Chaim Potok's Reforming of a Traditional Judaic Narrative in The Gift of Asher Lev

Introductory Remarks

The highly popular and critically acclaimed novel My Name Is Asher Lev (1972) has long been hailed as one of Chaim Potok's finest pieces of writing. Regularly assigned as compulsory high school reading and frequently discussed within the context of Jewish-Christian relations due to its Christological subject matter, the story of a young Jewish painter struggling to reconcile art with tradition has also attracted much scholarly attention. Studies in American Jewish Literature, in particular, has been one of the leading fora for scholarship on My Name Is Asher Lev, not to mention on the larger context of Potok's work as a whole. In fact, the earliest critical essays on Potok were printed in SAJL several years before the first monograph on Chaim Potok, written by Edward Abramson, was published in 1986.

Ellen Uffen's early article, "My Name Is Asher Lev: Chaim Potok's Portrait of the Young Hasid as Artist," appeared in SAJL in 1982. The journal's 1985 issue, entitled "The World of Chaim Potok," featured S. Lillian Kremer's "Daedalus in Brooklyn: Influences of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on My Name Is Asher Lev," as well as Sanford Pinsker's "The Crucifixion of Chaim Potok/The Excommunication of Asher Lev: Art and the Hasidic World." In 1992, Henry Ahrens's essay, "Tales from an Archetypal Ocean: Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev," appeared in SAJL. Nineteen ninety-eight witnessed the publication in SAJL of Joanna Barkess's article, "Painting the Sitra Achra: Culture Confrontation in Chaim Potok's Asher Lev Novels." Most recently, Daniel Walden, the founding editor of SAJL, published an article in the 2010 issue of that journal, entitled "Potok's Asher Lev: Orthodoxy and Art: The Core-to-Core Paradox."¹ Needless to say, forty years after its initial printing, the interest in My Name Is Asher Lev shows no signs of abating.²

That said, few readers familiar with the story of My Name Is Asher Lev are aware of the book that continues the saga of the young Jewish painter from New York. That same book was also the last novel on a Jewish theme that Potok wrote: The Gift of Asher Lev, which won the National Jewish Book Award upon its publication in 1990.³ I find this lack of attention curious, since, in my opinion, the second book is far superior in style and content to the first. Indeed, as someone who has closely studied the trajectory of Potok's novelistic career, I believe that The Gift of Asher Lev represents the apex of what Potok was capable of, both in its culmination of themes that had occupied the author throughout his fictional enterprise, as well as in the fluidity of its prose. How fitting to now have the opportunity to explore some of the major highlights of this novel in the same journal that initiated the first serious critical work on Potok.

Notes on the Texts/Methodology

This close reading of The Gift of Asher Lev—the first, to my knowledge—focuses on Potok's subversion in that novel of several traditional motifs, characters, and themes from the intertextual reservoir of Judaic culture. In particular, it examines the ways in which Potok references and re-envisions sacrosanct archetypes from the story of the 'akedah, or the "Binding of Isaac," from Genesis 22, which recounts how God instructed Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as a burnt offering, only to save the boy at the last moment.⁴ This reading emphasizes the ways in which Potok gives the aforementioned Judaic metanarrative a "scandalous" symbolic value, à la Barthes (23), by playing with the commonly held associations regarding the moral coherence of the story. I also highlight how the profoundly ambivalent nature of father-son relationships in Potok's novel mirror not only the archetypal Abraham-Isaac relation but also the paradoxes of allegiance and observance intrinsic to Jewish-American life.

The reader will recall the basic plot elements from the first Asher Lev novel: Asher Lev, the artistic prodigy...