The Gift of Asher Lev

  I wrote his name on the blackboard. Over the name I drew in a single continuous line with blue chalk the face of Miss Sullivan. It leaped, instantly recognizable, from the chalk onto the black-board. There was a stirring throughout the room, and murmurs of surprise and recognition.

  “The second is by an artist named Modigliani.”

  I spelled out his name on the blackboard and in red chalk drew Miss Sullivan, high-necked and with exaggeratedly high cheek-bones and almond-shaped eyes, emphasizing through the cylindricality of her neck the charm and refinement I sensed in her bearing.

  “The third artist is Picasso. How many of you have heard of Picasso?” Hands went up. “Good. Almost as many as have heard of Asher Lev.” Rav Greenspan joined in the general laughter.

  I wrote the Spaniard’s name on the blackboard, and I drew Miss Sullivan in ochre as he had once painted Gertrude Stein: solid, sculpted, Iberian, a creature more stone than flesh but with eyes that penetrated into the farthest future. I looked over my shoulder and saw Miss Sullivan staring open-mouthed at the drawing. You thought of inviting me here, Miss Sullivan. The power of art, Miss Sullivan. On your young and lovely flesh.

  “Three different ways of seeing the same person,” I said. “It makes life richer to be able to see in so many different and exciting ways. Just as the Rebbe and Ladover Hasidus make Torah and Yiddishkeit richer.”

  I picked up the board eraser from the ledge and raised it over the first of the drawings. There were sudden gasps behind me, and someone cried out, “Oh, no!” I put the eraser down and turned to the class.

  There was a long, uneasy silence. I was sweating heavily. A mist seemed to have entered the room, filling the air and blurring the faces and dulling the overhead fluorescents. I felt gritty with the chalk on my fingers.

  “Maybe this is a good time to ask questions,” I said.

  A moment went by. A girl with glasses too wide for her thin face slowly raised a hand.

  “When did you start to draw?” she asked.

  “When I was about four or five.”

  “I mean to seriously draw.”

  “When I was about four or five.”

  I pointed to the girl who sat in front of Rocheleh. She had wispy brown hair and a fair-skinned freckled face. She wanted to know where my ideas came from.

  “Everywhere. The street, the house where I live, the people I meet, this classroom. Everywhere.”

  A round-faced, heavyset girl waved a hand at me. “Are you a Ladover Hasid?” she wanted to know.

  The pause was longer this time, heavier. Rav Greenspan shifted slightly on his feet. The two adult women glanced at each other. The gray-bearded man had removed a pad from his jacket pocket and appeared to be taking notes.

  “I was born a Ladover Hasid,” I said. “I studied Ladover Hasidus. In Nice, which is the city in France near where my family and I live, I pray in a Ladover synagogue on holidays and sometimes on Shabbos. We don’t live within walking distance of the synagogue, and so we move in with friends whenever we go there to pray. I am a follower of the Rebbe. I believe in the future of Ladover Hasidus.”

  The girl said, before I could call on anyone else, “My father said you do things that are against the Torah. You make images that are bad, like what Rocheleh told us about yesterday.”

  A pronounced stirring of bodies and a murmur of voices, a palpable uncase, washed through the room. There was a general subdued nodding of heads. Rocheleh threw the girl an angry look. Miss Sullivan stood very still, her head slightly raised in what I thought might be a faint gesture of defiance. The gray-bearded man was writing steadily in his pad.

  “The Torah says you should not make images for the purpose of worship,” I said.

  “It says, ‘You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below.’ “The girl was reading the verse from a piece of paper on her desk. She had come prepared.

  “We may not make them for the purpose of worship,” I repeated. “Doesn’t the verse continue? Doesn’t it say, ‘You shall not bow down to them or serve them’? There were images in the First Temple, the temple of King Solomon. There were images in ancient synagogues. There are images in prayer books and in Pesach Haggadahs.”

  “Not the kind you make,” a high voice called out from somewhere in the middle of the room.

  “I’m trying to make new images.”

  “Why?” the same voice called out. It belonged to a thin, angry-faced girl with short blond hair.

