“Are you all right?” he asked anxiously.
I nodded.
“You looked like you were going to pass out. Let me help you up.”
I felt his hand on my arm as I rose to my feet. Michael and his parents were still standing together. They were not talking. They were simply standing together, looking at one another.
“Wait outside a few minutes,” Danny said quietly to me. “I need to talk to them alone. It’ll only be a few minutes.”
He opened the door and I stepped into the corridor and then he closed the door and I was alone. I found it difficult to stand. I went through the corridor and sat down on the stairs. I was feeling very cold and I put on my hat and coat. I closed my eyes and was back inside that room and opened them again quickly. I sat very still, with my eyes open. I sat and stared at the cement floor and the cinder-block wall and the ceiling fixture and saw cracks in the cement and the cinder blocks and let my eyes trace their jagged lines and then the door opened and Danny came out with Abraham and Ruth Gordon and they moved toward me through the corridor. I got to my feet. We went up the stairs through the door and along the corridor to Danny’s office. Outside the office we stopped and Abraham Gordon said quietly to Danny, “I’ll call you tomorrow morning,” and Danny nodded. Then Abraham Gordon turned to me and said, “I can’t quite begin—” and stopped. Ruth Gordon said nothing. Her eyes were dark and wet and filled with bewildering pain. Then they went along the corridor, walking very closely together, Abraham Gordon’s hand in Ruth Gordon’s arm, each seeming to be supporting the other, and turned into the living room and were gone.
“Come inside a minute,” Danny said. “I want to talk to you.”
We came into the office and sat at the desk.
“How do you feel?” Danny asked.
“I don’t know. Very tired.”
“Have you had lunch? I have a sandwich we—”
“I’ll eat at home.”
“Do you want some water? You look—”
“No,” I said.
He nodded. Then he said, “You should have been a psychologist.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You did it for me.”
“I didn’t do anything. I didn’t even know what I was saying.”
“No,” he said. “You knew what you were saying.”
I looked at him. There was a brief silence.
“I’m really tired,” I said. “I want to go home.”
“Do you understand what happened in there?” he asked.
“I—think so,” I said. Then I said, “You took quite a chance. He could have stayed catatonic. What would you have done?”
“Altman would have stopped the experiment. He would have come out of it.”
“Why didn’t Michael tell his parents what they were doing to him?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to work that out in therapy. I would guess that in a way he was enjoying his rage. Sometimes a person who feels helpless seeks power by manipulating the pain-giver into giving more pain. Or he acts erratically and causes the pain-giver pain as a way of avenging himself. He might even get some kind of sexual pleasure out of his rages. Yes … Even that. I don’t know. Michael has a long way to go. But I think he’s ready now.”
“You knew all along,” I said. “You knew what it was about all the time.”
“I guessed.”
“You didn’t guess. You knew.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I went through some of that myself a while ago.” He closed his eyes and after a moment I saw him begin to sway back and forth behind his desk. Then he raised his hand and with his thumb and forefinger began to caress an imaginary earlock.
I left him there and closed the door softly behind me and went home.
For a very long time my father sat at his desk, staring at me in disbelief. Then he tried to say something but the words would not come out and he cleared his throat and coughed.
“I would not have hated you that way, abba,” I said. “We would have talked about it.”
“You are sure, Reuven?”
I nodded.
“You would have told me how you felt about me if the things that were most precious to me had ruined your life?”
“Yes.”
“Haven’t you hated me during these past months?” he asked softly.
I hesitated. “It wasn’t really—”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Reuven?”
I looked at him and did not say anything.
“What a chance we take when we raise children,” my father murmured. “What a terrible chance.”
Rachel called me later that day and we talked for a while. She and her parents had spent part of the afternoon with her aunt and uncle. They had looked shattered. Her aunt and uncle had just sat together on the couch, broken and shattered. But they were grateful to me. They wanted to see me again, she said. Especially her aunt. They hadn’t thanked me properly. They wanted to thank me. I told her they didn’t have to thank me. I had learned a few things myself, I said. They didn’t owe me anything. Bloom had his son back, I said. He didn’t need Dedalus. She was silent a moment. Would I see them anyway? she said. Yes, I said. I had the impression that she had been talking all along through tears.
I went over to their apartment the following evening. They had recovered somewhat, but they were both subdued. Abraham Gordon looked pale. He was trying to get back into his book, he said. Ruth Gordon said very little. But she cried easily and made no effort to conceal her tears.
I saw Michael a few times during the next weeks. They had taken him out of isolation and he was back in his old room. Danny was seeing him in therapy three times a week. They thought he might be able to leave the treatment center at the end of June, he told me. But he would have to continue in therapy for a long time. And they would be sending him to a special school next year, and if that worked out he could return to his regular school the year after.
