My Name Is Asher Lev (1972) is about an observant Jew's confrontation with Western Art. The central metaphor of The Promise (1969) is about the confrontation with text criticism. The baseball game, for example, is a metaphor for a kind of combat, for a war, of spiritual as well as material differences. The central metaphor of The Chosen (1967) is combat of various kinds, about two components of the core of Judaism, or any tradition, one component looking inward and one looking outward to solve its problems. In his many novels and in his essays, Potok tried to explore how people confront ideas different from their own. What will happen, he concluded, is "very difficult to discern, but it is something that will come out of our fusion with the best of Western humanism unless we're inundated by the periphery of things Jewish and things secular" (Kauvar 87). But, as a result of being in the cores of two cultures simultaneously and having to fight the battle of how to fuse them, we are in a between period. In a 1956 interview, Chaim Potok said, "Today is the first time in the history of the Jewish people that the Jews actually constitute a fundamental element of our umbrella civilization" (Hinds 89).
The artist, in strange fashion, redeems the horror of reality through the power of his or her art" (Kauvar 70). As Potok once said about Picasso's Guernica, "That's the redemptive power of art. The novel is an explanation, a defense, for a long session in demythology. I am indeed, in some way, all of those things. a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years. Yet, he went on, "I am an observant Jew." The result is that I am labeled a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflictor of shame. The essential conflict is revealed in the first pages of the book: My name is Asher Lev, the Asher Lev, about whom you have read in newspapers and magazines, about whom you talk so much at your dinner affairs and cocktail parties, the notorious and legendary Lev of the Brooklyn Crucifixion. The epigraph to My Name is Asher Lev, "Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth," a quote from Pablo Picasso, is a kind of metaphor, one of the controlling ideas of the book.
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