My Name Is Asher Lev

  We began to move slowly along the walls and to look at the paintings. Behind us the crowd ebbed and swirled. These are my memories, Papa. No, I’m not saying that these paintings represent the truth; they represent how I feel about things I remembered when I was in Paris. They’re not the truth, Papa; but they’re not lies, either. Remember you told me about the village burning and the people who died? Remember you told me about the way he always traveled afterward? Remember you told me about your father and how he suddenly began to travel? Remember—? The crowd seemed strangely noisy. I heard whispers. The noise swelled, diminished, swelled again. I glanced around. People were staring at my parents. I looked at my mother. She had become aware of the level of noise and movement around us. She turned slowly. The crucifixions were on the opposite wall, but she could not see them for the dense crowd. Then my father turned. He was taller than most of the people in front of the crucifixions. He looked straight over their heads. The upper portions of the two paintings were visible. I saw my father staring over the heads of the crowd directly at my mother’s face on the crucifixions. His dark eyes narrowed. He looked puzzled. He began to move through the crowd, leaving my mother and me behind. I took my mother’s hand and followed. Her hand was cold and moist. There were more whispers. People moved aside. I saw my father stop in front of the paintings. My mother and I came up beside him. My mother stood between us, staring at the paintings. People were looking at us and at the paintings. There were still more hushed whispers. Then silence closed around us. I saw people in distant corners of the gallery become aware of the silence and begin to edge toward us. We stood there, staring at our own faces in the second painting. I had my hand on my mother’s arm. I felt her shudder. Her eyes were wide and disbelieving and her mouth was open, and she stared and shuddered and seemed not to know what to do or say. I felt the crowd begin to press in against us. “Hey,” someone whispered loudly. “That’s them.” The crowd stirred, then was silent. Through the silence came the soft music of the quartet. There was a long frozen moment of waiting. Then my father moved toward the paintings. I saw him bend to read the titles. His shoulders stiffened. Then he saw the red labels and the name of the museum that had purchased the paintings. He straightened slowly. He turned and looked at me. His face wore an expression of awe and rage and bewilderment and sadness, all at the same time. I remembered that expression. During the months of my mother’s illness, I had drawn her once sitting in the sunlight of our living room, and he had watched me from the doorway, watched me using cigarette ash to give life to the contours of her body and face. He had had that same expression on his face. Who are you? the expression said. Are you really my son? He had not spoken to me then. He did not speak to me now. He took my mother’s arm and led her through the silent crowd. He walked slowly, and with dignity. He looked straight ahead through the crowd, walking with deliberate slowness. I followed. I saw Anna Schaeffer’s face somewhere in the crowd. I saw my father push the elevator button. My mother kept staring at me in astonishment and disbelief. My father looked at the elevator door. The door opened. We stepped aside to let a wave of people move by us into the gallery. We were alone in the elevator as it went back down. My father would not look at me. The elevator operator, an elderly man in a crimson uniform and cap, stared at us curiously. Downstairs, we pushed through the crowd in the hallway and came outside on the street. It was cold. Sunlight bathed the tops of the buildings and slanted across the intersections.

  “Papa—”

  But he was not listening. He stood on the curb, hailing a cab.

  “Mama—”

  “There are limits, Asher.” Her voice trembled and her eyes were wet. “Everything has a limit. I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t want to talk to you now.”

  A cab pulled up to the curb. My father opened the door. My mother climbed inside. He sat beside her and closed the door in my face. He did not once look at me. The cab pulled away. I stood at the curb and watched the cab move into the stream of traffic. I shivered in the wind. I stood there a long time; then I went back upstairs to the gallery.

  I remember feeling more and more tired as the day wore on and thinking I could no longer endure the noise and the compliments of the crowd. Finally, it was over. Waiters moved through the silent gallery, picking up dishes and glasses. The bartender was closing up. The quartet was packing away its instruments.

  Anna Schaeffer stood beside me. “Congratulations,” she said. “It was a fine day for you, Asher Lev.”

  I did not say anything.

  “The apprentice has become a master,” she said quietly. Then she said, “Come in tomorrow. We have business to discuss.”

  We shook hands. She did not ask me about my parents.

  I remember coming home that night and finding the apartment empty. I slept fitfully and thought I heard my parents come in but I was not certain. In the morning, I woke late and they were gone. I went to the gallery. Only about a dozen people were there. It seemed barnlike and empty. The paintings drooped from the walls, parodies of masters I could not begin to follow. I did not look at the crucifixions.

