The room was large. It contained a single glass-enclosed bookcase, a large walnut-stained desk, and three chairs near the desk. The walls were white and bare. The desk was bare. Lights burned in a small glass chandelier overhead. A tall Gothic window, its uppermost section open, took up much of the wall to the left of the desk.
Behind the desk sat the Rebbe. He wore a dark caftan and an ordinary dark hat. A dark cord girdled the caftan. His face was pale. He seemed more a presence than a man.
“Asher Lev,” he said, raising his hand slightly, then letting it rest again on the desk. “Sit down, Asher Lev.” He spoke in Yiddish. His voice was soft. “How is your mother?”
I started to respond. I felt the words deep in my throat. I could not get the words out of my throat. I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. I saw the Rebbe looking at me.
“Thank you, Rebbe,” I heard myself say in Yiddish. “My mother is well.” I was sitting in one of the chairs near the desk but could not remember how I had got there.
“Asher Lev,” the Rebbe said softly, “I wanted to see you and to give you my blessings for your bar mitzvah.”
“Thank you, Rebbe.”
“Asher,” the Rebbe said. “How are you feeling?”
“I am well, Rebbe.”
“I remember when you were born. I remember your bris.”
I was quiet.
“You will become a bar mitzvah this Shabbos.”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
He looked at me. “I remember your father’s father. I bless you in the name of your grandfather. May you have a life of Torah and commandments.”
“Thank you, Rebbe.”
“Asher.”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
“A life should be lived for the sake of heaven. One man is not better than another because he is a doctor while the other is a shoemaker. One man is not better than another because he is a lawyer while the other is a painter. A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven. Do you understand me, Asher Lev?”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
“But there are those who do not understand this.”
I was quiet.
“There are those you love and who love you who do not accept this. Asher, to honor your father is one of the Ten Commandments.”
“Yes, Rebbe.”
“I give you my blessings, Asher Lev son of Reb Aryeh Lev.”
His right hand made a slight waving gesture. I got to my feet. I felt dazed and bewildered.
“Good night, Asher Lev.”
“Good night, Rebbe.”
I went from the room and closed the heavy door behind me. It closed soundlessly without effort.
I started through the waiting room. The man in the beret stood up. He went quickly past me, opened the heavy door, stepped inside, and closed it. A vague odor trailed behind him, the odor of earth and oil and paint. I saw a folded piece of paper on the chair I had occupied earlier. I stopped and picked it up and unfolded it. It was a pencil drawing, a photographic likeness of my face made with an exquisite economy of line and without light and shade. The lower right-hand corner of the drawing contained a signature: Jacob Kahn. Below the signature was the date: 1-10-56.
I sat down on the chair and stared at the drawing. Rav Dorochoff was behind his desk, reading. He seemed not to know I was there. I folded the drawing and put it carefully into a pocket. I took out my small sketchbook and, with a ball-point pen, drew in one continuous line the face of Jacob Kahn. In the lower right-hand corner of the drawing I signed my name: Asher Lev. Below the signature I wrote the date: 26 Teveth 5716. I left the drawing on the chair Jacob Kahn had occupied and went over to Rav Dorochoff.
“Good night,” I said.
He looked up at me. “Good night, Asher Lev. Mazel tov.” He paused, and added, “May you bring joy to your parents.”
“Thank you.”
I went from the room. I walked quickly down the stairs. I could hear voices. There were people still working in some of the offices on the street floor. I came out onto the stone porch. The night wind bathed my face. I sat on the rail of the porch and looked at the parkway. I sat there a very long time, remembering other times I had sat on that porch.
A man came out of the building, stopped for a moment in the doorway, and walked over to me. I got off the rail.
“My name is Jacob Kahn,” he said. He had a strong voice and he spoke with a vague Russian accent.
“My name is Asher Lev,” I said.
We shook hands. He had a powerful grip. I felt my hand swallowed by his.
“Thank you for your drawing,” he said.
“Thank you for yours.”
“Do you have any idea at all what you are getting into?”
“No.”
“Become a carpenter. Become a shoemaker.”
I was quiet.
“Become a street cleaner.”
I did not respond.
He sighed. “You are crazy,” he said. “We are all crazy. I know your father. He will become my enemy.”
I said nothing.
“Why should I make your father my enemy? Why? Tell me why.”
I did not respond.
He sighed again. “Our Rebbe is very clever. If it isn’t me, it will be someone else. Yes? He prefers to take a chance with me.”
I was quiet.
“Of course, yes. The Rebbe is clever. I will watch you. We have a clever Rebbe.” He drew his hand out of his coat pocket. “This is yours.” It was the sketchbook I had once filled for the mashpia.
“Thank you.” I put the sketchbook into my pocket.
“Now,” he said. “We begin. I do not like to start new relationships in the winter. It is not in my nature to do that. Also there is a sculpture I must finish and I will not have time for you now. You will call me in the middle of March. I am in the telephone book.” He stopped and peered at me intently. “You will call?”
“Yes,” I heard myself say.
