I said nothing.
“Goodbye, Asher Lev. Good luck.”
I went into the kitchen and told my parents. My father stared at me and said nothing. My mother began to cry.
I called and made a reservation on a flight to Paris for the next night. I remember nothing else about that day. I came awake in the night and heard my parents talking softly in the kitchen. I lay in my bed and wondered what they were saying.
I woke in the morning and prayed. My parents were not home. I made myself breakfast. I wandered about the apartment and walked the streets. I had lunch alone in the apartment and supper with my parents. I packed my bags. We stood at the door. My mother was crying. My father stood next to her, tall, heavy-shouldered, his eyes dark—and moist, I thought. He said nothing, but he shook my hand. “Please write,” my mother said. “You’ll write?” She looked tiny and fragile. “Have a safe journey, my Asher,” she kept saying. “Have a safe journey.”
I came out of the apartment house. It was cold and dark. I looked up. My parents stood framed in the living-room window. I hailed a cab and climbed inside. It pulled slowly away from the curb. I turned in the seat and looked out the rear window of the cab. My parents were still watching me through our living-room window.
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ANCHOR BOOKS
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FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2003
Copyright © 1972, renewed 2000 by Chaim Potok
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Potok, Chaim.
My name is Asher Lev/Chaim Potok—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-42234-7
1. Jewish families—Fiction. 2. Young men—Fiction.
3. Artists—Fiction. 4. Jews—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.
5. Crown Heights (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
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Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev
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