”Painting is for goyim, Asher. Jews don’t draw and paint.” “Chagall is a Jew.” “Religious Jews, Asher. Torah Jews. Such Jews don’t draw and paint.” (171)Really enjoyed this pretty yet devastating story. More than most novels that use simple, child-like language to paint pictures—A Tree Grows In Brooklyn remains far and away the summit of that mountain—this story finds especially universal purchase by dealing with, not just a coming of age, but questions of cultural vs. personal identity, art, religion in the modern world, and what it means to be Jewish. It delves into a handful of important themes poetically but directly, and at the end packs a hammer blow that leaves you with a full sourness I absolutely loved.
Asher Lev is a Hasidic boy living in Crown Heights, just a few blocks from where I type this, who happens to have been born with a genius for art. Despite an environment that takes a dim view of his skill, Asher finds a way to graduate from pencil to charcoal to oil paint and drop jaws along the way.
In a book appealingly full of characters with strong motivation—from his mother’s studying in the wake of her brother’s death (her inciting event) to his father’s piety to Jacob Kahn’s artistic integrity—Asher is almost without drive. All he does is make art. His talent and his desire to draw are one in the same; they are a flat fact about him. He never has any choice in the matter and seemingly has little going on cognitively or sensually aside from a miraculous talent for pouring himself into drawings. To his outside world he seems impossibly stubborn, but to us inside his mind, he moves and thinks and narrates, first-person, in a haze.
Asher’s drawing does not sit well with his father, Aryeh Lev, an honorable and prominent member of their ultra-Orthodox Ladover community (a fictionalization of the Lubavechers). He has escaped persecution in eastern Europe, like their entire community, and himself leverages a natural reservoir of intensity in the work of establishing new yeshivas around the United States on behalf of the Rebbe, their revered religious leader. Aryeh radiates sober strength and is universally regarded as a “great man.” And we see it, too; he is a brave guardian of his people and he does what he thinks is right.
Rivkeh, Asher’s mother, starts the book almost a child herself, playing with her young son in the park with abandon. But when her brother Yaakov is killed in a car crash in Detroit, while on business for the Rebbe, she is thrown into a catatonic depression that takes her months to emerge from and tests Aryeh painfully. After that, she is driven by the twin impulses to preserve the unity and harmony of her family, and to carry on the work Yaakov left incomplete. She attends college (which appears to be a radical thing at the time) and later, goes to join Aryeh when he is transferred to Vienna to continue his work establishing yeshivas and helping Jews escape Russia.
Rounding out the principal characters is Jacob Kahn, a famous septuagenarian artist who lives on the Upper West Side and embodies the world of serious art. He worked with Picasso in Paris and has achieved a high stature as an artist, far away from the Jewish identity he left behind after escaping “two pogroms” by the time he was twenty-five. Kahn actively lives life as an artist. He also remains in touch with the Rebbe, a man he respects greatly, and through him is asked to teach the young prodigy Asher. Kahn does so sternly—as if Potok is trying to show that a Jew must be serious about anything he undertakes—but lovingly. He ends up being an important mentor.
Asher grows up with dual fealty to his Jewishness and his art. Though every other character in the book expresses doubt they can coexist, Asher never concerns himself with the question. He is both, naturally and flatly. But when he grows older and becomes a successful painter, he is suddenly struck by a vision he can’t get rid of. Filled with sadness for his mother’s and his community’s tragic existences, he is compelled to paint her crucified to their apartment window frame: an outrageous choice that torments him and tears him fully from his people. In other words, no sooner does Chaim Potok cheerily affirm that someone can be an artist and a Jew simultaneously, he has that character excommunicated from his people for the sin of artistic vision.
It is a stark turn that takes place right after Asher goes to Paris (accompanied by a generally more mature style of narration coming from a newly mature Asher, which is a welcome change) and it is a haymaker. Potok turns a coming-of-age novel into a tragedy, you feel, until you remember that even for young Asher, coming of age into his Jewish identity itself was almost equally painful.
The book raises a number of really deep questions. Here are some of the most salient:
How does what you do define who you are? Each of these characters moves throughout the world with urgency and focus, bearing all the scars of their people forth into their chosen ministries. They come from a world where being themselves was lethal. Yudel Krinsky (who I loved) encapsulates it: “How should a Jew feel? [In Russia] we went through the seven gates of hell for matzos. Here I stand in matzos over my head… At night, I tell myself it is a dream and I am afraid to wake up. If it is a dream, better I should not wake up.” (37) These people all conduct themselves as if they have an accidental lease on life, and consequently live with gusto. But this gusto, and the work they do, stems from who they are as people. The religious Jews work on behalf of their community and the artists on behalf of their artistic purpose.
