While all of the above seems quite heavy and depressing there were plenty of moments of levity, such as when Asher has to paint his first nude, a task sprung on him by his blunt and crotchety (and awesome) art mentor. In Florence, the works of Michelangelo have a profound effect on Asher. As he travels in Italy and Paris, he meets with some of his father ’s Ladover connections and is moved to see the flourishing yeshivos Aryeh has established throughout his career. He decides to settle in Paris for a while. For the first time in years, he begins painting his mythic ancestor and scenes from his Brooklyn neighborhood. He also reflects on his mother ’s lifelong anguish, as she felt pulled between himself, Aryeh, and her own fears and desires. He works on two paintings, both of them portraying the Brooklyn apartment window in a way that evokes the crucifixion. In the second painting, he portrays his mother bound to the cruciform shape, her head divided into three segments looking upward and at the figures of himself and his father.

Asher spends the summer with Jacob Kahn at his beach house in Provincetown. It is a joyous summer dedicated to painting. Asher maintains his religious observance while there. Toward the end, Jacob Kahn withdraws for a few days, in an awful mood.

Church Times/Canterbury Press:

As an author, Vasbo is known for her non-fiction writing as well as several prize-winning novels, a poetry collection, and short stories. In the 1980s, she spent four years living in Yorkshire during her marriage to Leo Thomsen, a Danish seamen’s chaplain. Hildas Sang (translated as The Song of Hild) was written shortly after her return to Denmark. There was a sensation of something tearing wide apart inside me and a steep quivering climb out of myself. Asher Lev introduces himself as “the notorious and legendary Lev of the Brooklyn Crucifixion.” He is also “an observant Jew.” Because Asher’s dual identity has generated gossip and myths, he will now offer a defense of himself. The woman who helps out around the Lev household when Lev's mother is ill. She is often reprimanding Lev for not acting like the Ladover version of a "good" boy. Lev often seems to find his interactions with her annoying and frustrating. Anna Schaeffer Vibeke Vasbo was born on the Danish island of Als. She studied German and English at the University of Copenhagen before working as an assistant nurse, crane operator, and, later, teacher. She was also an active member of various women’s and LGBT-rights organisations.

However, despite his resistance to moving abroad and an early lag in his Torah studies, Asher remains a faithfully observant Ladover Jew throughout the story. He continues to practice his faith alongside his studies with Kahn, and even reconciles his artistic pursuits with his community obligations. In Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Asher spends his summers studying with Jacob Kahn, he never neglects his spiritual practices: “Those mornings, the beach was my synagogue and the waves and gulls were audience to my prayers […] And sometimes the words seemed more appropriate to this beach than to the synagogue on my street.” Asher’s religious identity is not only intact in his new artistically-focused environment, but it thrives in new ways within those surroundings. Asher describes a year of devout religious observance—even after his parents have left him behind in New York and he’s immersed in his studies with Kahn—culminating in Simchas Torah, when the Ladover Jews dance joyfully with Torah scrolls. He pulls Kahn (who, as a nonobservant Jew, is merely looking on) into the dance: “His small dark skullcap was as awkward on his head as was the grasp of his fingers upon the Torah. But we held it together and we danced.” Asher’s religious commitment remains unwavering and heartfelt, even when external influences would seem to threaten it; and he doesn’t see his art and his religious faith as worlds that cannot touch. To the contrary, he actively tries to draw them together. Asher even comes to see himself as partnering with his “ mythic ancestor”—who’d previously been an ominous fixture in his dreams—in setting the world right: “He came to me then, my mythic ancestor […] [saying,] Who dares drain the world of its light? My Asher, my precious Asher, will you and I walk together now through the centuries?” The mythic ancestor is far from being Asher’s adversary, angry at him for wasting his time on art. The ancestor now seems to summon Asher to indispensable work for the sake of the world, and in continuation of family tradition, not in competition with it. You should make the world pretty, Asher.” What should and should not be depicted in art, do you think? Asher Lev is the son of an important emissary for the Rebbe of their community of Crown Heights in Brooklyn. In his work, he builds safe places for teaching the Torah throughout Europe. His way of life encompasses Judaism and the ways of the world do not match with his religious views. Asher is an art prodigy so throughout there is much about art and its technique as well as its history. Asher’s need for drawing and painting is evident but a part of me didn’t really understand this need. However, Asher’s talent is more than just a hobby or something that he does for fun, it is an innate part of him, a definer of his being, something that he didn’t really have control of himself but as if an insatiable appetite within him for his passion took him over. I kept re writing this review but realised it was pointless to try and convey how I felt, but It has only happened to me a couple of times before, when you read a book and you feel it somehow touches your soul. That is how I felt reading about Asher Lev - a moment in time that I just needed to read undisturbed and fully appreciate the magic of Potok’s masterpiece.Then I thought it was like The Namesake and the struggle between parents and children and different generations. Asher è un bambino speciale. Vive il mondo con gli occhi, sente il mondo attraverso lo sguardo. E la matita si muove fra le sue mani inconsapevolmente, è un istinto primordiale il suo. Disegna e disegnando vive. Si astrae da tutto, non si cura di nulla se non delle sue linee, dei suoi colori, della forma che le sue mani danno al suo sguardo. Nonostante tutto Asher è inglobato nel suo mondo di osservante ebreo chassidico, con un padre che viaggia per il mondo per creare scuole in cui insegnare e far rivivere le tradizioni ebree, e una madre con il cuore spezzato che vive aspettando, prima un marito alla finestra che torni dai suoi viaggi, poi un figlio, e che si trova in mezzo ai due, ai loro contrasti, al loro modo diverso, eppure così carnale e umano di vedere la vita. It is awkward living with his parents again. Asher's parents are unhappy when he includes nudes in his next show. Asher tries to explain art to his father, but it is a miserable failure and they get frustrated with each other. Asher begins to plan a trip to Europe.

