A whole new way of seeing: My Name is Asher Lev

Picking up a new book is like setting off on an unknown road: you never know where it will take you.  In the late 1970's, I was reading every non-fiction book I could find about Judaism.  The religion fascinated me, a lot of my college friends were Jewish and I was deciding if I should convert.  Of course, I would not leave the delights of fiction, no matter what faith I followed, so I added several novels by Jewish authors thinking this would add dimension to my non-fiction studies.  One novel proved I have literary ADD; after I read My Name is Asher Lev, I put books on Judaism aside and became obsessed with art.

Even now I envy the reader who has not yet picked up Asher Lev because they haven't heard his mesmerizing voice spilling through that opening sentence:

My name is Asher Lev, the Asher Lev, about whom you have read in newspapers and magazines, about whom you talk so much at your dinner affairs and cocktail parties, the notorious and legendary Lev of the Brooklyn Crucifixion.

That beginning  has all of the power and immediacy of the opening paragraphs in  All the Kings Men or Rebecca.   You hear the man's insistent voice pouring out what will be a long confession of confusion, frustration, realization and art.  Because Asher is, first and foremost, an artist.

What follows is a Catch-22 of duty, responsibility and need.   First, Asher is a member of a Hasidic Jewish community, that branch of Orthodox Judaism where the men keep the locks of hair in front of their ears very long and wear very conservative, dark clothing.  These are very modest, pious people and because so much of art leans toward graven images, nudity and non-Jewish images , Asher's community avoids the field altogether.  This is a problem because Asher is compelled to create art.  I mean driven.  If this kid were locked in a room without any other way to make pictures, he'd open a vein and paint blood on the walls.  Asher can't deny his artistic impulses any more than he can deny his parents or the Rabbi.  Now Asher's creative drive causes great dissension and pain, first within his family and later, his community.  He knows the only way he can justify this pain is to create greater art.   Unfortunately, the greater the art is, the greater the pain.    Out of this conflict comes a great story.

This book has so many revolutionary ideas.  In one paragraph a fellow artist comments, "In all the history of art, there are only two ways of painting the world.  One is the way of Greece and Africa that sees the world as a geometric design.  The other is the way of Persia and India and China, which sees the world as a flower."   Do me a favor will you?  Next time you look at a painting, really look at it and you'll see the speaker is right.   The brush strokes and design will remind you either of geometrical shapes or flowers.

Ideas like that can blow the mind of a young reader, even one whose art appreciation began and ended with the board game, Masterpiece.  I ate up this book, picking up information about Hopper's sunlight and Picasso's Guernica instead of Hebraic culture and beliefs and started looking at the world in terms of line, light, color and tension.  When I told a Jewish friend I had fallen in love with My Name is Asher Lev, she cleared her throat and said that probably wasn't the ideal novel to study for Judaism.  I didn't have the heart to tell her my focus had shifted from Kabbalah to Kandinsky.

I still go back to Asher Lev every few years and I read the sequel but nothing beats that first breathless realization of getting lost in a compelling story.  Nevertheless, I owe Asher Lev and his author (Chaim Potok) a debt of thanks.  Other books gave me new ideas to believe; Asher Lev taught me to see.