Asher Lev is a young, imaginative boy with many different thoughts running through his mind, as all young boys have. However, instead of thinking about the Torah and his Jewish faith as his community would like, he is thinking about putting lines on paper. The young artistic prodigy in Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev, because of his talent, is being torn between his religion and his dream to be a famous artist; and the tearing is being done, not by himself, but by his incompetent parents and demanding Hasidic community. And not only do these distractions act to bring Asher away from his faith, but they also act towards bringing him away from his parents, and then finally his country.
Very early in his life, Asher had developed a certain affliction with putting everything he saw on paper. However, what he did not realize was that he also had developed an affliction with putting his emotions down on paper. Every child has some way of expressing his or her emotions whether it be through a musical instrument, physical contact, or merely their vocal cords; in the case of Asher Lev, it was through his pencils and crayons. At the age of four, his emotions were simple and care free and so he only drew simple things such as his bed, his chair or his desk (Potok 11). However, as the world around him became more complex, so did his drawings. Evidence of this came when he used burnt cigarette ashes to draw the deathly qualities of his sick mother (Potok 38). Not only does this show the progression of his drawings as his emotions progressed, but it more importantly shows how strongly his parents (especially his mother) affected his emotions and inadvertently push him into drawing.
Through his parents, because of the way they seemed to neglect him to pursue their own personal goals, in the early chapters, Asher learned that not everything happens the way he would like and so he discovered that the world is indeed not pretty (Potok 33). This revelation to a boy at such a young age was truly a shocking experience and so he could not understand as to why. He tried to make the world pretty for his mother, but he was unable to and so he felt as if he had failed. Failure, also being difficult to accept, pushed Asher into giving up his passion, seemingly pleasing his father who thought of drawing as mere foolishness (Potok 17). However, with no more drawings, Asher no longer had an outlet for his emotions and so as his parents continued to neglect him and as the world around him kept becoming more complex and confusing (specifically with what was happening in Siberia), his emotions began to build up. And this is what triggered Asher into creating a series of drawings through his subconscious, as it was his subconscious that needed to relieve that emotional build-up. Thus, the drawings of Stalin and the Rebbe on his school books, drawings that began the trouble between he and his religion, came as a result of his parents’ neglect.
As much as it was due to his parents, Asher’s continuing to draw and to draw without realizing it also stemmed from the pressure put on him from his community. Growing up under the sometimes unbearably strict ways of the Hasidic Jews and also being the son of a man who was so involved in spreading the religion to all parts of the country, there was only so much of the Torah that Asher could take. Not only did he have to study his religion every day in school, but it was also a constant part of the Lev dinner conversations and it was expected to be his future life dedication (Potok 78). With all of this coming at the age of six, and without a stable figure of support to help him cope with his problems, Asher grew to in many ways resent his religion. And rebellion, which was to be expected from such an intelligent boy, ran rampant through Asher and ran rampant through his hand onto anything that would show pencil marks. Thus, his community was throwing fuel onto his artistic fire that was already out of control as a result of his parents. And so a simple gift was now made into an obsession.
Thus, as drawing became an obsession to Asher, he had less and less control over it and so he began to do it more and more. The problem this presented was that it was interfering with his study of the Torah. And because anything that interferes with the Torah is unacceptable in the Hasidic community, Asher’s drawings and Asher himself were deemed unacceptable as well. Evidence of his community’s feelings about this issue were mainly illustrated through his father, Aryeh, who was anything but reluctant to show how dissatisfied he was with his son’s actions. At one point he said, "don’t be disrespectful to me, Asher. You can’t study Chumash, but this you have time for," (Potok 28) and at other times he said, "it is not possible for me to accept this," (Potok 223) referring to the belief that what Asher was doing was blatantly wrong. Other community members also showed their dissatisfaction such as his classmates who wrote poems such as the one that said, "Asher Lev won’t go to hev: To hell he’ll go far down below" (Potok 229). Thus, what happened was that as Asher became more engulfed in his art and began to study it more than the Torah, his community, who recognized this, started a process of shunning him. The process started with mere childish poems, but then branched into the loss of respect from his teachers, community members, and finally from the only one who had supported his gift, the Rebbe.
The significance of the Rebbe finally becoming intolerable of Asher was that the Rebbe was in essence the governor of the Hasidic community meaning that when he stopped supporting Asher, it allowed for everyone else to stop supporting him as well. At the time when everyone in the community was upset with Asher (including his father), because the Rebbe had said Asher’s pursuit of his gift was acceptable, everyone had to respect that decision. However, when Asher released his paintings of crucifixions to the world, not even the Rebbe could retain enough respect for him to tolerate his actions. He said to 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 to me, Asher. But this is an impossibility" (Potok 347). Thus, when not even the Rebbe could consent to what Asher had done, his only choice was to ask him to separate himself from his community and his country all together. Hence, the process of shunning Asher was completed.
However, as much as Asher would like to blame his troubles in the community on the community, it would be extremely unfair to do so because Asher is deserving of some of the fault himself. Although he can not be blamed for having a gift, he can be blamed for the unstable way in which he handled that gift. He never realized, as Reuven Malter did in another Chaim Potok creation called The Promise, that in order to be accepted by his community despite his "sinful" acts, he had to first understand his role in the Jewish community. Reuven took the time to do this through studying the Torah the traditional way, the way his community wanted him to, while at the same time studying it the controversial way, the way his community disliked. Although his teachers were upset that he was studying using "dangerous methods" (Potok 239), because he was also able to study the way they had wanted him to effectively, they gained enough respect for him to overlook his controversy. Thus, Reuven recognized that the only way to please his community was through conforming to it and by becoming a more involved part of it, and by doing so he was able to better his situation. This is where Asher fell down because instead of trying to show that although he was drawing he could be a respectable Jew as well, he thought he had to chose one or the other and therefore he essentially chose to abandoned his faith. It is because of this error on the part of Asher that perhaps he should be considered liable for some of the troubles he had.
