My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

Rating:

First 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.”

Favorite Quote From the Book: “Seeds must be sown everywhere. Only some will bear fruit. But there would not be the fruit from the few had the many not been sown”

Amazon Description: Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels even when it leads him to blasphemy. In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination.

Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time his gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Levbecomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant, a modern classic.

After Thoughts: I am not Jewish, but I have a great admiration for the Jewish people. A lot of that admiration is due to the writing of Chaim Potok and books like, “My Name Is Asher Lev”. This is a story of a boy who is trying to follow his passion in life, but faces incredible opposition from his father and to a lesser degree his Jewish community. It is a mirror into the conflict between fathers and sons, and the attempt so many mothers make to bridge that gap. This is a must read for anyone interested in exploring difficult family dynamics, Jewish culture, and the struggle to do what you love in a difficult world.