To the external world, Asher is the only one who upends this formulation. He is a “torah Jew” who indulges in childish, at times sacreligious behavior. To the first people who observe him, he is an aberration. He is weak because he lets what he does define his identity. But I think Potok uses Asher to make a statement about the nature of being a Jewish artist. If the job of an artist is to express anguish and worldview and truth (he defines art, through Asher, as “a person’s private vision expressed in aesthetic forms” (303)), to whom is that work more essential than a Jew? For what community is the need to metabolize anguish greater?
Questions of Jewish and artistic identity. Potok gives Asher two pairs of mentors that form a sort of Cartesian square of Jewish identity: Yudel Krinsky and Jacob Kahn, and Uncle Yitzchock and his father Aryeh.
Asher’s two successive mentors, Krinsky and Kahn, juxtapose two ways a Jew can present to the world following centuries of provincial sorrow. We meet Reb Yudel Krinsky freshly escaped from Russia, eternally grateful to be free. As a very young boy, Asher is fascinated by his stories of imprisonment in Siberia (he thinks of it whenever he sees snow) and of Stalin’s savage persecution. Krinsky runs an art supply store, rooting Asher’s art in his community’s trauma just as solidly as Aryeh’s work. From this relationship I took away the message that, while every kid grows up by acquiring calluses, Jewish kids experience it by directly confronting their community’s benighted history and present reality.
Further along in processing that trauma is Jacob Kahn. He is also a survivor of persecution, but he’s chosen to deal with it by largely jettisoning his Jewish identity and adopting that of an artist. On p. 218, Kahn articulates to Asher, or maybe even legitimizes, the helplessly selfish philosophy Asher has been living his whole life:
“Listen to me, Asher Lev. As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the truth as you see it. Do you understand? An artist is responsible to his art. Anything else is propaganda. Anything else is what the Communists in Russia call art. I will teach you responsibility to art. Let your Ladover Hasidim teach you responsibility to Jews. Do you understand? Yes. I think you understand. You did not do what you did to your family without understanding that. It is not weakness to feel guilty at having done it. But the guilt should not interfere with your art. Use the guilt to make better art.”As it turns out, we would have no idea how prescient that statement would be. (Just as an aside: I’m glad Potok made Jacob Kahn a sculptor, because in this book it always seemed kind of arbitrary that Asher would become a painter specifically. Wouldn’t a genius talent for drawing at an early age also potentially translate to, idk, conceptual art?)
I think Jacob Kahn doesn’t see Jewishness as a solution to the problems facing the Jewish people. His wife Tanya, speaking to Asher, articulates it best: “‘My younger brother was very religious. Like you. Everyone admired him. But the Nazis killed him anyway. It did not do him much good to be so religious.’” (258) Art, by contrast, is cathartic and earns him a fortune—and while he constantly claims to hate the emoluments of his success, you can’t help but see him weighing what art has gained him against what Judaism has. That’s why his relationship with Asher is moving. Here at the end of his life—he’s constantly alluding to wanting to live to eighty—he has a student into whom he can instill his philosophy and through whom he is forced to re-access his roots. Sure enough, he does start showing up at Ladover functions and dabbling back into Jewish life. Similarly, Yudel Krinsky gets married and has a family. So in Yudel Krinsky and Jacob Kahn we have two visions of old Jews working through their suffering, both of whom come of age in their own ways, like Asher.
In Aryeh and his brother Yitzchock, we have two diverging responses to suddenly finding freedom. Aryeh is forever connected to the old world. The suffering of his people is a present pain to him. From his perch of relative safety, he dedicates his life to helping others still dealing with what once afflicted him. Yitzchok is more modern, more American. Opportunity has opened his mind. He is a businessman who chomps big cigars and supports Asher’s painting, openly anticipating the profit that could come from supporting a golden goose. I think it’s fair to say both of these archetypes, traditionalist and capitalist, are well represented in the American Jewish identity.
Commingling of Judaism and art. With all these influences available to Asher, it’s important that Potok never has him run from his family, people, or religion. One really masterful element of the writing is that we go through, with Asher, the sad education of his community’s history, and neither he nor we ever question whether helping to look after other Jews, as he is taught, is a righteous and urgent thing to do. Asher never feels the need to throw off the manacles of his religion to commit to art, the way Jacob Kahn wants him to, even though his tradition doesn’t see much value in what he does.
