In My Name is Ashers Lev, Potok, uses Asher, the main character in the novel, as the character who is most affected when his mother leaves. Asher has a gift for drawing. When Asher is asked to move from Brooklyn to Vienna, he is very deviant and refuses to move. He also does not study torah and paints instead. The family is convinced that his artistic ability has come from the "other side". Asher's artistic ability begins to tear the family apart. This results in; his father and mother moving to Vienna and leaving Asher to live with his unlce.
In the novel, What Girls Learn, by Karin Cook a family is torn by heart ache and sadness when two girls find out their mother has breast cancer. Tilden and her sister Elizabeth are forced to grow up without the aid of their mother because of her illness. When the cancer results in death, the girls must then learn how to cope with the loss of their mother and move on.
The memoir Angela's Ashes relives the life of Frank McCourt, the author. Living in poverty as an Irish Catholic, Frank sees how his father's drinking habits tear the family apart. The money that his father makes goes toward alcohol instead of food for the family. This results in his mother's depression and the death of his siblings.
The main crises that tears the families apart in the books Angela's Ashes, My Name is Asher Levand What Girls Learn, is the absence of a mother. In Angela's Ashes, Frank's mother becomes distant and depressed after the death of her child, Margaret. One of the neighbors helps Frank's mother through the depression. "She helps my mother sit up against the wall. Mam seems smaller. She won't let my hand go and I'm frightened because I've never seen her like this before." In My Name is Asher Lev, Asher's mother shuts herself off from the family when she finds out that her brother has died. "There had been a special kind of relationship between my mother and her brother, and his death almost destroyed her. She had always been thin/ she returned from the hospital skeletal. At first, I did not know who she was... for the first few days, she remained in her bed"(Potok 21). In What Girls Learn, when the girls find out their mother has cancer, she does not talk to htme and instead spends time alone in her room away from society. "Alone in my room, I dug through boxes of old photographs, pinning pictures of Mama edge-to-edge on my corkboard. She was so beautiful in every picture-a shy, knowing smile, her hair shining around her face-I was quickly taken back to before she was sick. Then, I would get a pang of fear, a little worry growing in my gut, a question I wanted to ask, some story I needed to hear and run dry-mouthed down to her room, only to find her, a shadow of herself, dull and groggy" (Cook 271).
In the novels What Girls Learn and My Name is Asher Lev and the memior, Angela's Ashes it is evident that the absence of a mother can tear a family apart. When death or illness enters and takeds the sole person that keep everything moving-things fall apart, the family is traumatized and the children are devastated. Without a mother, communication ceases and ties are severed. The one person that could answer questions or be a best friend, is now life-less and shut away from the family.