The Work
My Name Is Asher Lev was first published in 1972 by Alfred A. Knopf (New York). It is Potok's most personally charged novel - drawing on his own experience of pursuing secular artistic and intellectual interests within an Orthodox Jewish community - and is widely considered his masterpiece. The novel is approximately 370 pages, narrated in first person by Asher Lev, a Ladover Hasidic Jew from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, who is born with an extraordinary gift for visual art in a community that regards the visual arts with deep suspicion as both a bittul Torah (waste of time from Torah study) and a potential avenue of assimilation into Gentile culture.
The novel traces Asher's development as an artist from childhood through his late twenties, culminating in his first major exhibition, which includes two paintings of a 'Brooklyn Crucifixion' - his mother seen through the crossed bars of a window, hung in the posture of crucifixion. The paintings cause a rupture with his community and his father from which Asher never fully recovers. A sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev (1990), follows the story twenty years later.
Biblical Engagement
Matthew 27:46 ('And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?') is the theological center of the novel's central paradox. Asher Lev, a Hasidic Jewish artist, finds that no image in his own tradition is adequate to express the suffering he has witnessed in his mother's face - the suffering caused by her divided loyalty between her husband's mission and her son's artistic calling - and borrows the cross, the central image of Christian art and the symbol of Christian persecution of Jews, to give it form.
The theological weight of this choice is enormous, and Potok is fully aware of it. The crucifixion is the image of abandoned, forsakenness - 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' - and it is this quality of abandoned anguish that Asher needs. There is no equivalent image in the Jewish artistic tradition: the Binding of Isaac (Akedah) comes closest, but the Akedah ends with the angel's intervention and the ram in the thicket, while the crucifixion ends in death that is not immediately reversed. For representing suffering without consolation, the cross is the more powerful image, and Asher knows it.
Isaiah 53:3 ('He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not') provides the Suffering Servant background against which both Jesus's crucifixion and Asher Lev's own position must be read. Asher is, in his community's eyes, a kind of defiling presence - a man of sorrows, despised for his use of the most hated image in Jewish experience. He is the artist-as-pariah, the creative gift as curse, the person whose calling isolates him from the community that formed him.
Galatians 6:14 ('But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world') is inverted by Potok's use of the crucifixion: what Paul presents as the highest possible glory is, for Asher's Hasidic community, the deepest possible shame. The cross is the symbol of everything that has persecuted the Jewish people - the Crusades, the pogroms, the forced conversions - and to place it at the center of a Jewish artwork is experienced as an act of betrayal.
Psalm 22:1 (also the source of Jesus's cry of dereliction) connects the crucifixion paintings back to the Hebrew tradition from which Asher cannot escape. The cry of forsakenness is a Hebrew cry, drawn from the Hebrew Psalter, and Asher's painting is in some sense a recovery of this Jewish image of abandoned suffering that the Christian tradition has appropriated and made its own. There is a deep irony in a Jewish artist 'borrowing back' from Christianity an image that Christianity itself borrowed from the Psalms.
The novel also engages extensively with the biblical prohibitions on graven images (Exodus 20:4, Deuteronomy 5:8) and with the Jewish tradition's complex relationship to visual representation. The Ladover community's distrust of visual art is grounded in the halakhic tradition's interpretation of the Second Commandment, and Asher's artistic vocation is experienced by himself and his community as a direct confrontation with the divine law. His artistic mentor, Jacob Kahn (a secular Jewish modernist loosely modeled on Picasso and Matisse), functions as the voice of the secular tradition that affirms the absolute value of artistic expression against all religious constraints.
Author & Context
Chaim Potok (1929-2002) conceived My Name Is Asher Lev as his most autobiographically transparent novel. Like Asher, he grew up in a Hasidic-inflected Orthodox community in New York; like Asher, he felt the pull of artistic and intellectual gifts that his community regarded with suspicion; like Asher, he pursued those gifts at the cost of communal tension and his parents' grief. Unlike Asher, Potok's gifts were literary rather than visual, and his 'borrowing' from the tradition he was partly leaving was less dramatic than Asher's crucifixions.
The novel was written in the context of the emerging dialogue between Jewish thought and Christian theology in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate (1965) had formally repudiated the charge of collective Jewish guilt for the crucifixion, and a new era of Jewish-Christian dialogue was beginning. Potok's novel intervened in this dialogue from an unexpected angle: not by minimizing the historical horror of Christian antisemitism but by exploring the question of what it would mean for a Jewish artist to appropriate the Christian image of suffering.