Key to this dual acceptance of art and religion is the Rebbe. As opposed to Asher’s titanic ancestor, who his father invokes frequently as being disappointed and who in Asher’s dreams is constantly charging towards him, the present-day Rebbe is a shrewd operator; almost a combination of Aryeh and Yitzchok. The Rebbe is seen as wise and godly by the Ladover community, but up close, we see he is a skillfully opportunistic and political manager. He’s still fundamentally good—again, it’s critical that we the reader see the mere propagation of the Ladover community as a good unto itself—but also benignly exploitative. He is able to convince people to do things others cannot; he has an army of people doing his bidding around the world (Yaakov being one casualty); he stays in touch with luminaries like Jacob Kahn despite their apostasy. Whereas Aryeh wants to see himself in his son, the Rebbe sees in Asher a potential asset, an extension of his power. We the readers let him get away with it, though, because he does seem to genuinely know what’s best for Asher. He not only connects him with Kahn, but forces him to study French and Russian, and permits the art in the first place.
It’s meaningful that Potok made the Rebbe the prime enabler of Asher’s gift and his ultimate expeller. In a story that wrestles with whether one can be both Jewish and a true, born artist, the Rebbe is an unmistakable claim that one can, shortly before he proves one cannot.
It’s important because fundamentally, Potok seems to endorse Kahn’s view of the artist. I loved this passage from Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit, which Kahn gives to Asher:
Every great artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a “universal” without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere… He should be powerfully possessed by one idea… He should be careful of the influence of those with whom he consorts. Large bodies tend towards the leveling of individuality to a common consent, the forming and adherence to a creed. (202)But before learning any of that about artistic integrity, Potok has Asher get in touch with his Jewishness through Krinsky, indicating to me that both of these identities emerge in Asher naturally, simultaneously. You can be both Jewish and freed from your nation and creed. I take it as a statement on the depth of a Jewish identity.
These concepts are wrapped up in an exchange that could serve as a summary of the book:
Jacob Kahn: “I am afraid I have made an enemy of your father.” “Why does he hate me? I don’t understand.” “He thinks you are wasting your life. He thinks you have betrayed him. It is not pleasant for a man like your father to see his son painting nudes and the other things you paint. It is for him at best a frivolity and at worst a desecration. You and your father are two different natures. There is nothing to be done about it, Asher Lev.” “The Rebbe isn’t angry. Why isn’t the Rebbe angry?” “The Rebbe is a very wise man. And he is of a different nature than your father.” “I don’t understand.” “Do not try to understand. Become a great artist. That is the only way to justify what you are doing to everyone’s life.” I painted and studied and brooded about my parents. Jacob Kahn’s words haunted me: “That is the only way to justify what you are doing to everyone’s life.” I did not understand what he meant. I did not feel I had to justify anything. I had not willfully hurt anyone. What did I have to justify? I did not want to paint in order to justify anything; I wanted to paint because I wanted to paint. I wanted to paint the same way my father wanted to travel and work for the Rebbe. My father worked for the Torah. I worked for—what? How could I explain it? For beauty? No. Many of the pictures I painted were not beautiful. For what, then? For a truth I did not know how to put into words. (278)What really is indulgence? Aryeh Lev has a great line, which he repeats a few times, about how only animals can’t help what they do. As any of us animals know, that’s more of an aspiration than a statement of reality for all but the most disciplined among us.
This novel deals with a few instances of people indulging in behavior that either they or someone else wishes they could stop. Each time, Potok seems to let them off the hook.
Shattered by her brother’s death, Rivkeh falls into a deep depression that leaves her unable to care for herself or her family. She is well supported by her husband and family, but refuses, almost obstinately, to recover and start living life again. People implore her to come back to life, including her own sister, but she cannot. Eventually, she starts to recover by carrying on the work Yaakov was doing. Actually, it propels her into a successful career arc as a professor of Russian studies at NYU. Potok acquits her by letting her tragedy give her drive.
Jacob Kahn also falls into depressions whenever he thinks too hard on the world and its sorrows, a lapse he refers to as “indulging” in illness. It happens to him when he thinks of the futility of trying to capture the world in his art, and again after JFK is assassinated. We don’t see very much fruit come out of these fugues, but Potok does not give us reason to think it’s a lack of discipline that leads Kahn to fall into depressions.
