Asher Lev

After reading, The Kite Runner and Sharpe’s Rifles, The Gift of Asher Lev contrast with those two novels. The characters in each novel have come from a specific religion for each novel, Islam for The Kite Runner, Christianity for Sharpe’s Rifles and Judaism for The Gift of Asher Lev. Chaim Potock wrote The Gift of Asher Lev in the early 90’s and the contrast is seen with the Hasidic movement and a world famous artist in the modern world.

In Chaim Potock’s first book about Asher Lev, My Name Is Asher Lev, the reader sees Aher as a child and sees his extraordinary talent of painting develop throughout his childhood into his teenage years. In this book Asher is banished from his Hasidic community in Brooklyn, and Asher leaves to go to France to further his painting career and become a world famous painter.

In the beginning of the novel, Asher tells that he is living in France. He is married with a son and daughter and is a Hasidic painter. Asher later finds out that his beloved uncle dies and he must make a journey back across the Atlantic to Brooklyn, where he grew up and where he hasn’t returned in twenty years. He is reluctant to return to his Hasidic roots because he was banished so many years ago for his paintings of a crucifixion offending his mother and the community so much that he had to leave.

Upon Asher’s return to Brooklyn, Asher is plunged directly into the conflict he was in years before that caused him to leave. The same conflict is going on between the sacred and the worldly that affected this Brooklyn neighborhood twenty years ago. Asher finds his uncle’s great collection of artwork and becomes responsible for it. Even more importantly, the rabbi in the Hassidic community is aging and looking for a successor. The rebbe would like to choose Asher’s father Aryeh as the successor but the rebbe’s successor must have a successor of his own, which could not be Aryeh’s son the painter. The only option is for Aryeh to skip a generation when choosing a successor and choose Asher’s son, Avrumel.

Asher has a tough moral decision to make as he does not believe in the Hasidic culture and was banished by that community, however it would be a great honor for his father and the community and his son is needed to fulfill this role. Asher ultimately chooses to let his son become the future

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