My Name Is Asher Lev (29 page)

“Please,” I said. “Please please please.”

He was silent for a long time. Then he dismissed me with an abrupt gesture of his hand.

There was snow on the street. A bitter wind blew along the parkway.

I was told that the Rebbe wanted to see me. I climbed the stairway on trembling legs and came into the waiting room. Rav Mendel Dorochoff took me into the Rebbe’s office and left, closing the heavy wooden door.

The Rebbe sat behind his desk. He looked at me from across the room. He seemed garbed in light.

“Asher Lev,” I heard him say softly. “Come here. Come here.”

I went up to him. I felt his eyes on my face.

“You look tired, my Asher. Sit here beside me. Here.”

I sat in a chair alongside his desk.

He gazed at me somberly. “How are you feeling, Asher?”

“I am well, Rebbe.”

“How you have grown. And your beard. But you are thin. You are too thin. Jacob Kahn tells me you work very hard.”

I was quiet.

“He has been a good teacher?”

“Yes.”

“He is a good person. He is not an observer of the commandments. But he is a good person.”

I did not say anything.

“I hear from your parents that they are well.”

“Yes.”

“The letters from your mother—they are often sad.”

I was quiet.

“Asher, Asher,” the Rebbe said softly. “This world has not been kind to you.”

I sat very still. He shook his head slowly.

“‘Everything is in the hands of heaven, except the fear of heaven,’” he quoted. “What can I tell you, my Asher? I do not
know what the Master of the Universe has waiting for us. Certain things are given, and it is for man to use them to bring goodness into the world. The Master of the Universe gives us glimpses, only glimpses. It is for us to open our eyes wide.”

I was quiet.

“Asher Lev. My Asher Lev. Jacob Kahn tells me you have greatness. He tells me you will soon be ready to show yourself to the world. His words are for me a glimpse, a light. I say to myself Asher Lev will be a great artist. He will travel about the world in search of ideas and people. Great artists make the entire world their home. You have already begun to travel. And I say to myself there are great museums in Europe. There are great museums in Russia. You know of the Hermitage in Leningrad and the museum in Moscow. Russia is a land rich in art and you will one day wish to travel there. That is for me a glimpse, my Asher. I am trying to open my eyes wide and to see. I will tell you what my father, may he rest in peace, once told me. Seeds must be sown everywhere. Only some will bear fruit. But there would not be the fruit from the few had the many not been sown. Do you understand, my Asher?”

I nodded slowly.

“Yes,” he said. “I am certain you understand. I wish you a long and healthy life, my son. I give you my blessings for greatness in the world of art and greatness in the world of your people.”

I walked back to my uncle’s house in the ice and snow of the January streets.

That spring, I flew to Chicago with Jacob Kahn to see a Brancusi exhibit at the Art Institute. That summer, I drove to Provincetown with Jacob and Tanya Kahn and lived in my world of water and sand. That fall, I entered college and registered for a class in Russian.

*    *    *

I painted. I attended college and studied Russian. I attended the yeshiva and studied Gemorra and Hasidus. I traveled to Manhattan galleries and saw the beginnings of a mocking art which I disliked. Jacob Kahn called it nihilism. He despised it. He regarded it as an undisciplined destruction of aesthetic values. Duchamp was to blame for this, he said bitterly. I began to understand what it meant to have once been a revolutionary in art and then to become, in turn, the target of a new revolution. “Sometimes I think it is not wise to grow too old,” Jacob Kahn said to me one windy afternoon as we walked together along Madison Avenue. “But I am not aware that we are given a choice in this matter.”

He brought me into Anna Schaeffer’s gallery. She was behind her desk and she smiled delightedly when she saw us.

“My young prodigy and my impossible old man,” she said, taking my hand. Jacob Kahn kissed her cheek. There were paintings on the walls. The forms and muted colors intrigued me.

“He is a splendid painter,” Anna Schaeffer said to me. “A Viennese. He loves to paint chairs. He is another of my impossible old men. Go and look at them.”

I wandered through the gallery. Anna Schaeffer and Jacob Kahn were talking quietly. I came back to them.

“He’s very good,” I said.

“Yes,” Anna Schaeffer said. “And he sells well.”

“I knew him in Paris,” Jacob Kahn said. “He sold well in Paris, too.”

“That is where your pictures will hang in the spring,” Anna Schaeffer said to me, pointing to the walls.

I stared at her and felt a shock move through me.

“I would have done it this year,” she said. “But this old man would not let me.”

“He is still a boy this year,” Jacob Kahn said. “A boy should not rush to make his soul naked.”

