She said to me one Shabbos afternoon, “My brother Yaakov, olov hasholom, used to tell me how Jews in Europe traveled and were away from their families for months. But I didn’t think it would happen in America.”
I’m sorry, I wanted to say. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it, Mama. I’m sorry. But I remained silent.
“You miss Papa?” she asked me softly.
“Yes.”
“I miss him, too,” she said. “Very much.” Then she added in Yiddish, “He is traveling for the Rebbe.” She gazed out the window. “He should live and be well. He should have safe journeys.”
I drew her sitting at the table studying. I drew her gazing sadly out the window. She developed a habit in those weeks of chewing on her pencils, and I drew her with pencils in her mouth.
“I used to do that when I was a little girl in school,” she said, gazing at a drawing of her with a pencil in her mouth. “I’ll have to break that habit, Asher. There are germs on pencils.”
But she could not break the habit and in the end she gave up trying.
She began to talk about her brother during those months. On our walks together to the synagogue or to my school, she would mention him when something she said or did touched memories concealed beneath time and pain. Her parents had died when she was young. There had been her sister Leah, eight years older than my mother; and her brother Yaakov, three years older than my mother. They had gone to live with their father’s sister, now also dead. Yaakov had been mother and father to little Rivkeh. “It’s hard to lose a mother and father the first time. Then to lose them again a second time …”
Yaakov had been thin and delicately built, a male counterpart of my mother. It had been impossible not to recognize them immediately as brother and sister. He had been a brilliant student in the Ladover yeshiva. The Rebbe himself had chosen him to become a student of Russian affairs, to become an adviser to the Rebbe, to travel, to—
“Why did the Ribbono Shel Olom kill Uncle Yaakov?” I asked my mother once.
“Why? I don’t know why. Do we understand the ways of everything in this world? We have to have faith that the Ribbono Shel Olom is good and knows what He is doing.”
She said it through tears.
The bookcase that stood next to her new desk in the living room was a small dark-wood three-shelf case about four feet high and three feet wide. By December, it was almost entirely filled with new books. I glanced at some of the titles one Shabbos afternoon: History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, by Simon Dubnov; The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, by Max Beloff; Law and Social Change in the USSR, by John N. Hazard; The Jews in the Soviet Union, by Solomon Schwartz; The Bolshevik Revolution, by E. H. Carr. There were two books on the Soviet secret police that I tried to read; but I could understand neither of them.
In the middle of December, she bought another bookcase, a duplicate of the first. It, too, began to fill rapidly with books on Russia. She was doing a great deal of writing. Papers for her courses, she said. For graduate school, one had to write many papers. I was not sure I understood. What was the paper she was writing now? I asked. It had to do with the murder of the Russian Yiddish writers and the doctors’ plot, she said. Did I remember the doctors’ plot? Yes, I remembered the doctors’ plot. I remembered the murder of the Russian Yiddish writers, too, I said.
She was typing her papers now, and I would at first not be able to fall asleep for the noise of the typewriter. But I grew accustomed to it quickly enough after three bad nights; she insisted I learn to fall asleep with the typewriter going; she did not have the time to indulge my need for quiet sliding into sleep. So I would fall asleep to the rhythm and clack of her type-writer. Sometimes I woke in the early morning and found her at her desk, asleep over her books near the typewriter, the pale sunlight shining on her face through the open slats of the window blind. I would take a pad and pencil and draw her then, draw her asleep over her books, her face cradled in her arms, all of her at rest like a child. I drew those moments of her asleep at her desk because they served me as balance for those moments when she would stand by the window staring at the street, seeing neither the trees nor the traffic nor the people of the parkway but my father on a different street, in different traffic, with different people. Those moments when I saw her at the window like that were the most difficult for me to bear, for I understood clearly that I was the cause of her unhappiness. I drew those moments, too, but I needed her moments of rest and peace to help stave off my own moments of darkness and doubt.
I drew endlessly all those weeks after my father’s departure. I drew while I walked; I drew while I ate; I drew while I sat in class; I drew in Yudel Krinsky’s store; I drew in the museum. Once I woke in the morning and found I had drawn on the wall near my bed a picture in red crayon of my mythic ancestor. To this day, I do not know how I did that picture.
In the last week of December, my mother brought home a wooden box. A gift, she said to me; purchased from Reb Yudel Krinsky. For no reason; just a gift because she loved me. The box contained twelve tubes of oil colors, half a dozen bristle brushes of different sizes, a bottle of turpentine, a bottle of linseed oil, a palette knife, and a palette. She had also bought me a small easel and half a dozen small-sized stretched canvases.
