[MLeary]

I recently wrote about My Name is Asher Lev and used the text and some of the circumstances of Potok's career as a model for Christian artists. With all the ambiguities presented by the book, I have found it more helpful than most things written by Christian theologians or critics on the arts. (There are a few things like Escape From Reason that still haunt my thinking about the arts.) Has anyone else here read this book as a practitioner and found themselves agreeing or disagreeing with Asher Lev's various responses to his own circumstances?

[e2c]

It's been a long time since I last read this book - but "Brooklyn Crucifixion" isn't entirely original.

It (along with other things in the book) has a prototype in Marc Chagall's The White Crucifixion:

[Chashab]

I haven't read read but have heard of Asher Lev . . .

I was excited last year when the local Christian university gallery had a Chagall show. I recall it being just some of his drawings, but good nonetheless.

Wish I had more to offer this conversation, but I don't since I haven't read the book!

[MLeary]

Yeah, his nod to the White Crucifixion is one of the bolder parallels Potok draws between Lev and Chagall. To be fair, Chagall is mentioned once or twice in the book by Asher's community as a negative example of a Jewish artist, so he is always looming there in the background. And then there is the period which Lev spends in Paris. Much like Chagall, Lev's artwork changes during this period, growing more confident formally.

But I would hesitate to say that Potok's painting isn't very original, as it did grow uniquely out of Potok's role as writer and artist with a foot in both the hasid and secular communities. I don't think the two paintings speak to the same set of concerns, Chagall's being more closely linked to the pogroms and the self-identification of the Eastern European hasid rebbe as the bearer of his community's suffering and Potok's to something for more domestic, perhaps even intentionally Freudian (as Freud is discussed a bit in Asher Lev, wherein Potok unmasks himself as a bit of a Freud reader).