My Name is Asher Lev

 

I first read Chaim Potok's classic novel My Name is Asher Lev in the early 1980s when my mum was studying it for HSC. The copy that I found in Savers is inscribed with the name Jo Reidy 1979; a Google search reveals that Joanne Reidy (about the right vintage) now works for the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, and has had a great career in education, co-authoring several textbooks. So that's pretty cool! She was certainly very diligent in marking significant passages and underlining good essay quotes -- in pencil, of course.

My Name is Asher Lev is perhaps the archetypal Chaim Potok novel, where the conflict between the individual and their community is presented at its starkest and most painful. Young Asher Lev, a member of a Hasidic sect in New York, with parents who spend their lives in utmost danger in Eastern Europe supporting the Jewish faith, has a unique artistic gift. This is a portrait of the creative artist as a genius helpless in the grip of their own talent, and Asher Lev ends up following his gift quite ruthlessly and paying the ultimate price in being cast out from his people.

Asher Lev starts slowly; it's not until about halfway through that the drama really picks up pace and then brings it home with a wallop. It really is Potok's masterpiece.