“You understand that I am not what you call a Torah Jew. I am a great admirer of the Rebbe’s. My father was a follower of the Rebbe’s father. But I am not a religious Jew. You understand that?”
“I understand.”
“Good. Now, between today and the middle of March is a long time. You will do something for me in that time. You will take a journey to the Museum of Modern Art, you will go up to the second floor, and you will look at a painting called Guernica, by Picasso. You will study this painting. You will memorize this painting. You will do whatever you feel you have to do in order to master this painting. Then you will call me in March, and we will meet, and talk, and work. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“It is in my nature to be blunt and honest. I shall ask you a question. You are entering the world of the goyim, Asher Lev. Do you know that?”
“Yes.”
“It is not only goyim. It is Christian goyim.”
“Yes.”
“You should better become a wagon driver,” he said, using the Yiddish term. “You should better become a water carrier.”
I said nothing.
“All right,” he said. “The Rebbe asked me to make it clear to you. I have made it clear to you. It is time to go home.”
We went together down the stairs and along the walk to the street.
“Tell me,” he said. “Have you been to the Parkway Museum?”
“Yes.”
“Have you seen my paintings?”
“Yes.”
He waited.
“I didn’t understand them,” I said.
I thought I heard him sigh. He had his big hands deep in the pockets of his coat. He shrugged his shoulders. The night wind blew against his lined face.
“You are only thirteen years old,” he said. “Yet it disturbs me to hear you say that. You will call me in March. Which way are you walking?”
“Toward New York Avenue.”
“I go the other way. Good night, Asher Lev.”
We shook hands. He went on u
p the parkway.
I walked home quickly beneath the stars and the trees.
Neither my father nor my mother appeared surprised by what I told them. My father would not look at me as I talked. He seemed to cringe in pain. My mother wavered apprehensively between my father’s pain and my dazed joy and seemed not to know what to say.
“I’m not reconciled to this, Rivkeh,” my father said with bitterness in his voice. He was talking to my mother as if I were not in the room. “I can’t reconcile myself to such a decision.”
“Aryeh,” my mother said quietly. “It’s the Rebbe’s decision.”
“Only because everyone is afraid the boy will break and go his own way. Why should everyone be afraid the boy will break away? Why? He is my son. I want to raise my son in my own way.”
My mother was silent. Her eyes were dark.
“I am not reconciled,” my father said. “I will spend my life traveling for the Rebbe, and my son will spend his life painting pictures. How can I reconcile myself to this, Rivkeh? Tell me. How? There will be trouble from this. When a son goes so far away from a father, there can only be trouble.”
“I don’t want there to be trouble between us, Papa,” I said.
He looked at me and slowly rubbed the side of his face. I had a sudden memory of the way his beard used to feel against my cheek when I had been very young. “Asher, I know you don’t want trouble. I am not accusing you, God forbid, of being an evil person. But there is something inside you I don’t understand. It will bring trouble. Look at the trouble it has already brought. I don’t know what you are. You are my own son, and I don’t know what you are. I am ashamed of my own son.”
“Aryeh,” my mother said softly. She seemed about to cry.
My father closed his eyes. He kept his eyes closed a long time. He said softly, “There are many things in this world I do not understand, Rivkeh. But this—this is the biggest mystery of all. And I can’t reconcile myself to it.”
My father carried his burden of pain all through the celebration of my bar mitzvah. People knew of the Rebbe’s decision. No one dared question it. For the Rebbe was the tzaddik and spoke as representative of the Master of the Universe. His seeing was not as the seeing of others; his acts were not as the acts of others. My father’s right to shape my life had been taken from him by the same being who gave his own life meaning—the Rebbe. At the same time, no one knew how to react to the decision, for they could see my father’s pain. I had become alien to him. In some incomprehensible manner, a cosmic error had been made. The line of inheritance had been perverted. A demonic force had thrust itself into centuries of transmitted responsibility. He could not bear its presence. And he no longer knew how to engage it in battle. So he walked in pain and shame all through the Shabbos of my bar mitzvah and all through the following day when relatives and friends sang and danced their joy. And he carried that pain and shame with him through the glass doors of the waiting room and into the aircraft that took him back to Europe in the third week of January.
Our school day on Sunday ended at one o’clock in the afternoon. On the last Sunday in January, my mother took me by subway to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. The following Sunday, my mother went with me again. She bought me a large reproduction of Guernica. I studied the reproduction during the week, then went alone to the museum the following Sunday. I went every Sunday for the rest of February and the first two weeks of March. At the end of the second week of March, I called Jacob Kahn.
Eight
“This is Asher Lev,” I said into the telephone.
“Hello, Asher Lev.”
“It’s the middle of March,” I said.
“You saw Guernica?”
“Yes.”
“How many times did you see it?”
I told him.
“You studied Guernica?”
“Yes.”
“What else did you do?”
“I drew each section of it at least twice.”
“What else?”
“I can draw it from memory.”
“What else?”
“I studied the drawings he made before and after he painted it.”