On the night of December 26, 1953, when Shabbos was over, I spread some of my father’s old copies of the Sunday Times on the floor of my room, set up the easel, and squeezed some red, yellow, and blue hues onto the palette. Then I put some white on the palette. I dabbed a narrow brush into the red and tapped it lightly against a sheet of newspaper on the floor. The red hue left marks across the newsprint, bright red against black and white. I looked at the red line on the newspaper; it had come off the brush. I ran the brush against the newspaper, feeling the play of oil against the paper, watching the hue come off and streak, testing how long a streak it made. Then I put some yellow on another brush and ran it into the red on the newspaper. I ran yellow and red together. I ran blue and red together. I ran yellow and blue together. I outlined a face on the newspaper and painted it in orange and green, using turpentine and linseed oil to dilute the colors, molding with the colors, trying to get the planes and forms, I loved the oil and turpentine odors. I tried painting a face on a white canvas board but it did not work; I could not do the molding. My mother sat on my bed watching me for a long time. Then she left. A few minutes later, I heard her begin typing in the living room. I continued working on the face and finished it but did not do it well. It’s an exercise, I said to myself. It’s cardboard, not even canvas. But I did not sleep much that night.
The next night, I painted my first oil on canvas, a picture of my mother looking out the window of our living room. It was as if I had been painting in oils all my life.
My mother came into my room one night in January and sat on my bed. I was doing an oil on canvas of Yudel Krinsky surrounded by stacks of matzos in the grocery store. She watched me for a while, then said quietly, “It’s a lovely painting, Asher.”
“Thank you, Mama.”
“May I interrupt you?” she asked.
I stopped my work.
“Your father wrote asking about school.”
I looked away from her at the painting. The square shapes of the boxes of matzos intrigued me.
“Asher, look at me. What should I tell your father?”
“I’m trying, Mama.”
“Your teacher says you’re not trying. The mashpia says you’re not trying. What should I tell your father?”
“I don’t care.”
“Asher.”
What if I tilt some of those squares? I thought. Won’t that make it more interesting?
“Asher, I have to tell your father something. What will I tell your father? I will have to tell him the truth. Asher, what do you do in school? Isn’t there anything you like?”
“Yes,” I said. Suppose I tilted one row of boxes one way and another row of boxes another way. What would happen?
“But you can?
??t do that all day and all night, Asher. You can’t go through school not learning.”
“I’m learning, Mama.”
“I don’t know what to do with you,” she said. She got up off the bed and went from the room.
I’ll try it, I thought. And maybe I’ll tilt Yudel Krinsky’s body a little in different directions, too. That might make it really interesting.
I scraped off the paint and started again.
I sat in the last row of seats in my classroom drawing in my Hebrew notebook. The teacher, a middle-aged man with a round face and black beard, said from across the room, “What are you doing, Asher Lev?”
I felt my face go hot. I put down the pen.
He came toward me up the center aisle of the classroom. Everyone watched intently. He stopped in front of my desk.
“What were you doing?”
I removed my hand from the notebook. I had drawn his face, giving his eyes the stern and serious expression they always wore.
He looked at my drawing. Then he looked at me.
“When will you grow up, Asher Lev?” he said sadly. “You are eleven years old.”
I did not say anything.
“At least you did not draw in a Chumash,” he said.
Someone in the room snickered.
The teacher turned and stared at the class. “I do not need you to help me. It is enough that I have to say it.” He looked at me again. “Try to grow up, Asher Lev. It is already time. You do not do your father honor with such behavior.”
The mashpia said to me one day in the last week of January, “You are not learning, Asherel. Your teacher does not know what to do with you.”
“I am trying.”
He sighed. We were in his office. Outside, there was winter sunlight on the bare trees.
“Your father wrote to me,” he said. “Your father is very upset. He asks me to speak to you.”
I was quiet.
“Can I help you in any way, Asherel?”
I did not know what to say.
“If I thought it would be different if your father was home, I would immediately tell the Rebbe.”
I stared at him.
“But it would not be different.” He was silent a moment. “No, it would not be different. Give your mother my very good wishes for her health, Asherel.”
My Uncle Yitzchok came over to the apartment one Shabbos afternoon on the way to the Rebbe’s talk. We sat in the living room. My father had written to him about my studies, he said. Not to speak of it on Shabbos, he said, but what was I doing with all my time and why wasn’t I studying?
My mother stared uncomfortably at the carpet. I looked out the window at the snow melting on the trees.
“Listen,” my uncle said to me, “you can’t spend your life drawing. Once in a while, it’s fine. As a hobby. But you can’t stop learning Torah, Asher. How will it look if I have a nephew who can’t even study a page of Gemorra? You want to draw, go ahead and draw. I’ll even buy some of your drawings. But draw once in a while. What kind of boy spends his whole life drawing? It kills the brain.”
I did not respond.
“Listen to your uncle. I’ll write and tell your father that I talked to you and that you’ll really try. All right?”
“Yes,” I said.
He left to go to the Rebbe’s Shabbos afternoon talk.
“What do they all want from me?” I said to my mother.
“They want you to study Torah. A boy your age should be studying Torah.”
I went into my room and stood by the window, staring out at the melting snow. I did not hate studying. I had no strength for it. My drawing needed all my strength. Couldn’t they see that? What did they all want from me?
I came into Yudel Krinsky’s store one day in February.
