My Name Is Asher Lev

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  “No.”

  “It is a good painting.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Asher. Goldie and I were talking. Look at your room. It is crowded and small.”

  “It’s a good room.”

  “We will fix up the attic for you.”

  I stopped painting and looked at him.

  “It is a whole floor. No one uses it. We will fix it up and you will have more room.”

  Carpenters came. Painters came. A month later, the whole family—my uncle, my aunt, their four children—helped me move upstairs. When it was done, my uncle surveyed the attic, chewed thoughtfully on his cigar, and said, “Now you are a painter. When someone writes the history of Asher Lev, he will say his uncle fixed him up with his first real studio. This is a studio. Not the closets you had until now. It will take you five years to fill up this studio.”

  I did a painting of him and his family and gave it to them for Hanukkah. He framed it and put it on a wall of the living room. He called it his “authentic Lev” and kept talking about the fortune it would be worth one day.

  The attic room was large, with a high sloping roof and a tall window that looked out onto an old maple. I could barely see the street through the thick tangle of branches.

  I worked and slept in that room. I did not think it would take me five years to fill it.

  Between semesters, Jacob Kahn took me by train to a Van Gogh exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We talked about the Post-Impressionists and the Nabis and the Fauves. We talked about Gauguin and Matisse and Vlaminck. We came back in a snowstorm that delayed the train and got us into New York more than two hours late. I called my uncle from the station. He answered the phone and I heard his voice tremble. He was relieved to hear from me and grateful that I had thought to call.

  Early in February, Jacob Kahn sent a plaster piece out for casting in bronze. When it came back, I saw it was a sculpture of the two of us dancing with a Torah. I had not seen him sculpt it. He put it in a corner of the studio. One day, I looked for it and it was no longer there.

  “Tanya likes it,” he said. “I took it home.”

  I asked him once if they had any children. They had had a daughter, he said. She had died of influenza in Paris at the age of four.

  He came to the Ladover farbrengen in the second week of February. We were commemorating the day that the Rebbe’s father removed himself from this world. The synagogue was filled with thousands of people. The men sat at the tables. The students stood on benches around the walls. There were benches along the area in front of the Ark. Elders and guests of honor sat on those benches. I saw two Jewish novelists on one of those benches. And I saw Jacob Kahn, thick-shouldered, the dark beret covering his white hair. The Rebbe sat on a cushioned chair at a table in front of a microphone. He wore a dark caftan and an ordinary dark hat. He spoke for a few minutes in Yiddish about the need for a true Torah education for Jewish children. He quoted from the Gemorra and the Midrash and the Zohar. The huge crowd was hushed, listening. His words came clearly through the microphone. Those same words were being transmitted by telephonic hookup to every Ladover community in the world—to England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Israel, South America, North Africa, Australia, Canada, Mexico, and perhaps elsewhere as well. I wondered if my parents were now listening to the Rebbe. It was a suddenly warm feeling to think that the three of us might be listening to the Rebbe together.

  When the Rebbe was done talking, someone began a song. There was rhythmic singing. Little paper cups of vodka were held up to be blessed by a nod of the Rebbe’s head before being drunk. Then the singing stopped and the Rebbe spoke again—about the importance of the sanctity of the Jewish family. There was more singing. I looked up at the benches behind the Rebbe and saw that Jacob Kahn was no longer there. A moment later, I felt a tug at my sleeve.

  “Come outside with me, Asher,” Jacob Kahn said.

  I followed behind him as he moved slowly through the dense crowd.

  Outside on the street, the air was cold and sharp with the feeling of coming snow. We stood on the sidewalk away from the crowd near the doors. There were two police cars at the curb and four patrolmen on the sidewalk in front of the building.

  “Fifteen years ago, there was nothing here,” Jacob Kahn said, gazing at the synagogue and at the headquarters building alongside it. “The house was here. I think a doctor or a dentist owned it. But none of this was here.” He gestured toward the crowd. “He is a good man, our Rebbe.” He looked at me. “I will be going to Europe for a month. I was called two days ago and thought I would tell you tonight rather than telephone. I leave tomorrow night.”

  I shivered in the wind.

  “In Zurich, they are planning a retrospective for a good friend. They are asking for advice. That will take a week. Then I will go to Italy. There is some marble I want to look at.”

  I was quiet.

  “Asher Lev, it will only be for a month. Your world has not come to an end because Jacob Kahn is going on a trip. You may use the studio anytime you wish. There is a new piece of wood I had brought in today that you might want to use.”

  I did not say anything.

  “It is not in my nature to make long farewells. Goodbye, Asher Lev.” He shook my hand and walked away quickly beneath the winter trees.

  I did not go back inside. I walked home and went to bed.

  I took the subway to his studio the following Sunday afternoon. But I found the silent enormity of the room intolerable. After an hour, I closed it up and went home.

  I did not return to his studio. Instead I worked in my attic room. I painted him swimming in the ocean. I painted him sculpting in the sand. I painted him walking with his wife. I painted the two of us painting together at the edge of the dunes. I painted him painting a huge canvas stripped to the waist. The room began to look cluttered with drawings and canvases. No, I would not need five years to fill this room.