Reuven still was ridiculed, though, by much of his community even after he was accepted by some of his teachers because of the way he was pursuing the faith. It was not until his success with helping Michael Gordon and with becoming an ordained Rabbi that they were able to accept him because as far as they were concerned he was being a menace to the Hasidic community. However, what they saw as menacing with a religion, Reuven saw merely as his struggle "to define himself in relation to Jewish tradition" (Nissenson 338). Thus, Reuven was forced to have a strong will to disregard criticism from his peers until he was able to show them that what he was doing would translate into good, something that he was ultimately able to do. Nevertheless, the community that criticized Reuven so much was in essence a manifestation of Potok’s own personal feelings. For "Potok is troubled by the growing influence of the right-wing Orthodoxy upon American Jewish life" (Leviant 269) and so he opposed those feelings to Reuven Malter to create the novel’s conflict. However, this is not to say that Potok sees Reuven as an objectionable character just because he represents Potok’s negative feelings, because it is quite the opposite. Instead he uses Reuven’s eventual success in the novel to show that although religious revolutions may perhaps be frightening at times, they also keep religions interesting and, if given time, they can improve the meaning of the faith.
The main theme that is seen in both My Name is Asher Lev, and The Promise, being that the main characters are being torn from their Hasidic faith by their surrounding community, is able to succeed because such situations are so familiar to Chaim Potok. He, himself, spent his adolescence "in a traditional Jewish home, and was educated in Jewish Parochial schools,"(Kremer 232) much as Asher and Reuven were. Thus, "familiar with his way of life, he can present [the Jewish religion in his novels] with credibility and without sounding pompous" (Bandler 369). And because both of these novels revolve solely around the Jewish faith and what Jews believe, the ability of Potok to accurately portray this religion is crucial.
Also, a similar past experience in Potok’s life allowed him to further the authenticity of the thoughts and feelings had by Asher (and to a lesser extent, Reuven) when he was struggling to balance his art and religion. As a boy, much as Asher had a gift for art, Potok had a gift for story writing and, like Asher, he received much disapproval from his community because writing was taking time away from the Torah (Kremer 235). However, he was able to continue with his passion while diligently studying to become ordained as a rabbi as well (Kremer 235), much as Reuven was able to do. And because of his great involvement with both writing and his faith in his early years, Potok "determined that fiction would be his vehicle to weave Jewish civilization into American literature" (Kremer 232). Thus, he was able to incorporate his two passions into his life’s work and do it effectively and honestly.
Another novel, Dawn, by Elie Wiesel, also pictures a young Jewish boy as the main character and although the problems he faced did not necessarily affect his religion’s beliefs, his religion did play a role in the way he handled those problems. Elisha, the main character, was a survivor of the Holocaust and was fortunate enough to get out of Auschweitz with his life. However, his parents and friends were not quite as fortunate and so Elisha, only 18, was forced to carry the pain associated with those deaths on his back, constantly reminding him of the evils of the world. After becoming affiliated with a Jewish freedom fighters group and after being dubbed as the executioner, Elisha was forced into a role that was all too familiar to him. However, instead of being a possible victim of an unjustified slaying, he was now the enforcer of an unjustified slaying, something that he had a hard time dealing with. Although his partners kept saying, "don’t torture yourself, Elisha. This is war," (Wiesel 33) the thought of killing a man who did not deserve to die was too much of an unsettling thought. Killing John Dawson, the man condemned, would be hypocritical in the sense that the Jews had been fought for to be taken away from arbitrary killing and yet now they were the ones doing the killing. Hence, through killing Dawson, the ghosts of the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust who were guiding Elisha through the novel, left him because he had betrayed them and because now his face was the face of death (Wiesel 90), not theirs.
Elie Wiesel, who grew up in Europe during the Nazi Holocaust (Stern 350) used personal feelings that he had as a child to sculpt Elisha’s character, a character that was constantly lost and confused much like himself. When he then set Elisha against the post World War II problem of the Jews trying to win back Palestine from the British, he created a book that "presents an imagined event, the destruction of a fictional town in Central Europe, and endows it with the destiny, pain and irony of historical reality" (Stern 350). Once again, the irony that is spoken of is the change of Elisha’s role from victim to killer. And it was this change of roles that broke him away from the murdered Jewish population and left him with the post war Jews who’s intentions were tainted with thoughts of revenge. This, then, represented the pain as it truly was a dark time for Jews who underwent a period of unbridled chaos and rage that never got them anywhere (Stern 350). And because Elisha was caught in the middle of this disorder and because of his young age, he was set up for being broken down in a tough situation, which is what ultimately happened.
Thus, what was seen with the three main characters in these three novels, Asher, Reuven, and Elisha, was that their surrounding communities, combined with their youth and inexperience, played an instrumental part in ripping them away from their religious faith. Also illustrated was the fact that the Jewish religion, especially the Hasidic faith, because of their strict ways and strong belief system, are resistant to change and therefore need to be conformed to. Nonetheless, as Reuven was able to show, it is possible to balance a gift with religion, but it is just as to how that is done that is the difficult part.