My Name is Asher Lev Analysis

One of the Big Apple's most famous boroughs, Brooklyn is well known for its literary and artistic (and hipster) communities. If you're going to grow up to be a prodigy painter, there's pretty much...

Asher Lev is the star of the show in every way—the novel is named after him, written about the events of his early life, and narrated by him. Unlike a peripheral first person narrator (Nick Carra...

Even though Asher Lev is a fictional character, he's still writing an account of his own life—last time we checked, that's called an autobiography. Add to that the fact that this novel is about A...

Forget about multiple points of view: My Name Is Asher Lev is basically Asher's diary, except instead of writing about who he's got a crush on and what he ate for lunch at school, he's writing abou...

No frills or fancy word-stuff as far as the eye can see. This novel is written in a direct and to-the-point manner, using basic language to directly tell the reader what is going on in the narrativ...

Could this title be about…identity? (Hint: yes, it definitely could.) Think of it as the response to a question: someone's asking "Who are you?" and our heroic protagonist responds, "I am Asher L...

Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.—PicassoQuipped by none other than the famous Picasso, this quote is about how pictures can tell us a lot about the real world. To get a little more...

The ending is pretty tragic, because it's basically Asher being cast out of his community and shunned by his parents. Not a great start to a career, huh?I came out of the apartment house. It was co...

Clear, direct prose—Potok writes in a way everyone can understand and never really tries any fancy stuff.

Baby GeniusThe setup for the novel is pretty basic: Asher Lev is a little kid who can paint and draw like an adult who's already graduated from art school. He's a pint-size Picasso, and he comes fr...

You'd think being a genius painter would be a good thing, but Asher Lev's story is actually pretty tragic. Asher is a gifted young artist living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He loves his family, h...

Chaim Potok started writing when he was sixteen. He once submitted a story to the fancy magazine the Atlantic Monthly, and although the story was rejected, the editor sent back a nice letter asking...

This book is about as unsexy as they come: except for a few times when Rivkeh sort of asks Asher to maybe think of dating a nice Hasidic girl, there's pretty much no mention made of any romantic in...

Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (201.23)Marc Chagall (painter), (31.4)Pablo Picasso (sculptor), (31.9)Josef Stalin (Russian dictator), (56), (87)The Holocaust, (71), (73)Guido Reni (painter), (199-200...