Asher Lev's Literary Works

and takes on a professorial career, while Aryeh continuall(a)y travels, sometimes for coarse periods, as a leading advocate of the Ladover effortment, a strict strand of Orthodox Jewish thought and evangelicalism.

The distressfulness of Asher's parents' pursuits seems neighborhoodly responsible for the seriousness of purpose he forms as an fraudist; however, their pursuits do not conflict with Jewish piety. His cheatistic gift, or more hardly the way he uses that gift as a witting artist, does. Rivkeh and Asher's trip to the Parkway Museum during one of Aryeh's many absences, is intended as a visit to some rare Jewish manuscripts and, presumably, part of normal and natural aesthetic education. But even as a small boy Asher has been making imaginative drawings as well as drawings from life, and he has gotten into trouble for drawing in a sacred book. Thus Asher is absorbed by different art also on display at the Parkway, from Christian paintings to abstract Picasso oils to various nudes. Rivkeh, who suspects (rightly) that Aryeh would not approve of Asher's engagement with unconsecrated and/or non-Jewish art, is torn in the midst of forbidding him further visits to the museum and providing him with paints and pencils.

Aryeh, indeed, considers art evil, something that "comes from the Other Side" (MN 176), especially since Asher persists in drawing pictures of nudes and of Jesus. all over the course of the two novels, Aryeh never quite understands his son's passion for art over his duty and heritage as a Hasid. As a

The rant, serious as it whitethorn be, is actually one of the more humorous moments of The founder of Asher Lev: Asher wonders in passing whether the Rebbe, who usually only quotes from learned Judaism, is directing his remarks to anyone in particular by mentioning Freud and Nietzsche. At this point in the narrative, Asher is a world-famous expatriate artist who is only visiting New York exactly who is undoubtedly notorious in the local synagogue community of interests for his lifelong embrace of the Other Side. The reader suspects that the Rebbe's rant is order at Asher himself.

Even though Asher privately experiences nostalgic informality in the familiar synagogue, the convinced Ladover community will be very public ab come in not forgetting the unbreachable gap between the good and the Other Side. It is within the religious context that Ladover Judaism seems unambiguously to experience the same demons of anger that Asher experiences uniquely as an artist.

Abramson, Edward A. Chaim Potok. Twayne's unite States Authors Series. No. 503. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.

Over the course of both Asher Lev novels, the antagonism between Orthodox Jewish and artistic identity plays itself out in a variety of ways. The enmity is most profoundly felt in Asher's immediate family: Asher's parents often quarrel closely Asher's drawing and painting. Now Aryeh considers it perfectly normal and natural to move the family to Vienna while he sets up Hasidic communities all over Europe (MN 171ff), and Asher's pleas to his mother not to join Aryeh in Vienna fall on deaf ears, though his parents' long absence and his residence at his vulgar uncle's house enables him to fortify as an artist. But this does not prevent Aryeh, whom Asher calls aesthetically blind, from unending worry about Asher's moral blindness (MN 304-5).

Toward the end of The Gift of Asher Lev, which brings the narrative up to the present day, Asher sits in a Ladover high-holy-day attend to as the Rebbe angrily declaims on and on about the horrors of late-
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