  “Because he’s an artist,” another girl said.

  “It’s against the Torah to make such images,” another girl said.

  “It’s stealing time from the study of Torah,” yet another called out.

  “So is this English class,” another girl said loudly.

  Remarks flew about the room. The girls were talking to one another as if I were not there. I was losing control of the class.

  Rav Greenspan moved away from the rear wall and stood just behind the fifth row of chairs. Miss Sullivan took a step away from the wall of windows toward the desk. The two seated women looked at each other nervously. The gray-bearded man stopped writing and glanced over his shoulder at Rav Greenspan.

  My only weapons now: the stick of chalk and my trembling fingers and the image that leaped into my mind. I went quickly to the blackboard and began to draw a portrait. Silence invaded the room as soon as I completed the outline of the features, and when I drew the eyes, the stillness was so pervasive I could hear plainly the beating of my heart and the drumming of the rain on the windows. I finished the drawing and put down the chalk and faced the class.

  “Is this also stealing time from the study of Torah?”

  The silence went on. The girls sat staring at the face on the blackboard. I saw Miss Sullivan faintly smile. Rav Greenspan glanced at his watch, looked at me, shook his head, then looked at the blackboard. Everyone in the room was staring at the face on the blackboard: the face of the Rebbe as he had looked many years before. Across the length of the room, I saw the eyes of the two women and the gray-bearded man and Rav Greenspan, and read the sudden spontaneous longing that reached from them toward the portrait, and felt myself shiver.

  A hand went up; wispy brown hair, dark intense eyes, thin pale lips, creamy complexion highlighted by touches of pink. “Rocheleh explained to us yesterday why you made those pictures of the cruci—the cruci—you know what I mean. What I don’t understand is why you had to use that picture for suffering. My father says you could have used something else, something more Jewish, like the binding of Isaac.”

  There was a general nodding of heads. The gray-bearded man was writing in his pad. The two women smiled at each other. Rav Greenspan moved back to the wall and stood with his arms folded across his chest. I tried to imagine the discussions that must have taken place in the homes of these children the night before when they had told their parents I would be coming to the school next day. Asher Lev, Ladover Hasid. Asher Lev, troublemaker. Asher Lev, poisoner of children’s minds. Why had they invited me? Why had they let me in the door?

  “The binding of Isaac?” I said. “Is that really a theme for suffering?”

  Using variously colored chalks, I drew a young boy bound on an altar upon a pyre of wood, and a bearded man towering above him, long-bladed knife in his upraised arm, and, vaguely visible in the background, the majestic head of a ram. I worked quickly, changing chalks, feeling the hardness of the blackboard, barely conscious of the flaking of the soft chalks, shading colors into one another by rubbing the bottom of my right middle finger across the surface of the slate board. I drew the boy with his eyes wide open, his thin neck arched back, throat exposed to the poised blade; the bearded man anguished and determined, his free hand clutching his chest in a gesture both pitying and purposeful—all of it frozen by the chalk and the work of my fingers. This is the Cave of Now, I told myself in strangely incoherent fashion. A drawing. A painting. Capture something forever.
Can see it all at one time. No future, no past. Only a perpetual this-moment, only nowness. It was done and I turned and they were all staring at it—the students, Miss Sullivan, Rav Greenspan, the women and the gray-bearded man—staring at the drawing in colored chalks on the blackboard. I looked carefully at the drawing and saw the faces I had made and was suddenly bewildered and dismayed and wondered if Rocheleh had looked closely, too, and I moved in front of the drawing to conceal the faces as best I could. With swift movements of my fingers I redrew the faces. It took less than one minute. Then I turned to the class.

  “The binding of Isaac is about a man who believes so deeply in the Master of the Universe that he is willing to sacrifice to Him his only son. What does that have to do with the theme of long and lonely suffering?”

  Closed faces gazed at me; silent lips, silent eyes; and the rain on the tall windows of the room.

  “That’s the reason I made those paintings.”