  I came back home after dark. The apartment was empty. There was a note from my mother. They were eating at my Uncle Yitzchok’s house. There was food for me in the refrigerator. I ate and went to bed and heard them come in hours later and go straight to their room. They were not home when I woke the following morning.

  That was the day the New York Times carried the review of the show, together with photographs of the two crucifixions. It was a kind review. I stood at the newsstand on the parkway looking at my copy of the Times and saw my father reading his copy at his desk. I saw him discovering the review. I saw him looking at himself and my mother in the second photograph. I walked along the parkway. I thought I saw people looking at me. I came into the Ladover building and went upstairs to my father’s office. I found him behind his desk, speaking into a telephone. He was talking in Yiddish about a trip to San Francisco. There was an open copy of the Times on his desk. He looked at me from across the desk. His eyes were sharp, clear, dark. His lips stiffened. He did not stop talking. He swiveled in his chair and turned his back to me, still talking into the telephone. I stood there for a long moment, staring at his small dark velvet skullcap and his thickset shoulders. Then I went back downstairs and came outside.

  I do not remember what I did the rest of that day. Nor do I have a clear memory of what that Shabbos was like, though I remember the three of us were together in the apartment for the meals. There were no quarrels. There was very little conversation. Once I tried to talk to my father about the paintings. He threatened to get up and walk out of the room. “Aryeh,” my mother murmured. “Please.” Her eyes wore a dark tortured look.

  The following week, Time and Newsweek carried stories on the show, along with pictures of the crucifixions and photographs of myself and my parents. To this day, I do not know how they obtained photographs of my parents. Had a photographer been in the gallery with a camera that Sunday? I asked Anna Schaeffer about it later that week, and she shrugged. The stories were about Asher Lev, painter, the Ladover Hasid who had put his family into a crucifixion. Leading Catholics had been asked for their reactions to having an Orthodox Jew use the crucifixion in his paintings, and they had responded, some of them quite unkindly. There were faintly lurid overtones to the stories—Freudian evaluations regarding my relationship with my parents. But the technical analyses of the paintings were well done and very favorable.

  I saw my father reading the stories. I wandered around the apartment, then took the subway to Manhattan and went up the tall stone stairs into the mansion-like building off Washington Square where my mother taught Russian affairs. I asked for her class and came to the door and peered through the small glass panel. She sat behind her desk, lecturing. I came quietly into the room and sat in the back of the room. I saw her stare at me, hesitate, then continue. There were about twenty students in the class. My mother was talking about Russian foreign policy dur
ing the First World War. She lectured in a soft voice. There was the sound of pens and pencils against paper. Then a student glanced at me, looked away, then looked back, her eyes going wide. She leaned over and whispered to the young man next to her. “Asher Lev,” I heard. “Asher Lev.” There was a stirring throughout the room. Heads turned. My mother stopped her lecture and looked at me from across the room. I felt my face burning. I got up and went out and took the subway home.

  That Shabbos, people turned their backs to me in the synagogue. The Rebbe came in during the service and sat down in the chair near the Ark. I could see his eyes beneath the prayer shawl. I could see him scanning the people in the synagogue. I saw him looking at me. For a long time, he sat near the Ark looking at me across the expanse of the synagogue. People saw him looking at me. After the service, the mashpia would not return my greetings. He walked past me, his eyes filled with pain. Yudel Krinsky murmured a response but gazed at me in silent bewilderment. My Uncle Yitzchok brushed by me angrily. I ate with my parents in a heavy silence. I tried to talk about the paintings. “I will walk out of the room,” my father said. “I warn you. Do not destroy my Shabbos.”

  “Asher, please,” my mother said. “Not now.”

  We did not talk about the paintings.

  The next day, the Sunday Times carried another review of the show, a lengthy and serious attack against my entire painting style, against the essential integrity of my efforts, and especially against the crucifixions. It was a long carefully composed and well-reasoned article written by the man who had once accused me of having a dangerous affinity to Picassoid forms and then had changed his mind. Now he accused me of a regressive flirtation with the clichés of literary painting. Once again, there were photographs of the two crucifixions.

  Anna Schaeffer called me during the morning. It was a vicious slanderous review, she said. At least half a dozen painters had called her to say they were writing to the Times in my defense. I was to be brave, she said. The vultures were out. I had to learn to abide the vultures.

