asher lev

To the teacher: My Name is Asher Lev is the story of a young boy whose gift for drawing leads him on a course that sets him apart from family and friends. The book belongs to the classic literary genre of the Bildungsroman, or novel of education, in which a young person, through struggle with his environment, learns about the ways of the world and gains an identity. In this novel, the Hasidic community of …

…sympathetic to Christianity, but because he believes that the Jewish artistic tradition does not have a sufficient vocabulary with which he can express his feelings. He elects to live with these contradictions. As he imagines telling his uncle (with little hope of being understood), "You will see strange crucifixions painted by a Ladover Hasid who prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olam and loves his parents and the Rebbe" (p. 341).