Aryeh’s traveling, I think, also falls into this category. He sees his work as righteous, of course, but in order to do it, he needs to defy his family’s wishes that he stay home more, and his child’s cries about not wanting to move to Vienna, where they “hate Jews.” Aryeh’s work ethic could be called an indulgence, but it is essential to his identity and one that earns him great respect.
Finally, there is the primary example of a supposed indulgence, which is Asher’s art. He is told to stop and simply cannot. It is part of him. And though his father continually calls it foolishness, we get a nice moment on p. 305 when Asher gets to finally show his father that he’s not “retarded” like once feared, but just expert in a different subject.
Asher has heard that art is “a tradition of goyim and pagans. Its values are goyish and pagan. Its concepts are goyish and paga. Its way of life is goyish and pagan.” (213) When he finally has a moment where he can demonstrate to his father that he’s actually schooled within this realm he cares about, it’s the first time we see Aryeh impotent: “He listened attentively to what I was saying. But there was nothing in his intellectual or emotional equipment to which he could connect my words. He possessed no frames of reference for such concepts. He could not even ask intelligent questions. My world of aesthetics was bewildering to him.” (305) It’s a nice moment of circularity; more even than when he starts to surpass Jacob Kahn’s eye and inventiveness, that moment juxtaposing him with his father signals that Asher has truly become an artist.
When does a nourishing family and community become confining? One thing that’s certain is that these Ladover need each other. They’re strangers in their new cities, rescued from their old, and all they have is their shared traditions. But in their strict adherence to their religion, they end up doing exactly the same ‘leveling’ Henri warned of.
To me, it’s reasonable that a culture under perpetual assault would lionize those vocations that preserve their heritage and beliefs. But a successful society can’t flourish with too narrow a view of what its people should do. So afraid are they of a gift coming from the “sitra achra,” or “other side” (the Devil, basically, as opposed to the “ribbono shel olom” or master of the universe) that they are unable to nourish an exemplary individual. If Asher were any less autistic, he would have probably caved into the demands of those around him and given up his drawing. Instead, he ends the book as a successful artist.
A few complaints. Though I appreciated the breezy writing when I cracked the book open on my bleary morning subway ride, I’m not sure the style really ever conveyed the qualia of either creating or experiencing great art. We hear a lot about the life of an artist, but almost nothing about what, exactly, Asher can do. We hear he has an “eye,” that his painting is “magnificent,” that he will earn lots of money for the art promoter Anna Schaeffer (who starts out as a sympathetic character but ultimately exploits Asher recklessly.) But what he’s communicating, exactly, is never discussed.
Similarly, we don’t get to understand what goes through Asher’s mind when he’s making something, other than some bullshit about lines coming together and becoming alive. It doesn’t mar the reading, but it’s just like, OK, I guess we’re not really talking about what it’s like to paint.
Asher gets annoying sometimes. When he refuses to move to Vienna because he is so unable to leave Eastern Parkway, I was like, look you can wander around in a daze not replying to people over there, too. And then when he did go visit Vienna, and the whole trip was like “I heard voices talking about me until I was put back inside the metal bird” … come on. Also, his writing never changes throughout the whole book. It starts off simple because he’s a child and ends up in nearly the same place.
Random thought: this book was a really charming portrait of the intended utility of libraries and especially museums. Asher teaches himself much about painting by going to the Brooklyn Museum and analyzing the work.
Last thought: it was inconsistent, to me, that Asher would feel the need to display the offending paintings at the end of the book. Maybe I’m moved just because it made me so sad, but I couldn’t help but wish that of all times Asher could have stood up for a vision, it would have been for the vision of his family finally enjoying his talent. We hear from Jacob Kahn that an artist is always true to himself, to the point that he ridicules Asher for trying to hide his payos. We also hear that art shows are crass, profiteering exercises that “Picasso hated” and which are ancillary at best to the practice of making art. So why, then, wouldn’t Asher conclude that his painting should serve his identity first and not offend his poor mother and father? He already painted his “personal vision of the truth”; does he really need to also sell it in order to have artistic integrity, at the expense of his people? And for who? For Anna Schaeffer? Seemed backwards to me.
Overall this book was a smooth, effortlessly readable, ultimately crushing parable about art and identity. Though the manner of speaking about art and artists is dated at times, the themes of entwining one’s family with their work resonate agnostically and timelessly. And for turning the book into basically an entirely different novel around page 300 , Potok revealed a trick up his sleeve I did not see coming. Immense reading experience.
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