  I doubted they understood what I was saying. Sixty-year-olds had not understood it over the years. And these were eleven-year-olds. I was sweating heavily. What a waste of everyone’s time! I picked up the eraser and turned toward the blackboard.

  A gasp went through the room like a wind, followed by a spontaneous, many-voiced “No!”

  Startled, I put down the eraser and faced the class.

  Rav Greenspan was coming quickly up the side of the room near the windows. He stood next to me.

  “We thank Mr. Lev very much for his words and his art. The class is over.”

  I glanced at Rocheleh. She sat silhouetted against the windows; her face looked grainy, its features indiscernible. I nodded to Miss Sullivan and followed Rav Greenspan out of the classroom. In his office I retrieved my too-large raincoat and said goodbye to the receptionist. “Give us more paintings, Mr. Lev,” she said, and winked.

  I stood with Rav Greenspan at the door to the school. “Was that really worthwhile?”

  “Oh, I think so,” he answered cheerfully. “The teacher will continue to discuss it with the students. The two other teachers who were there will discuss it with the older grades. It was very worthwhile. Listen, are you sure you can’t help us out with Barbra Streisand?”

  I looked at him and shook my head.

  “That’s too bad,” he said sadly. “We really can use some big-name help with that new building.”

  I stood on the front steps of the school and looked out at the rain. “Frankly, I don’t understand why you called me and let me in the door.”

  “Mr. Lev, we called you and let you in the door because the Rebbe told us to. The elder gentleman who was in the class is Rav Shimon Seligson, from the Rebbe’s office. Go in peace.”

  He patted my arm and walked away toward his office.

  I hurried along the parkway in the rain. The windows of the stationery store and the cafeteria were misted over. I walked up our street under the trees and into the house. Devorah was at the desk in our room and did not look up when I entered. I went into the bathroom and washed the chalk from my fingers and then washed the sweat from my face. I could not get all the chalk from my fingers and from under my nails. The colors of the chalk stained the towel and the bottom of the sink. I scrubbed the white porcelain and watched the colors swirl and disappear down the dark opening of the drain.

  That afternoon Avrumel returned from school with his right cheekbone bruised and his lower lip split. I was in the living room, looking out at the rain on the front lawn, when he came home with Rocheleh.

  “Look at you,” I said. “Where did you fall?”

  He did not respond but went along the hallway and into his room. His face was very pale.

  “A boy in the school hit him,” Rocheleh said.

  Avrumel came out of his room, holding his Shimshon doll.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He went past me into the kitchen.

  “What was it about?” I asked Rocheleh.

  “He wouldn’t tell me. He said the nurse took care of it.”

  “You don’t know anything about it?”

  “No. Is my mama writing?”

  “Yes. Rocheleh, what was the reaction to the talk I gave?”

  “There was a lot of discussion in the class after my papa left. Everyone liked the drawings you made of Miss Sullivan.”

  “What happened to the drawings on the blackboard?”

  “I don’t know. They were still there after class ended.”

  “No one erased them?”

  “No. I liked the drawing you made of the Rebbe. Some of the students said you shouldn’t have drawn it, because now it can’t be erased. Papa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you put yourself and Avrumel into the drawing of the binding of Isaac?”

  She had noticed it. Sharp-eyed, quick-witted Rocheleh. Who else had seen it? “I don’t know. It was a surprise to me.”

  Behind her glasses her eyes took on a disbelieving look. “My papa draws things without knowing it?”

  “Sometimes. Then the drawing tells me what I’m trying to say.”

  “What did my papa want to say with the drawing of Avrohom and the binding of Isaac?”

  “I don’t know. I need to think about it.”

  “I don’t understand how my papa can make drawings without knowing what they mean.”

  “You want to understand everything at the age of eleven? Leave a little for later on. Don’t you have homework?”

  She went to her room.

  I moved toward the kitchen. Avrumel was sitting at the table with his Shimshon doll. I poured milk into a glass and put it on the table in front of him. He waited until I sat down, and then he began talking to the rag doll. “Shimshon, you want to know what happened today? I’ll tell you what happened today. During recess,one of the boys in first grade asked me if I was Avrohom Lev, son of Asher Lev, and I said yes, I was. The boy said my papa was a sinner. That’s right, a sinner, and a man who shamed the Master of the Universe in public. My papa! What would you have done, Shimshon? I shoved him. He hit me. We rolled around on the ground until a teacher stopped us. That’s what happened.”

