Estimated Reading Time 1 Minutes
Publisher: Yearling; Reprint edition (December 27, 2011)
Paperback : 384 pages
ISBN: 978-0375858291
Thoughts: I’m not Jewish, but I admire the Jewish people and I LOVE Chaim Potok’s books. They are universal in theme yet give you an inside look into a rich culture. Asher Lev is a must-read for anyone interested in exploring art, difficult family dynamics, Jewish culture, and the struggle to do what you love in a difficult world.
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:… an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
Summary from Amazon.com:
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 Lev becomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant, a modern classic.
