Chaim Potok

For Davita Chandal, growing up in the New York of the 1930s and '40s is an experience of joy and sadness. Her loving parents, both fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely bright hope of a new and better world. But as the deprivations of war and depression take a ruthless toll, Davita unexpectedly turns to the Jewish faith that her mother had long ago abandoned, finding there both a solace for her questioning inner pain and a test of her budding spirit of independence.From the Paperback edition.

Translation of "The ark builder", one of three stories published in Old men at midnight.

Asher Lev, un bambino di Brooklyn, ha la pittura nel sangue. Tutto nelle sue mani diventa disegno, immagine, colore: la casa, la madre, il padre, gli amici, la strada. Ma in una cultura come quella ebraica, tradizionalmente ostile alla rappresentazione figurativa, la vocazione di Asher è destinata a creare difficoltà e discussioni, e alla fine una drammatica rottura. Asher incontra un maestro, va in Europa, a Firenze, Roma, Parigi... Quando torna a New York, è ormai un pittore affermato. Decide di misurarsi con un tema fondamentale nella storia della pittura, la Crocifissione, scatenando un nuovo conflitto con il padre e con il suo ambiente d'origine. In Il mio nome è Asher Lev, Potok continua ad affrontare le tematiche dei suoi grandi romanzi: il confronto tra la modernità e la tradizione, il rapporto tra la fede e l'arte, il contrasto tra l'individuo e i diversi gruppi di cui fa parte, per nascita o per scelta.

Fifteen thousand children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp. Fewer than one-hundred survived. In these poems and pictures drawn by the young inmates, we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their hopes and fears, their courage and optimism. 60 color illustrations.

This is a previously-published edition of ISBN 9781400031047. Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day, and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels, even when it leads him to blasphemy. In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination. Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time, his gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant, a modern classic.

It is the now-classic story of two fathers and two sons and the pressures on all of them to pursue the religion they share in the way that is best suited to each. And as the boys grow into young men, they discover in the other a lost spiritual brother, and a link to an unexplored world that neither had ever considered before. In effect, they exchange places, and find the peace that neither will ever retreat from again. . . .

Twenty years have passed for Asher Lev. He is a world-renowned artist living in France, still uncertain of his artistic direction. When his beloved uncle dies suddenly, Asher and his family rush back to Brooklyn--and into a world that Asher thought he had left behind forever....

“A superb mirror of a place, a time, and a group of people who capture our immediate interest and hold it tightly.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer Young Reuven Malter is unsure of himself and his place in life. An unconventional scholar, he struggles for recognition from his teachers. With his old friend Danny Saunders—who himself had abandoned the legacy as the chosen heir to his father's rabbinical dynasty for the uncertain life of a healer — Reuven battles to save a sensitive boy imprisoned by his genius and rage. Painfully, triumphantly, Reuven's understanding of himself, though the boy change, as he starts to approach the peace he has long sought…