  A moment went by. Avrumel picked up the glass of milk, put it to his mouth, wincing as the glass touched his split lip, and drank. He put the glass down. “If that boy talks to me that way again, I will hit him,” he said to Shimshon. He drank some more milk. “No one will talk to me that way about my papa.”

  I heard footsteps in the hallway. Devorah came into the kitchen. “Rocheleh told me Avrumel was hurt.”

  I told her what had happened. “The sins of the father are being visited upon the son,” I said. “We never had trouble like this in Nice.”

  “This is not France,” she said. “This is Brooklyn.” Avrumel finished his glass of milk and got down from his chair, holding tightly to Shimshon.

  “Are you all right?” Devorah asked him.

  He looked up at her and did not answer.

  “Ça va, Avrumel?” I said.

  “Ça va, Papa,” he said, and left the kitchen.

  “I will call Rav Greenspan about this,” she said.

  “We should have gone home Tuesday the way we planned.”

  “The Rebbe asked you to stay. Did we have a choice?”

  “No,” I said.

  My father returned from his office, took a look at Avrumel’s face, was told by Avrumel what had happened, and marched off to the phone in his bedroom. While he was there, my mother came home. Avrumel told the story again in the kitchen, over a second glass of milk and some of my mother’s cinnamon-and-sugar cookies, which he had some difficulty chewing because of the lip. My father returned from the bedroom. Avrumel went over to him. My father lifted him and held him. Avrumel’s hands clasped my father around his neck. Wisps of my father’s white beard flowed across Avrumel’s checks and shoulders, enfolding him. Together, they went out of the kitchen.

  “Wherever you go, your art causes trouble, Asher,” said my mother, shaking her head.

>   “What a troublemaker I married,” Devorah said, and flashed me a smile. “Why can’t you make pretty pictures like Max docs?”

  “My mother used to ask me that when I was a child.”

  “I remember,” my mother said.

  “What did you answer?” Devorah asked.

  “I answered that the world is not a pretty place, why should I paint lies?”

  From a distant part of the house came the sound of my father singing. His deep, faintly nasal voice drifted through the halls and into the kitchen. He was singing a song I had never heard before, a slow, sweet, melancholy Yiddish tune about a deer that runs away from hunters and is lost in a dark wood. After a long journey the deer comes upon a clearing, where there is an old stone house with a softly glowing white light over the door. An elderly bearded man lives in the house. He has barely enough food for himself, but he takes the deer in, and the deer lives with the man and is happy. And it turns out that the man is the blessed and saintly Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, the first and the greatest of all the tzaddikim.

  Drawn by the sound of my father’s voice, Rocheleh came out of her room and into the kitchen. The four of us, in the kitchen, listened to my father singing to Avrumel.

  The next day Rav Greenspan called an assembly of the entire school, boys and girls. He announced that hospitality to guests is a commandment from the Torah. It was practiced by Avrohom our Father, and it would be practiced as well by all the students of the Ladover yeshiva. There were guests in the school from France, and they were to be treated as Avrohom our Father treated the three angels. That was the wish of the Rebbe, he said, who had called him on the telephone that morning. Did anyone have any questions?

  There were no questions.

  Rocheleh and Avrumel told Devorah and me about the assembly when they returned from school. Avrumel said that the boy with whom he had fought had come to school with purple marks around his left eye. In the rolling around on the asphalt, Avrumel’s shoe had connected with the boy’s eye. “I didn’t mean to hit him,” Avrumel said. “It just happened.” The chance blow to the eye was not without its ensuing satisfactions. Avrumel was now regarded by many in his class as someone to be reckoned with, and there were even those who now looked upon him with a mixture of awe and caution. The fist—or, in this instance, the shoe—is not always decried by Ladover Hasidim.