  He returned in March, one month after he had gone. He called me. It had been a fine trip. Italy especially had been admirable. Italy was always admirable. Especially Florence.

  “I met your parents in Zurich. They are well and send you their love. You know they will be back for Pesach. Will I see you Sunday?”

  “Yes.”

  “You will have to see Florence one day, Asher Lev. There are people I will send you to. It is a gift, that city.”

  I went to him the following Sunday. He looked well and was exuberant. “I am always exuberant after Italy. It is the marble.” We worked together and soon it was as if he had not been away at all.

  My parents arrived by ship on the last day of March. They moved into my uncle’s house and lived in the room I had occupied before being transferred to the attic. My father looked rested. He had put on weight and had almost completely lost his limp. Looking at him during those weeks, I often wondered if I, too, would be gray in my early forties. But he seemed once again strong and it was clear that he had really needed my mother.

  We said very little to one another. He was uneasy in my presence. There was between us now a permanent high wall of uncertainty and hostility.

  My uncle made an effort to pierce that wall the first night my parents were back. He brought my father upstairs to the attic. I was at my desk, reading.

  They stood in the doorway, looking around at the clutter of drawings and canvases.

  “I will have to buy him a house,” my uncle said, speaking in Yiddish and chewing on a cigar. “Look how he is filling the attic.”

  My father’s face was dark. I could see the anger in his eyes. “You are encouraging him.” He spoke as if I were not in the room.

  “I am doing what I think is right.”

  “You give him money for his paint. I did not ask you to give him money.”

  “Aryeh, do you want your son to steal?”

  My father looked at him. I could see his lips tighten beneath his
graying beard.

  “Listen to me, Aryeh. Listen to your brother. Reconcile yourself to your son.”

  My father said nothing.

  “He is a good boy. He cannot help what he does.”

  “Only an animal cannot help what he does.”

  “Aryeh—”

  My father turned and went from the room.

  There was a heavy silence. My uncle sighed and shook his head. “He is a stubborn man, your father. It is both a weakness and a strength to be so stubborn.”

  Sometime during the intermediate days of Passover, I walked with my mother along the parkway near our apartment house. She looked young and lovely. But her eyes were sad.

  “Jacob Kahn told us in Zurich that you had a fine summer.”

  “Yes.”

  “He succeeded in angering your father.”

  I was quiet. We walked beneath the trees.

  “It is impossible to talk to your father about you. Hopelessly impossible.” She looked at me and her eyes were moist. “It hurts me to be caught between my husband and my son.”

  I did not know what to say. We walked on and came to the apartment house and stood on the street, looking up at the window of the living room. The Venetian blind had been raised. We could see the houses and the street reflected in the glass of the window.

  “We think we may give up the apartment,” my mother said. “We don’t know how long we’ll be in Europe. It doesn’t seem to make much sense to keep it.”

  We turned and started back to my uncle’s house.

  “Asher, come with us to Europe.”

  “No.”

  “We miss you. I miss you. There are great art schools in Vienna.”

  “No.”

  “Asher—”

  “He’ll try to take it away from me. No.”

  She stared.

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  “All right, Asher.”

  “I’m worse than an animal. I’m—”

  “Asher, please.”

  “He won’t take it away from me.”

  “All right. All right. Hush. All right.”

  She took my hand. I felt her slender fingers cool and strong against my skin. We walked back together beneath the young spring trees.

  My uncle urged them not to give up the apartment. Had the Rebbe told my father his position in Europe was permanent? No, the Rebbe had not said that. Then they should keep the apartment. Did they know how difficult it was to acquire a rent-controlled apartment these days?

  They left for Europe by ship in the third week of April and I went back to Jacob Kahn.

  “Yes,” Jacob Kahn said when I told him of my parents’ visit. “I am afraid I have made an enemy of your father.”

  “Why does he hate me? I don’t understand.”

  “He thinks you are wasting your life. He thinks you have betrayed him. It is not pleasant for a man like your father to see his son painting nudes and the other things you paint. It is for him at best a frivolity and at worst a desecration. You and your father are two different natures. There is nothing to be done about it, Asher Lev.”

  “The Rebbe isn’t angry. Why isn’t the Rebbe angry?”

  “The Rebbe is a very wise man. And he is of a different nature than your father.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do not try to understand. Become a great artist. That is the only way to justify what you are doing to everyone’s life.”

  I painted and studied and brooded about my parents. Jacob Kahn’s words haunted me: “That is the only way to justify what you are doing to everyone’s life.” I did not understand what he meant. I did not feel I had to justify anything. I had not willfully hurt anyone. What did I have to justify? I did not want to paint in order to justify anything; I wanted to paint because I wanted to paint. I wanted to paint the same way my father wanted to travel and work for the Rebbe. My father worked for Torah. I worked for—what? How could I explain it? For beauty? No. Many of the pictures I painted were not beautiful. For what, then? For a truth I did not know how to put into words. For a truth I could only bring to life by means of color and line and texture and form.

