Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. You draw with too much love." But Potok, as in The Chosen, is able to sustain a singleminded gloomy intensity and will attract the same audience, assisted by the Literary Guild selection.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. However the visual arts seem somewhat out of his reach and the creative impulse is articulated by Jacob in the declaratives of the Hemingway era: "I will teach you how to handle rage in color and line.
When Potok is writing of Crown Heights - the enclosed Hasidic structure of circumscribed piety, hierarchical certainties, and the close weave of obligations and dependencies - his work has a moving acuity. But his tormented mother is a weary voyager between the two, and it is Asher's knowledge of her suffering - a clearer vision of his own identity and an understanding of the many masks of atonement - that produce the masterpieces, two Crucifixions, which bring him both fame and exile. When it becomes obvious Asher cannot assume a preordained role, the Rebbe gives him a cautious blessing and Asher studies painting with Jacob Kahn, an elderly artist, while Asher's father deepens the silence which divides them. But Asher, while haunted by his mythic ancestor calling him to follow his father, is also driven by his own compulsion to draw and paint.
He helps to establish schools, consolidate communities in Europe and to rescue Jews from Soviet oppression. Asher's father exists, as did his fathers before him, within the rituals of prayer and sacrifice and does "good deeds" as the Brooklyn-based emissary of a Landovian Rebbe. This features the agonizing young years of Asher Lev caught between the imperatives of his Hasid family's dynastic destiny and the forbidden visions of the goyische world of art.
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