A novel my father gave me

When I moved out of home I was 17. I packed my few possessions into the car and my father drove me from Townsville to Brisbane. My father is a very thoughtful giver of gifts, and he gave me his copies of Joe Jackson's Blaze of Glory album, which I had played continuously since I was eleven years old, and Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev. I found Asher Lev deeply moving and it instantly became my favourite book, which it remains to this day. When I re-read it a few years later, the then-frail copy (Dad had owned it for many years) burst apart at the spine, although I kept it, unable to part with it. Last year I found a more recent edition of the novel and read it for a third time, the first novel I read after moving to Sydney, just like Brisbane ten years earlier. I didn't think it possible, but it affected me even more this time. If you have not read any of Potok's novels, a theme he often explores is that of father and son, which he does with passion, eloquence and a profound sadness. I can only liken this to myrelationship with my own father, who finds personal sentiment and feelings hard to express in ways other than his work- which is infused with so much passion, faith, desolation and beauty- and certain gifts, such as Potok's novel, which had affected and inspired him. Messages within messages. After I finished the novel for the third time I was excited to find that Potok had written a sequel later in his life, The Gift of Asher Lev. It continues Asher Lev's story some twenty-five years after the original novel finishes, and it was everything I hoped it might be. Some of the characters of the previous novel had passed with time, and those remained had become richer, fuller, and new characters reflected personalities of friends I love so well. I have not read, whether fiction or not, a better account of the isolation, the raw obsession and the alienation that is the life of the artist. We strive to articulate what things mean, what we were thinking and going through when we were in the throes of the making these things, but it is impossible to fully articulate. We can try, we can come close. But if it were possible, that would be the end of art. Asher Lev's curiousity, His mother's sadness, his father's vigour and rage. Jon Dorman's alcoholic melancholy, Devorah's darkness, Kahn's drive- these all work as ciphers for a life now lost to us- this is as close as we can ever get now. This is it. Don't fuck it up, don't waste it...