As Potok once said about Picasso's Guernica, "That's the redemptive power of art. The novel is an explanation, a defense, for a long session in demythology.
I am indeed, in some way, all of those things. a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years. Yet, he went on, "I am an observant Jew." The result is that I am labeled a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflictor of shame. The essential conflict is revealed in the first pages of the book: My name is Asher Lev, the Asher Lev, about whom you have read in newspapers and magazines, about whom you talk so much at your dinner affairs and cocktail parties, the notorious and legendary Lev of the Brooklyn Crucifixion.
The epigraph to My Name is Asher Lev, "Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth," a quote from Pablo Picasso, is a kind of metaphor, one of the controlling ideas of the book.
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