Review: “My Name is Asher Lev”

My name is not Asher Lev, but I too have disappointed my parents with art.

Asher looks and draws and paints. His father frowns. His mother wrings her hands and stares at the window.

Chaim Potok’s ultra-orthodox coming-of-age novel feels like dust and unspoken guilt. It’s a story about a boy torn between an unnameable and unknowable God and his God-given gift, ripped between family and faith, between community and culture, between old and new.

He’s the type of child who ruins family dinners not with jazz metaphors, but with sullen questions. The kind of child who looks at suffering and shrugs his shoulders The kind of child who draws his mother dying slowly in the kitchen light and then asks her to pose for another sketch.

The Rebbe blesses him and exiles him in the same breath, which is really the most efficient way to handle genius. I read and I laughed, not because it was funny, but because I recognised the truths.

What Potok gives us isn’t merely a story. It’s a confessional whispered across the generations.

And somewhere between the charcoal drawings and the parental disapproval, I began to feel the slow burn of recognition. The kind that sits in the chest and doesn’t move.

The kind that reminds you who you are all along.