In honor of Jewish culture week, Chaim Potok recently spoke about his career as a writer and about the messages that his books are intended to deliver. Potok grew up in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, which he refers to as a “sheltered world”. Potok believes that the Hasids live in their own little world, ignoring the outside as much as possible because there is evil on the outside. But in high school, he decided to expose himself to modern literature and art from outside the Jewish community. When Potok began to explore the outside world, he discovered that among the evil, there is also beauty. “Not everything about the outside world is ugly. Let’s borrow the good things, and, by integrating them with our tradition, enrich ourselves as a result.” (Potok). This seems like a very good theory, but when Potok decided he wanted to become a writer, his parents and teachers strongly disapproved. His mother told him to pick a different career and keep writing as a hobby, and his teachers were worried that Potok would spend time writing instead of studying the Torah and the Talmud. But Potok continued to write, later publishing books and painting pictures that many of the people in his community disapproved of. He still considers himself to be a Hasid, and he feels that he can be a loyal Hasid but still explore the outside world. At his speech during Jewish culture week, Potok stated that he knew that he wanted to become a writer so that he could “use writing to explore I knew not what.” (Potok). It seems that in his writing he explores what happens when the ideas of a subculture clash with the ideas of the greater culture, and what the outcomes are. In his novels The Chosen, My Name Is Asher Lev, and it’s sequel, The Gift Of Asher Lev, Potok wrote certain characters’ lives as the lives he might have chosen to live when the problem of friction between his subculture and the larger culture arose in his early life. The main character in these novels is always very similar to Chaim Potok, but some of the other characters encounter the culture clash problem, and deal with it differently than Potok did.
In My Name Is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev, the main character Asher is a Hasidic Jew living in Brooklyn who has a rare gift for art. The community encourages him to stop drawing because they believe that his gift for drawing is from the devil, or “the other side”. Being unable to ignore the gift, Asher becomes an artist but still calls himself a Hasidic Jew, even though many believe that it is impossible to be both. He paints nudes and crucifixions, which are both very important to his development as an artist, but considered very sinful among the Hasids. After Asher creates paintings that are insulting to the Hasids, the Rebbe, who is the lead rabbi of the Hasids, suggests that Asher move to Paris so that the Hasids have time to calm down after he has shocked them with his artwork. In The Gift Of Asher Lev, the story continues. Asher is married and raising two children in South France. But two decades after he has been banished, when his beloved uncle dies in Brooklyn, he returns with his family to attend the funeral. They had planned on staying for only two weeks, but they end up staying for about seven months because Asher’s wife and children enjoy the company of Asher’s parents and they like the neighborhood in Brooklyn. The Rebbe is now old, and he has no children to succeed him. He chooses Asher’s father to be the next Rebbe, and then Asher’s son will be his successor. Asher is insulted because his father and son will both be Rebbes, but they chose to skip over Asher because of the fact that he is a Hasidic artist. Through Asher being rejected as a Rebbe, Potok shows how he felt when his community rejected him for being a writer. Potok compares his own live to Asher’s, showing how they both decided to turn to the outside world but never lost their roots, then they became outcasts in the eyes of the other Hasids.
In Potok’s novel The Chosen, again he compares himself and his past to that of the main character. A Hasidic Jew named Danny is supposed to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a rabbi, but he begins to be interested in modern literature, especially books about psychology. His father strongly protests, but finally allows Danny to study psychology at a college other than the Hasidic university, which is a very rare occurrence among the Hasids. Again, Potok revisits his past as a Hasidic Jew who was able to appreciate the outside world without abandoning his religion.
In My Name Is Asher Lev, Asher learns about art from his teacher, Jacob Kahn, who is one of history’s best sculptors. Jacob Kahn was raised as a Hasidic Jew, but he soon discovered that he had great talent in sculpting. His love for sculpting overcame his religious life, and he chose to become a secular Jew rather than an orthodox Jew. Chaim Potok could have chosen to abandon his religion like Jacob Kahn did, but he felt to closely tied to his religion, and he did not want to give it up. In The Chosen, Danny’s father wanted him to be a rabbi, but Danny chose to take a different path. Since being a rabbi was “practically a dynasty in the family”, Danny’s father looked to Danny’s little brother to follow in his footsteps and become a rabbi. His brother may not have wanted to be a rabbi, but he feet like he could not disappoint his father since Danny would not fulfill his father’s expectations. Potok could have done what Danny’s little brother did, and conformed to his parents’ wishes. He could have tried to overlook the need he felt to write and lived his life studying the Torah and the Talmud like the other Hasids. But maybe Potok could not ignore his gift for writing, like Asher Lev could not ignore his gift for drawing. It may not have been an option for Potok to ignore his gift, if it was so strong and powerful that he could not help himself from writing.
Out of all the options Potok had as a Hasidic Jew with an extraordinary talent, he feels that he chose the best one. He was successfully able to stay true to his religion and be sheltered from the evil of the outside world, and at the same time able to access the good things in the outer world. In his books, he likes to address the problem of “core-to-core culture conflict”, showing the result of cultures within cultures that hold different beliefs. “Few Jewish writers have emerged from so deep the heart of orthodoxy; fewer still have been able to write about their emergence with such and unforced sympathy for both sides and every participant.” (Philip Toynbee, The New York Times).