“You are a scandal,” he said to me in his hoarse voice. “The world knows you are not studying Torah.” He fixed his bulging eyes on me. “Your father journeys through Europe bringing Jews back to Torah, and here his own son refuses to study Torah. Asher, you are a scandal.”
I told him I wanted one tube of cobalt blue and one large tube of titanium white. My mother was giving me money now for the things I needed.
He put the tubes into a paper bag. “A son should not hurt his father,” he said sadly. “Especially a father like Reb Aryeh Lev.”
Mrs. Rackover all but stopped talking to me. She walked around in a permanent sullen rage over what she called the stink of paint in the apartment. She would leave altogether, she once yelled at me, if it were not for her feeling of respect toward my father. What kind of Jewish child was I? My father was giving his life for Torah and Hasidus, and I was wasting my life with paint. Goyim behaved this way toward their fathers, not Jews. She kept scrubbing the floor of my room. She left the window open for hours. So my father should not be greeted by the stink of paint when he came home for Pesach, she said.
I was encountering my father everywhere I went. I was hearing about my father from everyone I talked to. He was more in my life now than he had been before his journey.
Early in the afternoon of the third Friday in March, my mother and I went to the Parkway Museum. It was Purim and I was off from school. It was also the day before Shabbos. We wanted to save time. Rather than walk, we took the subway.
An old woman sat in the seat across the aisle from us. Her clothes were ragged and fitted her badly. She wore a kerchief over her hair. Her eyes were sunken and watery; her face was deeply lined. I took out my pad and pencil and sketched her quickly, trying to anticipate the lurching motions of the train. It was a brief ride to the museum from where we lived. I was almost done by the time we arrived at our stop.
I showed the sketch to my mother.
“Yes,” she said. “But what did you do to her eyes?”
I had seen the old woman’s eyes as pools of brimming dark water and had drawn them that way. “I wanted to show she was sad.”
My mother looked closely at the drawing. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I understand.”
We came up out of the subway station onto the parkway. It was a windy day, but there was sunlight on the street and we knew the winter was gone.
The museum was a large marble and whitestone building fronted by tall trees and a deep spread of rolling lawn. It dominated the area in which it stood, massive, glistening in the sunlight. All along the front of the building directly below the roof were deep niches; set into those niches were statues of great men. One of the statues was of Moses. He stood there near the top of the building, huge, the folds of his robe spilling from him in a rich cascade of marble. It was good going into a museum with a statue of Moses. I wondered if there were any other statues of great Jews anywhere in the world. I took my mother’s hand as we walked quickly toward the building.
“I was here with my brother once,” she said, “to see an exhibit of Jewish manuscripts. I’ve never seen any of the paintings. We never thought it was important.”
We came through the glass doors into the stone and marble interior. I was not interested in the teepees and canoes and Indians on the first floor. We went up the wide marble staircase to the galleries. I held my mother’s hand. I saw with mild surprise that my head now reached to her shoulders. I had grown in the last months and had not known it.
There were very few people in the galleries. I went along slowly with my mother, looking at the paintings. Uniformed guards stood near the entrances to the galleries. They looked at us curiously as we went by.
We came into a large room with paintings in ornate frames. Some of the paint in the paintings seemed to be gold.
“These are the ones, Mama,” I said quietly.
She looked at the paintings. I saw her eyes scan the room slowly. She sighed and shook her head.
“I’ll explain this to you outside, Asher.”
“Why not here, Mama?”
She did not respond. “Where are the others you couldn’t understand, Asher?”
We went to another gallery.
> “I like the way he paints the water and the gardens. But why does he paint so many like that?” I pointed to a row of paintings on the wall. “Look how he paints them like that over and over again, Mama.”
Bright pink spots appeared on my mother’s cheeks. I saw her look instinctively away from the paintings, then slowly look back. Looking at her flushed cheeks, I was suddenly reminded of the way she used to look when I was a child and we went together on winter walks beneath the trees of the parkway. But she seemed embarrassed now and very uncomfortable.
“Some artists think it is very beautiful to paint this way.”
“Is it against the Torah?”
“You’ll have to ask your father, Asher. I think it is, yes.”
“Can it be against the Torah to paint something beautiful?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask your father, Asher. But I think it’s against the Torah to paint women the way this artist paints them. The Torah asks us to practice modesty.” She used the Hebrew word “tzenius” for modesty.
“Lots of painters paint this way, Mama.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. What else did you want to ask me, Asher? I’m embarrassed standing here in front of these paintings. Let’s move away, please.”
I took her through many galleries to a room filled with paintings that bewildered me. They did not seem to be paintings at all but huge canvases smeared and blotched with wild and random streaks of color.
“Are these paintings, Mama?”
“There are those who think these are paintings, yes.”
“What do they mean?”
“I don’t know, Asher.”
“How can they be paintings if they don’t show anything?”
“I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know very much about art, Asher.” She peered into the adjoining gallery. “Do you understand those paintings?” she asked.
“I see a Jewish man and a fish with wings and a girl surrounded by flowers and candles. It’s by Chagall, the Jewish painter.”
“Do you understand the one on the opposite wall, Asher?”