There's a tag going round Facebook that invites me "to post the covers of 7 books I love or that have stuck with me: no explanation, no review, just the covers." I'm happily engaged in doing so
But when I see the covers of books that my Facebook friends have posted I want to know!
Why is this a book you love, or that has stuck with you?
What is the connection between your reading this particular book and the way you now see the world, or think about yourself, or understand human behaviour?
Was it only for that time in your life or does the book still speak, resonate, carry with it those transformative memories of discovery, reflection or self-understanding?
So I thought I would say a little about one or two of the books I posted. Chaim Potok is a writer I discovered in the 1970's. I had been in John Smith's bookshop, now sadly closed, but a shrine of learning, stories and undiscovered worlds of the mind for those who have known Glasgow these past 50 years and more.
The book I bought was The Chosen, Potok's first bestseller, a wonderful novel about fear and trust, friendship across cultural canyons, and the changes that are part of growing up and sicovering who we are. It was later made into a film with Rod Steiger as the Rebbe, a central character of wisdom and authority throughout these novels about Jewish life in Brooklyn in the decade or two after the Second World War.
I remember as a 21 year old student, first opening this book. I was, sitting upstairs on one of the old green and orange double decker buses, on a wet and foggy afternoon, with the sulphur street lights already on before four o'clock, and the bus slowly making its jerky way from St George's Cross to Gilmorehill. I was transfixed by the intensity and mystery, the narrative pull and the strange world of Hasidic Judaism lived out through the lives of two teenage Jewish boys in Brooklyn.
I have read Chaim Potok's novels ever since. I can't imagine my intellectual and imaginative life without those stories somewhere in the background like one of the backwash tones of a water-colour painting that give the finished picture its depth and texture. He has taught me so much that I needed to know, and was glad to learn. My Name Is Asher Lev is, I think, his masterpiece. The major themes of his writing coalesce in a novel of spiritual intensity and emotional authenticity. The place of the Jew in a post-Holocaust world; the response of different Jewish traditions to living in a culture saturated with the moral assumptions and political ambiguities of Christendom; art as an essential component of human activity and community; the ambivalence of orthodox Jews towards art as image, and painting as making images; and in the context of conflicted art, the crucifixion as an image, unique and essential to understanding Christianity, and yet the devastating truth and reality that it was Jesus the Jew who was crucified; and woven through and through, the place of human suffering as a given in human experience and as a challenge to the benevolence, even the existence, of God. Metaphysics, aesthetics, theodicy and secularism in one story.
All of these strands are made visible on the tapestry pattern, and they are still there though invisible on the back of the tapestry; but, of course,the visible image is only possible to see because of what is not seen. This, for me, is novel writing at its highest artistic expression, and in the mind and words of a man who is rooted in the realities of cultural tensions sometimes so powerful and anguished, that the human being is stretched out with arms wide in both entreaty and embrace.
The central character, Asher Lev, is part of a family in which his parents consider art and the creation of image a violation of the Torah prohibition about making images. His sympathetic uncle becomes both patron and advocate; his parents worry about Asher being excluded from the community; Asher's growing fame and success force the issue of ultimate spiritual and relational loyalties. The climax of the novel brings these unbearable tensions into a conflict that has no obvious resolution, and threatens Asher's entire future as a member of his Jewish family and community.
The title of the novel contains its own ambiguity. Art is a gift, but from whom? Is it from God or from the "sitra achra", the other side? Is art creative or destructive; does it reveal or hide truth; is the compulsion to paint and its inspiration blessing or curse? In religious communities, is the artist a traitor who prefers 'the other side', or one who with courage and self-sacrifice and being true to the gift, "plumbs the depths of the other side in order to make this side a better place in which to live?'"
Few novels are as demanding and as satisfying. It is an astonishing achievement, which sympathetically and critically opens up the life and faith practices of Hasidic Judaism, and its strained relations with other forms of modern Jewish life and faith. All Potok's novels have elements of autobiographical insight. His own uneasy relations with his Hasidic roots, his training as a Rabbi, his cultural and theological worldview, and his empathy with each conflicted character in his stories, drive novels like Asher Lev towards that difficult terrain between cultural integrity and religious identity. The faithful Jew in the modern (and now the postmodern) world seeks to stand somewhere between accommodation which is not a sell out, and counter-cultural Torah obedience which, however devout, does not make living in a place of exile an impossibility.
Comments