by Chaim Potok
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APPEARANCE
14:38-14:45
IDENTITY
The top one on the stack is My Name is Asher Lev, a book by Chaim Potok, an American rabbi. It’s about a Jewish New Yorker boy who has to fight his father and his community to pursue his own vision of art.
SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE
Here’s the most salient part from the Wiki:
“Art is Asher’s real religion, and not only he, but his mother suffers for it. When Asher tries to portray his mother’s suffering, “[his] search for a motif reveals none powerful enough in [his] own tradition, and so [he] turn[s] to the central theme of suffering in the Christian tradition: crucifixion.””
Just as there’s danger in assigning the most personally satisfying interpretation to all of Kubrick’s religious imagery and invocation in the film (he used Penderecki, so he must be sympathetic to Christ!), there’s danger in assuming a rabbi would write a book about a Jew turning artistically to Christ as a pure work of transgression.
Incidentally, this was one of the hardest books to decode, and I’m tempted to think that the harder to decode, the closer the wink to the heart of Kubrick’s meaning. I could be wrong. But Kubrick was a New York Jew who openly turned away from all monotheism.
Next literary reference: Holding On
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EYE SCREAM 