“Come to my studio this Sunday in the afternoon.” He gave me an upper Manhattan address. “Can you come?”
“I can come at two o’clock.”
“You will stay until dinner. We do not keep kosher. I will see you Sunday.”
“Yes.”
“Asher Lev.”
“Yes.”
“You are familiar with the story about the massacre of the innocents?”
“No.”
“Then you will read about it, please, for Sunday. You will find it in the New Testament, the Book of Matthew, chapter two, verse sixteen.”
I did not say anything.
“The New Testament,” he said. “The Bible of the goyim.”
“Yes.”
“You will find it and read it.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You are familiar with the painting Massacre of the Innocents, by Guido Reni?”
“No.”
“You will go to the library and find a reproduction of it and study it. If you cannot find Guido Reni’s Massacre of the Innocents, then find Poussin’s. But study one of them at least. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I will see you Sunday at two o’clock.”
“Yes. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Asher Lev.”
I went to the library after school the next day and read the passage in the New Testament about King Herod ordering his soldiers to kill all the children of Bethlehem who were two years old and younger, after having been told that a child had been born who would become king of the Jews. It felt strange holding and reading a copy of the Christian Bible. I could not understand what the story had to do with Guernica.
I found a small reproduction of Massacre of the Innocents, by Guido Reni, in a thick volume on the history of art. I looked at it closely. I had my reproduction of Guernica with me. I opened it and compared the two pictures. The faces of the women in the Reni painting intrigued me, especially that of the woman in the upper left of the picture. I found the Poussin painting in another volume and studied it carefully. After a while, I closed the books and went out of the library.
It was dark and cold. I took the subway home. My mother had a class on Thursday nights. Mrs. Rackover gave me supper. I went into my room and thought about Guernica. Mrs. Rackover came in to say she was leaving. I heard the apartment door close behind her.
I was alone in the apartment. I sat at my desk and looked at the reproduction of Guernica, which I had put on the wall near my bed. The city of Guernica had been destroyed by the German air force in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso had painted the mural for the Spanish Pavilion of the International Exhibition in Paris that year. I knew that painting by heart and could draw it in my mind. I had dreamed about the bull and the horse. I had drawn the screaming pain-filled faces of the women in my notebooks during classes. I had put the anguished women with the dead child into the back of an English exam book, and had gotten it back with a written remark from the teacher about this being an English, not an art, examination; he gave me a D on the test. I did not understand what Guernica had to do with the Christian Bible; I did not understand what it had to do with the Massacre of the Innocents. I felt upset and uncomfortable at having read from the Christian Bible. I thought of my father. I thought of the mashpia. I wondered if the Rebbe really knew what Jacob Kahn was doing. I felt vaguely unclean.
I had some homework. I started working on it, quickly, perfunctorily. In the middle of an algebra problem, I found myself drawing from memory the head of one of the screaming women in Guido Reni’s Massacre of the Innocents. I looked at the head. Then I went back to the algebra problem.
I heard the apartment door open and close. My mother was home. She came into my room a moment later, carrying a book.
“There was no mail from your father?”
she asked.
“No.”
“Did you have supper?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you all right? Do you have a fever?”
“No.”
She glanced at the notebook with the algebra problem and the Reni head.
“Her child was massacred,” I said.
She looked startled.
I told her about the painting. Then I told her about the account of the massacre in the Christian Bible.
“I didn’t like reading from that book. I saw where it said Jews killed Jesus. I feel guilty reading the Bible of the goyim.”
She gazed at the head in the notebook and did not respond.
“Why did he ask me to read that?”
“When you see him Sunday, ask him. Do you want something to drink before going to sleep?”
“No, Mama.”
“Have you had milk today?”
“Yes.”
“I brought you this book. You said to me once that you liked the paintings of Robert Henri. A professor in the art department gave me this for you to read.” She put the book on my desk. “Good night, Asher. Don’t stay up late.”
“You told the professor about me?”
“I said my son is interested in art and likes Robert Henri. He told me to tell you to read this book. He also told me that Jacob Kahn is one of the greatest artists alive today. He worked with Picasso in Paris before the First World War. He was a little astonished that you’re being taught by Jacob Kahn.” She smiled wryly. “Everyone seems astonished by that. Good night, Asher. I have a meeting early in the morning with the Rebbe’s staff. Khrushchev’s speech about Stalin also has everyone astonished.”
She went from the room. A moment later, I heard her moving about in the kitchen.
I looked at the book she had put down on my desk. It was called The Art Spirit. I finished my homework quickly.
In bed, I leafed idly through the book, reading passages at random. I liked this man. I liked the warm and honest way he wrote. I lay in bed leafing through the book, and I read:
If you want to know how to do a thing you must first have a complete desire to do that thing. Then go to kindred spirits—others who have wanted to do that thing—and study their ways and means, learn from their successes and failures and add your quota. Thus you may acquire from the experience of the race. And with this technical knowledge you may go forward, expressing through the play of forms the music that is in you and which is very personal to you.