When, however, he commits himself unequivocally as a young adult to the traditions of Western art and begins to paint nudes and crucifixions (as though nudes and crucifixions were the only subject matter of Western art), his family and community turn upon him with the violence and hatred reserved only for representatives of the sitra achra, literally the other side, a kabbalistic euphemism for the satanic and the diabolic. As a child, dabbling in crayons and watercolors, Asher Lev is treated with condescension and indulgence he is considered a mild curiosity. Asher Lev is a uniquely talented artist, born to a Hasidic family otherwise distinguished not only for its piety and scholarship but for service to the rebbe and to the community. In My Name Is Asher Lev, Potok deals with one very special aspect of this dilemma. The schizophrenic trap of living a double life and of speaking in two, often exclusive, languages-the subject of all of Potok’s novels-is precisely what he has been most unsuccessful either in depicting or in attempting to resolve. In fact his novels assume the impossibility of existing in both the religious and the secular spheres-an assumption whose net effect amounts in the end to a kind of apology for assimilationism. Potok’s heroes, however, move from the religious to the secular under the spell of an aimless, even a gratuitous, inevitability.

Historically, the Orthodox-Jewish community, insular by choice and by dint of outside pressure, has gone to extreme lengths in its rejection of the secular, and those Jews who have attempted to lead both religious and secular lives have often fallen prey to a real confusion of identity, a kind of metaphorical schizophrenia. Yet for all the suffering they undergo in this process, and despite the relentless psychological motion through which Potok pushes and pulls them, his characters display no real understanding of the dilemma which they have been chosen to exemplify, which is nothing short of the dilemma of modern religious Judaism itself. The protagonists of Chaim Potok’s novels- The Chosen, The Promise, and now My Name is Asher Lev-follow a common career in the course of the narrative they are seen moving slowly and with agonizing reluctance out of, and away from, the religious community in which they were born and brought up (a highly sentimentalized version of Brooklyn’s Williamsburgh or Crown Heights section twenty years ago) and into secular society.

My name is asher lev by chaim potok