Technology and Education: Literature, Art History and Images from the World Wide Web

Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev,
Art History, and Images from the World Wide Web

By Alan Warhaftig

The relationship of technology and art in secondary education is a work in progress. I am neither a technologist nor an art teacher, but I do teach at the Los Angeles Unified School District's Visual Arts Magnet and have thought a lot about the place of computers and the internet in K-12 education.
While effective practices for use of computers and the internet in K-12 classrooms have yet to be defined, some uses are of obvious value -- including access to images spanning the entire history of art. I learned just how valuable this could be when I read Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev with a ninth grade English class. (Selected web sites are listed at the end of the article.)

It is the story of a Hasidic Jewish boy in Brooklyn beginning in the 1950s, a community traumatized by the Holocaust and focused on the plight of Jews in Stalin's Soviet Union. Asher Lev is an art prodigy in a community that has no place for modern art and no role for the artist. His father, who travels for the Rebbe and undertakes perilous missions to rescue Jews from the USSR, regards Asher's art as silly. He wants his son to excel at Torah and in the academic subjects.

While Asher's father is disapproving, his mother is more understanding, though she would like him to paint pretty pictures rather than the troubling images he customarily produces. The Ladover Rebbe understands that Asher's gift is too powerful to ignore, and prevails on Asher's parents to allow a famous artist, Jacob Kahn, to be Asher's teacher.

I had the idea that our students at the Magnet Center for Visual Arts might really like My Name is Asher Lev. Our students come to us interested in art, but many tend to underachieve in academics. Sound like Asher Lev? The parents of some of our kids don't understand why they spend so much time drawing. Sound like Asher Lev?

I happened to have one period of ninth grade English last spring, so I decided to teach the novel with an eye to develop it as core literature for our program. I'm pleased to report that the kids really enjoyed the novel.

One of the greatest challenges in our program, which is based on making art, is how to educate students about the history of art. You know the story - there aren't enough hours in the day. To my surprise, My Name is Asher Lev turned out to be an excellent vehicle to expose students to a number of artists and key ideas in art history.

This began with a scene when Asher is at Jacob Kahn's beach house in Provincetown, just looking at the landscape. He turns to his mentor and says, "Now I understand the sunlight in paintings by Hopper." Kahn "gazed at the houses along the dunes. 'Yes,' he said, 'That is Hopper's white sunlight. One day you will understand the sunlight in Monet and Van Gogh and Cézanne.'"

My students know anime and advertising art, but I would be surprised if a ninth grader knew Edward Hopper. So I went to cyberspace and found a Hopper painting, Corn Hill, that was perfect for that moment in the novel. (See sources at end of article.) One painting is not sufficient to introduce Hopper, so I also brought in two other paintings, including Nighthawks. I downloaded the images as .jpgs and printed them onto photo paper at 1440 dots per inch on my inexpensive inkjet printer, and they came out looking as if they had been professionally printed. These made it onto my bulletin boards with relevant quotes from the novel. The juxtaposition of images and texts proved especially powerful.

The next step was to find sunlit paintings by Monet, Van Gogh, and Cézanne, to give reality to the names mentioned by Jacob Kahn. When Asher first became Jacob Kahn's student, he was assigned to study Guernica and a painting by Guido Reni, Massacre of the Innocents. He was told that if he could not find a reproduction of the Reni painting, he should study Poussin's painting of the same subject. Most of the students were unfamiliar with Guernica, so I saw another opportunity. Picasso, Reni and Poussin all went up on the bulletin boards.The kids were fascinated by the paintings and, each day when they entered the classroom, immediately looked to see what had been added.

Asher was treated cruelly by his fellow Yeshiva students - and by some of his teachers. They not only did not appreciate his gift; they thought it came from the Other Side, the Sitra Achra, the devil. One day Asher fell asleep in class and was upbraided by the teacher in front of the class. The teacher scornfully addressed him as "Rembrandt Lev" and made a nasty pun: "If you fall asleep and people say sha sha (meaning "Quiet, you'll wake him"), I will make your life bitter like gall gall."

Well, what might otherwise have been a passing reference became an opportunity to introduce students to both Rembrandt and Chagall. Up they went onto the bulletin boards, which were becoming crowded.

As Asher went to museums and studied with Jacob Kahn, he became increasingly aware of the traditions of painting and its iconography - a sophisticated idea that is well within the reach of our students. I'll leave you with two examples. The first takes place in Jacob Kahn's studio in Manhattan:

Week after week, I painted my mother and myself together, though I did not always give the mother and the child our faces. Jacob Kahn watched me in silence. One Sunday in June, he stood behind me as I worked on a huge canvas of a mother and child seated on a mound of grass beneath tall leafy trees. I heard him say softly, "Asher Lev, do you have any idea what you are doing?" I told him I was painting a mother and her child.

The phrase "Madonna and Child" is never mentioned, but I downloaded several wonderful paintings and up they went - along with a photograph of a certain pop culture diva and her daughter. This allowed us to explore the idea of tradition and see how contemporary popular culture both plays upon it and extends it.
Another key tradition of western art is paintings of the crucifixion. When Asher first visited museums, the crucifixion paintings were very troubling to him and cut against his religious training. As a young artist, it was nonetheless important for him to draw from those paintings, both literally and figuratively. Years later, as a young adult in Paris, the ultimate extension was Brooklyn Crucifixion, a painting which increased his stature as an artist and brought unendurable pain to his family and community. As Asher observed, "I created this painting - an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment."
If the art is available, thanks to the internet, why would anyone teach My Name is Asher Lev without the art, which illuminates the novel? LAUSD's reading initiatives will fail if reading is not a rich experience and students are not motivated to read for any reason other than obedience to authority. In a larger sense, we must remember that our instructional goal is to educate human beings, not just raise Stanford 9s - and art is an essential element of a well-rounded education, not to mention the reason why the work we do is more than just a job.
Web Links:

The Asher Lev Page
http://honors.udayton.edu/honors/honors_authors/potok/

NIcholas Pioch's WebMuseum
http://www.ibiblio.org/louvre/

The Thinker Imagebase
http://www.thinker.org/fam/index_thinker.asp

American Memory
http://memory.loc.gov/

Alan Warhaftig's 1998 Technology Focus Group Discussion Paper
http://www.les.appstate.edu/courses/integrate/lausd_paper.htm

About the Author:
Alan Warhaftig teaches American Literature and co-coordinates the Fairfax Magnet Center for Visual Arts in the Los Angeles Unified School District. A graduate of Stanford University and a National Board Certified Teacher, Mr. Warhaftig co-founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Music for Educators professional development program. He has organized a number of teacher professional development programs and is a leading skeptic about the use of computers and the internet in K-12 education. He can be reached via E-mail: warhaftig@alumni.stanford.org

2000 by Alan Warhaftig. All Rights Reserved.
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