What a book! This week you can tune in as David, Heidi, and Tim continue to rave about Chaim Potok’s skill, a few particularly miraculous passages, and the culmination of Asher’s coming-of-age. Close Reads is a community-supported endeavor. If you value what we’re up to please subscribe. Thanks!
I would also like to agree with Tim about moving off Facebook. If The Play’s the Thing created a Substack account, I wouldn’t need to check my account anymore.
I agree with Heidi that in the end Asher finds a place where his faith and art meet. I would be interested in more discussion of his final exhibit. It is so painful that the tipping point is the exhibition that is the most honest. He is bearing his soul in the exhibit and demonstrating his intense connection to his family, faith, and community, but no one can see it.
Thanks to Good Reads, again, on my second reading, I did not want to lose my Asher Lev. I have read the sequel long ago and he was not the same for me.
My question is: why is he so cowardly about alerting his parents to what they will find at the exhibition. The warning would have saved them both a shock, or at least mitigate it. He does not seem to realize that his cowardly inaction means a greater trial for everyone, also requiring courage, after its initial suffering.
Is it because he is too immature to understand warning would help them? Is it because he is helplessly overcome? Or because Potok's readers need nearly——but not quite understandable——tension before the story's climax? His lack of warning does make for a better climax, and dénouement, by keeping us waiting to see what he will or will not do, and what would come of it. ——This last would be in its details because we the readers already anticipate his parents’ sufferings, shock if he does not warn.
My take on the novel was that Asher did want to tell them, but he didn’t have the words to communicate his intentions and feelings, which is the problem that has plagued him throughout.
Throughout the novel I kept seeing similarities between Asher and Jack Boughton, especially how he's presented in HOME. Both of them, even as small children, seem to recognize that they are outcast by some function of who they were born as, not mainly due to the choices they make. Why are Robinson and Potok both making the argument (at least, as I see it), that these religious communities can't accept someone different? Why do I feel so much more pity for Jack than for Asher, even though HOME isn't even from his perspective?
Thank you for introducing me to this book! I adored it. I also wanted to agree with Tim that it would be great if the Close Reads conversation migrated off Facebook somehow. It is the only thing that makes me disappointed I am not on Facebook.
I’m listening to this episode and the questions are really great. Many of them are about the relationship between art and “the truth” or the balance required between the aesthetic and moral education required to depict “the truth”, etc. My question is do you believe in the premise of these types of questions--that there is “the truth” as opposed to my truth, your truth, and the likelihood that neither of us really capable of deciphering “the truth” entirely on our own? Isn’t that really what the heart of this novel is all about revealing? That Asher sees his truth and must paint it, but that his community may not be fully willing to look at or receive his version? Isn’t that perhaps why the Rebbe ultimately sends him to Paris, but doesn’t cast him out of the faith--because he is the only one in the novel with the insight to see that no one has a monopoly on the truth, no matter how much we may wound each other with the way we project and reject our own and other peoples’ truths?
I would also like to agree with Tim about moving off Facebook. If The Play’s the Thing created a Substack account, I wouldn’t need to check my account anymore.
I agree with Heidi that in the end Asher finds a place where his faith and art meet. I would be interested in more discussion of his final exhibit. It is so painful that the tipping point is the exhibition that is the most honest. He is bearing his soul in the exhibit and demonstrating his intense connection to his family, faith, and community, but no one can see it.
Thanks to Good Reads, again, on my second reading, I did not want to lose my Asher Lev. I have read the sequel long ago and he was not the same for me.
My question is: why is he so cowardly about alerting his parents to what they will find at the exhibition. The warning would have saved them both a shock, or at least mitigate it. He does not seem to realize that his cowardly inaction means a greater trial for everyone, also requiring courage, after its initial suffering.
Is it because he is too immature to understand warning would help them? Is it because he is helplessly overcome? Or because Potok's readers need nearly——but not quite understandable——tension before the story's climax? His lack of warning does make for a better climax, and dénouement, by keeping us waiting to see what he will or will not do, and what would come of it. ——This last would be in its details because we the readers already anticipate his parents’ sufferings, shock if he does not warn.
My take on the novel was that Asher did want to tell them, but he didn’t have the words to communicate his intentions and feelings, which is the problem that has plagued him throughout.
Throughout the novel I kept seeing similarities between Asher and Jack Boughton, especially how he's presented in HOME. Both of them, even as small children, seem to recognize that they are outcast by some function of who they were born as, not mainly due to the choices they make. Why are Robinson and Potok both making the argument (at least, as I see it), that these religious communities can't accept someone different? Why do I feel so much more pity for Jack than for Asher, even though HOME isn't even from his perspective?
Thank you for introducing me to this book! I adored it. I also wanted to agree with Tim that it would be great if the Close Reads conversation migrated off Facebook somehow. It is the only thing that makes me disappointed I am not on Facebook.
I’m listening to this episode and the questions are really great. Many of them are about the relationship between art and “the truth” or the balance required between the aesthetic and moral education required to depict “the truth”, etc. My question is do you believe in the premise of these types of questions--that there is “the truth” as opposed to my truth, your truth, and the likelihood that neither of us really capable of deciphering “the truth” entirely on our own? Isn’t that really what the heart of this novel is all about revealing? That Asher sees his truth and must paint it, but that his community may not be fully willing to look at or receive his version? Isn’t that perhaps why the Rebbe ultimately sends him to Paris, but doesn’t cast him out of the faith--because he is the only one in the novel with the insight to see that no one has a monopoly on the truth, no matter how much we may wound each other with the way we project and reject our own and other peoples’ truths?