  And so I painted and studied and began once again to see my thunderous mythic ancestor. I saw other things as well: the prophylactic on the Provincetown beach, the nudes I had drawn and painted, the girls waiting along Manhattan side streets, certain books in stores, certain magazines on newsstands. I painted in a frenzy of fierce and restless energy; and slowly the room filled with my work. One day in June, I put a wet and finished canvas near my attic window. I looked outside and could not see the street for the thick new leaves of the tree.

  I spent that summer in Provincetown with Jacob and Tanya Kahn. It was a calm and beautiful summer. I met some of his artist friends. They spent long nights talking. I sat and listened.

  I sat and listened the following summer, too, and sometime toward the end of the summer I began to join in the talk. There were things I wanted to say. I said them, and they sat and listened, and we talked.

  Those were lovely summers. Only once in both summers did Jacob Kahn indulge his illness, and then only briefly.

  My parents returned to America for the holidays after that last Provincetown summer. My mother began urging me to spend the following summer in Vienna. But I was afraid a summer in Vienna would extend itself into one or two years in Europe. I had come to enjoy living with my aunt and uncle and their noisy brood of children. I did not want to live with my father. So I refused.

  That was a bleak holiday for me. My aunt and uncle joined my mother in her insistence that I go to Vienna. My father remained aloof, not seeming to care whether I went or not. Jacob Kahn was campaigning around the country for John Kennedy. Hitler had taught him to take an interest in politics, he had said to me after Kennedy’s nomination. He was going to organize a nationwide artists-for-Kennedy group. “People will listen to a seventy-five-year-old man,” he said. “They will think I possess wisdom.” I did not see him all during the campaign.

  I relented to their pleas. I would go to Vienna.

  “You were right to do that,” Jacob Kahn said when I saw him again after the election.

  “Why?”

  “They are your parents. You should be with your parents.”

  “Why?”

  He looked at me sharply. “You do not want to go?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you agree?”

  “They all piled on me.”

  “You have been piled on before, Asher Lev.”

  “I wish you had been around.”

  “Learn to stand on your own feet, Asher Lev. Even if I live to eighty, I will not be here forever.”

  “I don’t want to live with my father.”

  “Then change your mind.”

  “No.”

  “Then do something. But do not brood in my studio. Brood in your attic. Here we think and we work. We do not indulge ourselves in brooding.”

  “I’ll brood in my algebra class. It’s as good a place as any for brooding. Maybe I’ll brood in my physics class.”

  “You are developing an interesting sense of humor, Asher Lev.”

  He said to me one day in December, “I think John Kennedy will be a great President. I like the people he is surrounding himself with.”

  But I was not interested in politics and cared little about Kennedy and his people. I shrugged and continued painting.

  He stood behind me one afternoon and watched me paint. He was silent a long time. Then he said, “Asher Lev, what are you doing?”

  I explained it to him. He looked at me. Then he looked at the canvas.

  “Yes,” he said very quietly. “I understand.”

  He went off to his own work. But from time to time throughout the rest of that afternoon I saw him glancing at me in a strange and curious way.

  The winter weeks passed with leaden heaviness. I did not want them to pass at all. I dreaded the oncoming summer.

  There was stil
l coldness in the air the first day of Passover. I spent all the intermediate days in galleries and museums. On one of those days, Jacob Kahn accompanied me to the Museum of Modern Art and I discovered something about two of the Picassos that I had not noticed on previous trips. I pointed it out to Jacob Kahn, and he stared at the paintings and nodded slowly and gave me that strange and curious look again.

  Early one May afternoon, I took a subway to a Jewish museum in Manhattan. I saw Torah crowns, Torah pointers, Torah covers, spice boxes, illuminated manuscripts. Some were fine pieces of work. But there was no art. It was all crafts and unmoving. I felt vaguely betrayed.

  On the last Tuesday in June, my uncle drove me to Idlewild Airport and put me on a plane to Vienna.

  I became ill on the plane. I was ill during the stopover in London. I was ill on the flight from London to Vienna. In Vienna, I lay in a strange bed in a strange room and saw my mother’s face through dark fog. Somewhere along the edge of the fog, I sensed my father’s rage. I heard strange voices in languages I could not recognize. I heard Yiddish and French and what sounded like Russian. Food poisoning, someone said. Virus, someone said. Nervous shock, someone said. I heard my father shouting. I sat in front of an open window that looked across a dark river to old gabled buildings. It was raining. Rain came in the open window and collected in puddles on the wooden floor. I saw Yudel Krinsky. What was Yudel Krinsky doing in Vienna? Hello, Reb Yudel Krinsky. Vienna is a city of waltzes and cafés, Yudel Krinsky whispered. Vienna is a city that hates Jews. It rained on the river and the gabled houses. I saw sand and a vast ocean in the rain. I saw dunes and white sunlight on shingled houses. Someone had me by the arm. I heard my mother and father. There was a quarrel. It swirled poisonously around me. I felt its rage and hate. A man with a beard led me gently into a silver bird and sat with me through clouds.

  My uncle met me at the airport and took me home. It was the end of the third week of July. I lay in bed three days, then began wandering around the house. I did a painting of a dark river in rain.