The Brooklyn Crucifixion

Chaim Potok wanted to become a painter but life intervened and it was a road not traveled. Instead, he became a writer primarily of well-received novels. He was unusual, as a major Jewish writer in North America at the time, as he was fully immersed in his tradition as a believing, practicing Jew, rather alienated from or even antagonistic to his tradition.

He wrote from within yet not unaware of or ungenerous towards the secular, the intrusion of modernity. It is, in many of his novels, a creative tension between the enclosed but unfolding and sustaining world of Hasidic or Conservative Judaism and the American world beyond that gives his novels their life. It comes alive in the struggles of his characters to make their way - faithful to both tradition and the new. https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-chosen-parenting-and-path-to-heart.html

This is wonderfully depicted in Potok's 'My Name is Asher Lev'. Asher introduces himself at the novel's opening as the creator of scandal. The scandal is to have become a painter of 'The Brooklyn Crucifixions I and II'. They depict his mother, crucified against the domestic setting of his family apartment window, torn between her faithful husband, servant of his Rebbe within Ladover Hasidim, rescuing Jews from Soviet Russia, building yeshiva in Europe for a growing community and advising the Rebbe on matters political; and, her son, the artist, a difficult vocation for an observant Jew to follow, a painter of nudes and now of these contemporary crucifixions.

The crucifixion is the compelling aesthetic form that Asher chooses to shape the intensity of his feeling of love for his parents and his conflict with them, especially his father. In doing so, he presses on an open wound - for the crucifixion is, also, a witness to suffering inflicted on the Jews through centuries of anti-semitism. Asher's own grandfather was murdered by a Russian peasant on the eve of Easter, an ax buried in his skull as a 'Christ killer'.

It is Potok's gift to show how this image emerges from both Asher's biography and the learning of his art. It is his gift to show how this image cannot simply be painted, as therapy perhaps, never to be shown but once entering the world as 'a' truth must be communicated to the public. Art can be ruthless and spares no one neither it subjects nor its producers.

It is Asher's father's contention that art ought to be subject to a wider, communal moral compass but it is Asher's contention that the communal moral compass that any tradition can offer, including the one he follows faithfully, never abandoning his orthodox Judaism, cannot censor the truth-telling of art. Art can be frivolous, faithless and false but to itself, to its own requirements and language, not to those of another world.

This tension is never resolved in the book and is left at its end an open question. The Rebbe can no longer defend Asher to his wider community, he has pained it too deeply, but nor will he expel him, asking merely to put distance between its center in New York and himself as a painter. He leaves to return to Paris.

Throughout Potok is expert at showing forth the development of a precocious talent from its earliest beginnings in childhood drawings to its mentorship by an established artist, a contemporary of Picasso. He is brilliant at enabling you to see what it might be to see like an artist and think through images, allowing the images to emerge, compel before being ordered and arranged. Art is informed by thought but the image is always ahead, eluding interpretation. The image strikes the depths before it reaches the surfaces. It is, also, remarkable how Potok conjures forth paintings that exist only in the author's imagination in such a way that you fully expect to turn a page and see an illustration of them as existing forms!

Ultimately the book is about the role of traditions - Hasidim and art - and how they both impose over-lapping yet different requirements for truth-seeking; and, how finding oneself the carrier of both traditions is an inhabiting that is itself a crucifixion - a suspension between forces tearing apart yet if endured, you might find yourself practicing resurrection - a new birth that might enrich both. Both and a third. The third, the between, is the world that drifts by out of the stream of meaning, indifferent to embodying truth, that finds itself addressed in Potok's art - what are you prepared to live by? What deeply matters? And, if not deepened now, when?