  My mother came into my room that afternoon and stood near the doorway. I was at the window, looking out at the dirty snow in the yard below.

  Had I seen the review in the Times? she asked softly.

  “Yes.”

  My father wanted to know if I was all right, she said.

  “Yes.”

  Was there anything she could do?

  “Yes.”

  What could she do?

  She could listen, I said.

  She hesitated. Then she came slowly into the room and sat down on my bed.

  I tried to explain it to her. Somewhere in the middle of it all, it became clear that I was not succeeding. She would accept what I had to say. But she would never understand it. To do what I had done was beyond comprehension. She would not even dare try to explain it to my father. What could she explain? The crucifixion had been in a way responsible for his own father’s murder on a night before Easter decades ago. What could she possibly say to my father?

  She went out of the room. A few minutes later, I was called to the telephone. It was Rav Dorochoff. The Rebbe wanted to see me. Now. Yes, now. In his office. I went out of the apartment and into the cold afternoon sunlight of the street.

  I remember Rav Dorochoff’s dark anger and the brusque way he ushered me into the Rebbe’s office. I remember the Rebbe’s long burning gaze and the silence that filled the space between us. He had read everything. He had followed the papers and the magazines. He understood everything. He sat behind his desk, gazing at me out of dark sad eyes. The brim of his ordinary hat threw a shadow across his forehead.

  “I understand,” he kept saying. “Jacob Kahn once explained it to me in connection with sculpture. I understand.” Then he said, “I do not hold with those who believe that all painting and sculpture is from the sitra achra. I believe such gifts are from the Master of the Universe. But they have to be used wisely, Asher. What you have done has caused harm. People are angry. They ask questions, and I have no answer to give them that they will understand. Your naked women were a great difficulty for me, Asher. But this is an impossibility.” He was silent for a long moment. I could see his dark eyes in the shadow cast by the brim of his hat. Then he said, “I will ask you not to continue living here, Asher Lev. I will ask you to go away.”

  I felt a cold trembling inside me.

  “You are too close here to people you love. You are hurting them and making them angry. They are good people. They do not understand you. It is not good for you to remain here.”

  I said nothing.

  “Asher.”

  I looked at him.

  “Go to the yeshiva in Paris. You did not grow up there. People will not be so angry in Paris. There are no memories in Paris of Asher Lev.”

  I was quiet.

  “Asher Lev,” the Rebbe said softly. “You have crossed a boundary. I cannot help you. You are alone now. I give you my blessings.”

  I came out of the Rebbe’s office and walked past Rav Dorochoff’s angry gaze and out of the building. I walked for hours then beneath the naked trees of the parkway along streets that had once been my world but were now cold and gone from me. Sometime during the walking, I stopped in front of a mound of snow and with my finger drew in one continuous line the contour of my face. Asher Lev in snow on a cold Brooklyn parkway. Asher Lev, Hasid. Asher Lev, painter. I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. Art was demonic and divine. The solitary vision that put new eyes into gouged-out sockets was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine. Asher Lev, son of Aryeh and Rivkeh Lev, was the child of the Master of the Universe and the Other Side. Asher Lev paints good pictures and hurts people he loves. Then be a great painter, Asher Lev; that will be the only justification for all the pain you will cause. But as a great painter I will cause pain again if I must. Then become a greater painter. But I will cause pain again. Then become a still greater painter. Master of the Universe, will I live this way all the rest of my life? Yes, came the whisper from the branches of the trees. Now journey with me, my Asher. Paint the anguish of all the world. Let people see the pain. But create your own molds and your own play of forms for the pain. We must give a balance to the universe.

  Yes, I said. Yes. My own play of forms for the pain.

  Later that afternoon, I called Anna Schaeffer at the gallery. It was another mob scene, she cried exultantly. I would have to see it to believe it.

  I told her I was returning to Europe.

  There was a long silence. I could hear the noise of the crowd through the telephone.

  “Will you stay to the end of the show?” she asked.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow, Anna.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know. Back to Paris. I may go to Russia.”

  She was very quiet.

  “I need new faces. And there’s the Hermitage in Leningrad and the Matisses in Moscow.”

  “Yes,” she said. Then she said, “You will let me know where you can be reached.”

  “Yes.”

  “Goodbye, Asher Lev. When you get to Paris, you should wear the beret.”