Questa volta compare un personaggio femminile vero, non solo un bozzetto: è la mamma di Asher, giovanissima, tenerissima, distrutta dalla morte del fratello che le fatto da padre e madre, essendo rimasta orfana da bambina, donna colta e studiosa. In what ways does the shadow of the Second World War and, in particular, the Holocaust hang over the characters in My Name is Asher Lev? Why is it so important for Asher’s artworks to be “complete”? How else does the notion of completeness appear in the novel? Asher has discovered in the image of the crucified Christ the most sublime expression of the agony he has seen in his mother, torn as she is between him and his father. He knew he had to paint this, even though it would be hurtful to his family and community.

Asher explains that he is descended from a “ mythic ancestor,” the estate manager for a wealthy Russian nobleman. The nobleman had burned a village and killed people during a fit of drunkenness. After that, Asher’s ancestor began to travel, supporting Jewish scholarship and learning everywhere he went. As a child, Asher was taught that non-Jews—people of the sitra achra—behave like the Russian nobleman. Observant Jews, on the other hand, work to “bring the Master of the Universe into the world,” like Asher’s ancestor. Asher’s grandfather, an ingenious scholar, had also traveled as an emissary of the Ladover Rebbe, until he was brutally murdered by a Russian peasant. Unlike any of these ancestors, Asher, born in 1943 in Brooklyn, has a gift for drawing. Although Asher puts his art above every other consideration, he remains, in all other respects, a loyal and observant member of his community. When Asher is young, many warn him that his art will conflict with his Ladover Jewish religious identity and community. After Asher sketches in a sacred book, his mashpia cautions him: “Many people feel they are in possession of a great gift when they are young. But […] [o]ne does with a life what is precious not only to one’s own self but to one’s own people. That is the way our people live, Asherel. Do you understand me?” In other words, even if there is not anything inherently bad about Asher’s artistic gift, that gift must be subordinate to the needs of the community. Asher’s mother, Rivkeh, tries to be supportive, but a museum visit persuades her that Asher’s passion will expose him to images that are inappropriate for a religious Jew: “[Your painting has] taken us to Jesus. And to the way they paint women. Painting is for goyim, Asher. [Observant] Jews don’t draw and paint […] What would the Rebbe say if he knew we were in the museum?” In Rivkeh’s view, Asher’s art inevitably places him on a collision course with the values of his community. Asher’s Rebbe (a religious leader of the Ladover Jews) places him under the tutelage of a Jewish artist, Jacob Kahn. Even the nonobservant Kahn asks Asher, “Do you begin to understand what you are going to be doing to yourself? […] You are entering a religion called painting. […] Its way of life is goyisch and pagan. In the entire history of European art, there has not been a single religious Jew who was a great painter.” It’s not that art is merely a distraction from Asher’s religious obligations and identity, argues Kahn; art will establish itself as a direct rival to his religion, with directly competing demands and values.