We walked beneath the trees on a day in the second week of June and there was sunlight on the leaves and on the red and white pagoda. We sat on the circular white bench and looked through the trees at the sky. He had put on some weight but his hair was still uncombed and he seemed tense and a little dazed. I saw him take his eyes from the trees and look around at the pagoda.
“I think I might have killed him,” he said softly. “I remember—I remember I was so angry I wanted to hurt somebody.” He seemed frightened by his words. “But he said no one could take you away from me and I knew you were my friend and I didn’t want to hurt you by hurting him.” He was silent. A breeze stirred the leaves. Then he looked at me. “He’s a nice person. Even if he is so religious. I wish—I wish Rachel hadn’t fallen in love with someone so religious.”
The following Sunday I received my Master’s degree in philosophy and a week later, in a long and joyous ceremony attended by dozens of rabbis and a variety of dignitaries from all over the country, I was given smicha. Later, sitting in my seat during a particularly lengthy speech, I unrolled the parchment and read the words and saw his signature alongside that of Rav Gershenson. It was a strong, spiky scrawl. The letters stood out sharply, his title, his name, and the name of his father. They seemed to glitter in the bright lights of the huge auditorium.
I was standing with my father at one of the tables in the reception hall when I saw him come toward us, looking small but stately in his tall black skullcap and starched white shirt and dark knee-length jacket. He shook my hand and I felt the misshapen fingers against my palm.
“Your son has chutzpah,” he said to my father. “I have never had a student with such chutzpah.” Then he smiled thinly. “And with such derech eretz.” “Derech eretz” is the Hebrew term for respect and good manners.
I watched as the two of them shook hands, coldly, guardedly. Then he walked off and disappeared into the crowd and I saw my father grimace and shake his head. They would be opponents all their lives. I did not for a minute think he had heard the last of Rav Kalman. For tha
t matter, I did not think I had either.
Danny and Rachel were married on the last Sunday in June. It was a lavish, tumultuous, Hasidic wedding in a hall in Williamsburg. Men and women sat separately. There were Hasidic musicians. There was dancing and singing and the radiant face of Rachel and Danny’s eyes shining as he danced and Abraham Gordon standing against a wall and watching and Ruth Gordon’s face cold and contemptuous and Joseph and Sarah Gordon looking distressed and uncomfortable and totally unable to reconcile themselves to the world their daughter had forced into their lives. Reb Saunders danced briefly with my father and a group of tzaddikim and there were lengthy discourses on passages of Talmud and at one point as an old rebbe wound his way tortuously through a labyrinth of Talmudic reasoning I remembered a Yerushalmi and solved his problem for him with a variant text but I sat there listening anyway, fascinated by the look on his aged face and by the gestures of his hands. Then Danny spoke and he was very good and I did not need to do anything to the text he used. Sometime during that wedding Abraham Gordon came over to me and told me he had finished his book and he and Michael and Ruth were going off on a vacation for a while, and Joseph Gordon chewed on his pipe and asked me how in God’s name anyone could think in all this noise, and Rachel, beautiful Rachel, told me she and Danny had found a small apartment near Columbia and she would be going to graduate school for a degree in English literature until—she stopped, and I said, Until Rachel became big with seed, and she blushed and laughed and went off. From time to time I glanced over at the table where Michael was sitting with his father and saw him staring at the dancing Hasidim, his face pale, his eyes wide. Then he was gone from the table and I looked around and found him standing near the door and I came up to him and asked him how he was feeling. His nose had begun to bleed a little, he said. But he was all right now. Then he looked at me through his glasses. “We’re going away for a few weeks,” he said. “The doctors told my parents it was all right. We might see the observatory in Palomar. Have you ever seen that observatory?”
“No.”
He was silent for a moment, gazing moodily at a circle of dancers. “I really hurt my parents,” he said. “I really hurt them.”
I did not say anything.
“They’re not over it yet,” he said. “I can feel they’re not over it. I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish you hadn’t made me do it. I wish—I wish—” His thin body sagged slightly. “I’m tired,” he said. “I want to sit down.”
He went off in the direction of his table.
Danny came over to me and said, “You’re not dancing.”
“I’m resting. I don’t have the strength you Hasidim have.”
He laughed.
“Will I see you this summer?” I asked.
“I’ll be working on my dissertation this summer.”
I asked him what the topic was.
“Michael,” he said.
I looked at him.
“It was Altman’s idea.”
“I think it’s a fine idea.”
“We may come up to see you in August.”
“I’d like that.”
“Come and dance with me, Reuven. I want you to dance with me.”
He took my hand and we broke through a circle and did the handkerchief dance and I heard them singing and clapping and stamping their feet and the room shook to the rhythm of the music. The whole wedding was like that. It was—it was a splendid wedding.
I did not see any of them again until the middle of August.
