Two Worlds
My Name Is Asher Lev.
by Chaim Potok.
Knopf. 369 pp. $7.95.
The protagonists of Chaim Potok’s novels—The Chosen, The Promise, and now My Name is Asher Lev—follow a common career; in the course of the narrative they are seen moving slowly and with agonizing reluctance out of, and away from, the religious community in which they were born and brought up (a highly sentimentalized version of Brooklyn’s Williamsburgh or Crown Heights section twenty years ago) and into secular society. Yet for all the suffering they undergo in this process, and despite the relentless psychological motion through which Potok pushes and pulls them, his characters display no real understanding of the dilemma which they have been chosen to exemplify, which is nothing short of the dilemma of modern religious Judaism itself.
Historically, the Orthodox-Jewish community, insular by choice and by dint of outside pressure, has gone to extreme lengths in its rejection of the secular, and those Jews who have attempted to lead both religious and secular lives have often fallen prey to a real confusion of identity, a kind of metaphorical schizophrenia. Potok’s heroes, however, move from the religious to the secular under the spell of an aimless, even a gratuitous, inevitability. In fact his novels assume the impossibility of existing in both the religious and the secular spheres—an assumption whose net effect amounts in the end to a kind of apology for assimilationism. The schizophrenic trap of living a double life and of speaking in two, often exclusive, languages—the subject of all of Potok’s novels—is precisely what he has been most unsuccessful either in depicting or in attempting to resolve.
In My Name Is Asher Lev, Potok deals with one very special aspect of this dilemma. Asher Lev is a uniquely talented artist, born to a Hasidic family otherwise distinguished not only for its piety and scholarship but for service to the rebbe and to the community. As a child, dabbling in crayons and watercolors, Asher Lev is treated with condescension and indulgence; he is considered a mild curiosity. When, however, he commits himself unequivocally as a young adult to the traditions of Western art and begins to paint nudes and crucifixions (as though nudes and crucifixions were the only subject matter of Western art), his family and community turn upon him with the violence and hatred reserved only for representatives of the sitra achra, literally the other side, a kabbalistic euphemism for the satanic and the diabolic.
The specific issue that Potok raises here—the status of art and artists within the traditional Jewish community—is symptomatic of the larger problem raised by Judaism’s attitude toward the creative arts in general. While the Orthodox-Jewish community has given birth to great painters, musicians, and writers, it has not encouraged, nurtured, or sustained them in their achievement, and, in the case of representational art especially, it has been downright hostile to their calling. The biblical prohibition against the fashioning of idols (“Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold”) was traditionally interpreted to forbid all three-dimensional, sculptured representations of the human body; as for painting, although not explicitly forbidden, it came to be viewed, because of its origins, as essentially the heritage and property of pagan (Greek and Roman) and Christian culture—unsuitable by definition for the Jew.
Behind such an attitude lies a basic philosophical antagonism between halacha (Jewish law) and art. Whereas the one, the legal embodiment of revealed truth, forms the very basis of social and religious order, the other, as the expression par excellence of the individual voice and the private vision, represents an actual or potential threat to all communal values. On this point, oddly enough, Orthodox Judaism sees eye to eye with Plato, and whenever the community has seen fit, or been compelled, to permit artistic expression in its midst, it has proceeded more or less along the lines suggested in the Republic: tolerating and indulging that which clearly lies within the boundaries of the Law or, at the least, does not subvert the religious interests of the community; rigorously forbidding everything that refuses to yield to the needs of didacticism. The case has never been one of overt or official censorship, but of a subtle and persistent pressure which has discouraged the pursuit of artistic talent and attempted to channel that energy into more conventional disciplines. Yet whatever form it has taken, the hostility fostered by halacha has contributed to a common view of the artist as heretical or, at the least, immoral.
Children are, of course, most susceptible to prejudices of this kind. In the baseball game with which his first novel, The Chosen, begins, Potok captured very well the zeal and inventiveness with which children turn play into a ritualization of their parents’ animosities. Similarly, the most successful passages in Asher Lev occur when the child artist is caught in class drawing the face of the rebbe on the page of a Bible. He is taunted by his classmates as “the destroyer of Torah,” and “goy Lev”; then one day he discovers a mildly scatological poem inserted between the pages of his Talmud text. In revenge, Asher copies a detail from Michelangelo’s Last Judgment that depicts “a man being pulled headlong into hell by serpentine demons”; substituting the face of an especially obnoxious classmate for that of the man, he inserts the copy into the classmate’s Talmud:
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.
Even should he wish to remain within his community, Asher Lev stands beyond its circle if not outside God’s Creation as well.
Exactly what there is for him on the “other side,” however, is hard to say. As a portrait of the artist and a study of his growth and maturing, Asher Lev is without distinction. We are constantly told of Asher Lev’s prodigious talent, and of the extent to which he suffers for his art, but from Potok’s banal and sentimental descriptions of his painting, Asher Lev sounds dreadfully untalented. Moreover, his conflict with his father, which provides the impetus to his creative energies and is the dramatic focus of the novel, is treated in a heavy-handed and even careless way. Thus, when Asher Lev finally cuts off his side-curls, a gesture rich in psychological suggestiveness precisely because it is at once an assertion of self and an act of self-castration, Potok treats the incident merely as an indication of Asher Lev’s movement from one social ambience to another.
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My Name Is Asher Lev concludes with the description of a rather horrendous painting, The Brooklyn Crucifixion—a. portrait of the artist’s mother tied to the Venetian blinds of her front window as she waits for her husband and son to return—which nevertheless poses an overwhelming question: the possibility, or viability, of an art authentically Jewish. The artist committed to remaining within Judaism in a more than peripheral way, who makes his concern the creation of a work that will stand firmly within Jewish tradition, faces the necessity of working in genres whose origins and structures are all secular. The paradox implicit here may itself begin to suggest an aesthetics rooted in the same “schizophrenia” characteristic of Jewish existence within secular society. Chaim Potok no doubt would wish to be understood as working in the direction of such an aesthetic, but he has yet to write a novel whose imaginative richness and narrative strength would begin to approach the standard to which he aspires.
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