the opening on their side, so we must make it on our side. Do you understand me, Asher?”
I saw my mythic ancestor again that night, moving in huge strides across the face of the earth, stepping over snow-filled mountains, spanning wide and fertile valleys, journeying, journeying, endlessly journeying. I saw him traverse warm villages and regions of ice and snow. I saw him peer into the windows of secret yeshivos and into the barracks of Siberian camps. […] “And what are you doing with your time, my Asher Lev?” I thought I heard him say […] If You don’t want me to use the gift, why did You give it to me? Or did it come to me from the Other Side? It was horrifying to think my gift may have been given to me by the source of evil and ugliness. How can evil and ugliness make a gift of beauty?
I looked into my Chumash. I stared at the face staring back out at me from the page. I had slanted the eyes somewhat and given the lips beneath the beard a sardonic turn. The Rebbe looked evil; the Rebbe looked threatening; the Rebbe looking out at me from the Chumash seemed about to hurt me. That was the expression he would wear when he decided to hurt me. That was the expression he had worn when he had told my father to go to Vienna. I looked at the framed photograph of the Rebbe on the front wall near the blackboard. The eyes were gray and clear; the face was kind. Only the ordinary dark hat was the same in both pictures. I was frightened at the picture I had drawn. I was especially frightened that I could not remember having drawn it.
“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.”
“Listen to me,” my father said. He was speaking suddenly in Yiddish. “I am killing myself for the Ribbono Shel Olom. I have broken up my family for the Ribbono Shel Olom. I do not see my wife for months because of my work for the Ribbono Shel Olom. I came home for Pesach to be with my family, to be with the Rebbe, to rest. And what do I find? You know what I find. And what do I hear? I hear my son telling me he cannot stop drawing pictures of naked women and that man. Listen to me, Asher. This will stop. You will fight it. Or I will force you to return to Vienna with me after the summer. Better you should stay in Vienna and be a little crazy than you should stay in New York and become a goy.”
“Ribbono Shel Olom,” my mother breathed. “Aryeh, please.”
“We must fight against the Other Side, Rivkeh,” my father shouted in Yiddish. “We must fight against it! Otherwise it will destroy the world.”
“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.”
My father carried his burden of pain all through the celebration of my bar mitzvah. People knew of the Rebbe’s decision. No one dared question it. For the Rebbe was the tzaddik and spoke as representative of the Master of the Universe. His seeing was not as the seeing of others; his acts were not as the acts of others. My father’s right to shape my life had been taken from him by the same being who gave his own life meaning—the Rebbe. At the same time, no one knew how to react to the decision, for they could see my father’s pain. I had become alien to him. In some incomprehensible manner, a cosmic error had been made. The line of inheritance had been perverted. A demonic force had thrust itself into centuries of transmitted responsibility. He could not bear its presence. And he no longer knew how to engage it in battle. So he walked in pain and shame all through the Shabbos of my bar mitzvah and all through the following day when relatives and friends sang and danced their joy.
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.
“I understand,” he kept saying. “Jacob Kahn once explained it to me in connection with sculpture. I understand.” Then he said, “I do not hold with those who believe that all painting and sculpture is from the sitra achra. I believe such gifts are from the Master of the Universe. But they have to be used wisely, Asher. What you have done has caused harm. People are angry. They ask questions, and I have no answer to give them that they will understand. Your naked women were a great difficulty for me, Asher. But this is an impossibility.” He was silent for a long moment. I could see his dark eyes in the shadow cast by the brim of his hat. Then he said, “I will ask you not to continue living here, Asher Lev. I will ask you to go away.”
