Asher Lev

Unfair Decisions (Revised Asher Lev Prompt)

Throughout life we as a society undergo potential choices that can obviously determine our future. In My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, Potok exemplifies how people undergo changes and choices that, nevertheless, will adjust their future by altering the relation between people and their society. However the motives for people choosing choices that will adjust their future and their relations with others is fuel by their want to achieve their dream. Asher and Rivkeh Lev undergo problems and choices that will affect their relations with their family and society because they were chasing their dreams.

Asher Lev becomes torn in half between his family and his passion for painting. Asher’s love and skills for painting consistently grow while the relation with his family is slowly eroding away into nothing. His passion for art was at first just a hobby, of doodling but soon became a potential profession under the help of Jacob Kahn. Asher wished to become a great artist in a strictly orthodox Jewish community and family, but Asher planted a seed of problems by forgetting his roots, religion, and family. Asher began to nurture the seed of problems by letting art quickly take over his life to where he, “could not remember having drawn” (Potok 123). Once his art became uncontrollable Asher left the boundaries of the Jewish community resulting in the rift between him and his family. The quote by Langston Hughes best explains the situation of Asher is encased in. Asher was successfully able to mend the broken-winged bird of his dreams, by sticking with his dream of and practicing under his mentor Jacob Kahn until he was holding his own art shows. Asher was, in term, flying his dream and forgetting the “barren field frozen with snow” (Hughes) of his life with his parents and his religion. Overall Asher left his Jewish culture and lifestyle for his passion of art.

The other character portray through potential decision which...