The novel also reflects the broader cultural debate in the 1960s-1970s about the relationship between art and religion, between individual artistic vision and communal moral constraint. The emerging idea of the artist as autonomous creator - responsible only to the demands of aesthetic truth - was in direct conflict with the traditional religious understanding of the artist as a servant of communal values. Potok dramatizes this conflict with full awareness of both sides.
Structure and Argument
The novel is organized as a retrospective first-person narrative: the adult Asher Lev tells the story of his childhood and youth from a position of exile (he is living in France, having been asked to leave New York by the Rebbe after the exhibition). The narrative structure itself enacts the theme: the retrospective telling is an act of self-examination and self-justification, an attempt to understand why the gift he was born with required the destruction of the community that formed him.
The three fathers - biological father Aryeh Lev, spiritual father the Rebbe, and artistic father Jacob Kahn - represent the three worlds whose competing claims Asher must negotiate. His biological father's world is Torah, mission, and the Orthodox community. The Rebbe's world is the mystical Hasidic tradition that sees Asher's gift as coming from the 'Other Side' - the demonic realm - unless it can be redirected to the service of God. Jacob Kahn's world is secular modernism, the Western artistic tradition, and the absolute demands of authentic aesthetic vision.
The climax of the novel - the Brooklyn Crucifixion paintings - is prepared by a series of earlier works in which Asher uses less explosive images of suffering. The crucifixion paintings are the end of a process of artistic development in which Asher exhausts the available alternatives and discovers that only the cross is adequate to what he needs to say.
Critical Reception
The novel was enthusiastically received by both literary critics and general readers. It was particularly praised for its evocation of the Hasidic world - detailed, sympathetic, and unflinching - and for the authenticity of its central paradox.
Some Orthodox Jewish readers objected to the novel's use of the crucifixion, reading it as a gratuitous act of cultural provocation rather than a necessary artistic choice. Some Christian readers found the novel's treatment of the cross illuminating: the outsider's recognition of the crucifixion's power as an image of human suffering gave the cross a significance it had lost through familiarity in the Christian tradition.
Theological Significance
The novel's most profound theological contribution is its exploration of what art can and cannot represent - the question of the image in a tradition shaped by the prohibition of graven images. Asher's choice of the cross is not an apostasy from Judaism but an acknowledgment that the visual tradition he has inherited from Western art (which is largely Christian) has resources that the Jewish visual tradition (which has been constrained by the Second Commandment) lacks.
The novel also raises the question of whether suffering - specifically, the suffering of the innocent - can be adequately represented by any image other than the crucifixion. The cross has become, in the Western tradition, the image of undeserved, agonizing, public suffering. If a Jewish artist wishes to paint that kind of suffering, does she have available any alternative?
Legacy
The novel has been continuously in print and is widely assigned in American literature courses, religious studies courses, and courses on art and religion. It has been particularly influential in discussions of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, between artistic freedom and communal obligation, and between individual vocation and communal identity.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Matthew 27:32-56 (the crucifixion narrative, whose imagery Asher borrows), Psalm 22 (the Hebrew source of 'My God, why hast thou forsaken me'), Isaiah 52:13-53:12 (the Suffering Servant, who is despised and rejected), Exodus 20:4-6 (the prohibition of graven images - the law Asher's art transgresses), Genesis 22:1-19 (the Akedah - the Jewish image of sacrificial suffering that Asher finds insufficient), and 2 Corinthians 4:7-12 (the treasure in earthen vessels - the New Testament language for carrying suffering as witness).
Further Reading
- Dov Silverman, The Art of Asher Lev - a study of the visual tradition Potok draws on in constructing Asher's artistic development, tracing the specific paintings that influenced Potok's descriptions. - Sanford Sternlicht, Chaim Potok: A Critical Companion (2000) - a comprehensive study of Potok's fiction, with chapters on My Name Is Asher Lev and its sequels that address both the autobiographical sources and the theological themes. - Marc Chagall, My Life (1922; English trans. 1960) - the autobiography of the Jewish modernist painter who is part of the artistic tradition Asher Lev inherits; Chagall's own engagement with Christian imagery in his 'White Crucifixion' (1938) is the most direct visual precedent for Potok's novel.