Joseph and Sarah Gordon spent all of July and the first two weeks of August alone in their summer home by the lake. My father and I moved into our cottage in the first week of August and a few days later I went over to see them. I found Joseph Gordon on the dock with a new book about Hemingway and Sarah Gordon on the patio, flinging paint onto a canvas. I was with them for an hour or so and we had a pleasant enough time and they told me that Rachel and Danny were coming up to spend two weeks with them. Rachel had talked Danny into taking off for a while. They were expecting to see me, she said, daubing paint on the canvas and stepping back to gauge the effect. She would call me when they came.
Those early weeks of August were warm and quiet and restful. I was able to do some swimming and sailing, but mostly I sat with my father at the wooden table on the screened-in porch of our cottage. We were preparing our lectures for the classes we would be teaching in September.
Danny and Rachel came up in the third week of August. They looked the way all newly married couples look: radiant, somewhat shy, and filled with the quiet amazement of discovery. I asked Danny if he had heard from Michael and his parents, and he said yes, he and Rachel had received a card from them and they seemed to be enjoying their trip. He would be seeing Michael again in therapy when they returned. He was really only at the beginning of things with Michael. There was still a long way to go.
I found Rachel on the dock late one morning, sunning herself and reading a Hebrew book, and when I asked her what it was she handed it to me and I saw it was a Hasidic book about the concept of the holiness of the family. Danny came down and we sat on the dock and talked, and later I watched Rachel trying to teach him how to swim and he was as awkward as a finless fish in the water. I took him out in a sailboat one afternoon but he could not get the feel of it and I did not take him out again. That was the afternoon Rachel asked if we might want to go to the county fair in Peekskill. She had checked it out and it was really a fair this time. Did it have a carnival? Danny asked. Yes, she said. But it was a very small carnival and we could ignore it and see the exhibits. Danny said he would feel uncomfortable in a place like that and did not want to go. But Rachel insisted and we went and the old man was not there and we had a good time.
A few days later Michael and his parents arrived for the weekend and on a warm and windy Sunday morning I crossed the back lawn and went past the old maple and through the woods and around the lake to the Gordon home. I found them playing volleyball on the lawn beyond the patio, Michael and his parents forming one team and Danny and Rachel and her parents forming the other, and I stood on the side for a while and watched. Danny was playing volleyball the way he had once played baseball, with an intense, hungry eagerness to win. He played wildly, his long body everywhere on the court, his small skullcap attached to his hair with a bobby pin so it would not fall off, one of his ritual fringes falling out of his polo shirt and flapping against his leg as he ran about.
Abraham Gordon saw me and called me over to join his team. “We need help,” he said.
“Nothing will help,” Joseph Gordon laughed.
I went over to Abraham Gordon’s side of the court. He was bare to the waist and sweating profusely. He shook my hand.
“Where did that Hasid learn to play ball like that?” he asked.
From the other side of the net came Rachel’s laugh and Joseph Gordon’s loud and happy challenge. “It won’t help. We’ll even use the Geneva Conventions. But it won’t help. We’ve got ourselves a powerhouse here.”
“How was Palomar?” I asked Michael.
“It was great,” he said, smiling happily. Then he said, “Can we go sailing in the afternoon, Reuven?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “This wind is perfect for sailing.”
“Your friend plays a rather frenzied game,” Ruth Gordon said.
“Yes,” I said. “Always.”
The three of them seemed rested and relaxed and I joined them and did the best I could, but with Danny on the other side we lost anyway and at the moment the final point was scored Rachel shouted with joy and in front of everyone planted a kiss on Danny’s lips. I saw his eyes above the curve of her cheek, wide, startled, and his face a sudden flaming crimson. He was going to have quite a time of it with Rachel’s twentieth century.
I went back to the cottage to have lunch with my father and later that afternoon I took a Sailfish across the lake to the dock and then Michael and I sailed toward the middle of the lake. There were many clouds in the sky
but they were not blocking the sun. There was a strong wind and Michael held the tiller in one hand and the mainsail sheet in the other and I sat near the center board, balancing the boat. We sailed to the rhythm of the water and the wind and then Michael headed the Sailfish past the house and the dock toward the cove and I pulled up on the center board and felt it move smoothly through the slot and we tied up to the branch of a tree that lay in the water.
“Do you want to swim?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“I’ll race you to that rock.”
We swam for a while and then we lay on the Sailfish and I saw Michael looking up at the sky. He looked up at the sky a long time.
“Sometimes I still see faces,” he said.
I asked him what he was seeing now.
“Clouds,” he said.
ALSO BY CHAIM POTOK
“Memorable.… Profound in its vision of humanity, of religion, and of art.” —The Wall Street Journal
MY NAME IS ASHER LEV
Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day, and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels, even when it leads him to blasphemy. In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher’s passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination.
Asher Lev grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. But in time, his gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant, a modern classic.