“I think you will be the youngest artist ever to have a one-man show in a Madison Avenue gallery,” Anna Schaeffer said. “I may bill you as ‘Asher Lev, Brooklyn Prodigy.’” She laughed softly. “Look at his face, Jacob.”

“I am looking. I would like to sculpt that expression. But I do not happen to be carrying a block of marble on me.”

Outside, we walked together on the windy street.

“You are happy, yes?” Jacob Kahn said.

I nodded and did not know what to say.

“Be happy,” he said. “Be happy. These are the good times. Be happy, Asher Lev. Later you will understand how truly good these times have been.”

My uncle and aunt were delighted when I told them. Yudel Krinsky was delighted. “The colors you paint with you bought here, yes? I am happy for you, Asher Lev.”

I wrote my mother. She wrote me back saying she was very happy. Yes, she had informed my father. They would probably return from Europe sometime during the summer, she wrote. My father’s work was coming to an end. Would I inform my aunt and uncle, and would I ask them to inform the tenants in the apartment?

I lived that year in a fever of expectation. The winter seemed unusually mild. Jacob Kahn came to the house one day and, from the stacks of canvases piled against the walls, selected the ones for the show.

“It will take your uncle five years to scrape the paint from your room,” he said. “You have learned all my bad habits.” He looked at me. “Yes, we will show the two nudes, Asher Lev. They are important to your development. We are not playing games. You will enter in truth or you will not enter at all.”

A truck came one afternoon while I was in school and took away the paintings he had chosen.

The weeks went by. One April afternoon, I came into Anna
Schaeffer’s gallery and watched as they put up the paintings. I did not like how some of the canvases had been hung.

“Artists should paint and not hang,” Anna Schaeffer said. “Your colleagues have destroyed the frame and soon they will destroy the wall. Go away, Asher Lev. Go home and paint. I was hanging canvases before you were born.”

I walked the wind-blown streets of Manhattan. She had said “your colleagues.” I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city.

To this day, I do not know all the details that went into the preparation of that show. Anna Schaeffer sent out the announcements, contacted some of her collectors privately, and prepared the catalogue. A week before the opening, I learned that it had all amounted to a great deal of money.

“Who is paying for it?” I asked Jacob Kahn.

“You are.”

I stared at him.

“She will take it from your sales. She has a great affection for you. But she is a businesswoman.”

“Does she also get a percentage of each sale?”

“Thirty percent. Do not look at me like that. What do you think she means when she talks about becoming rich off your work? She has become rich off mine. But we are fortunate. Some galleries take forty and fifty percent.”

“What if I don’t sell?”

“She is gambling. Gamblers sometimes lose.”

She did not lose. But she did not win, either. The opening was a moderate success. Some of her collectors came. Some of my classmates came. Some critics came. Yudel Krinsky came. Rav Mendel Dorochoff came, looked, and walked out. My uncle and aunt were there. People sauntered in off the streets. It was a warm day in early May and the streets were crowded. There were drinks and food, non-kosher food. She was in the art business, not
in the religious-catering business, Anna Schaeffer had said. This was not a bar mitzvah but an art show. I did not eat.

The sharpest memory I have of that show, a memory that was reinforced by the two other shows she gave me before I left for Europe and that returns to haunt me more and more frequently these days, is the memory of standing in that gallery and seeing the faces of my world on its walls—paintings of my people and my street, paintings of my mother and me walking together, paintings of Yudel Krinsky and Mrs. Rackover, paintings of old ladies on the parkway benches—all the years of my life summed up on the walls of a gallery, and then seeing some of the empty spaces when the show was over: Yudel Krinsky was gone; Mrs. Rackover was gone; my mother and I were gone; some of the old ladies on the park benches were gone.

“We are not rich,” Anna Schaeffer said to me when it was done and the walls were bare. “But we are not poor, either. The critics were kind.”

The critics who had noticed me had commented on my extreme youth and been very kind, with the exception of one who dismissed me as a fraud and described me as glutted with banality, sentimentality, and “a menacing affinity for Picassoid forms.” Jacob Kahn liked that phrase. He went around quoting it for weeks. “Anna, did you know our prodigy has a menacing affinity for Picassoid forms?” Anna Schaeffer was not amused.

I wrote my mother about the show. She wrote me back expressing her joy. They would not return that summer, she added. My father’s work was not yet done. She asked me to call the tenants in the apartment and inform them that they would not have to move out. I spent the summer in Provincetown with Jacob and Tanya Kahn.

Jacob Kahn was in Paris visiting a retrospective given for an old friend from his Berlin days when President Kennedy was assassinated. He returned to America a few days after the funeral,
locked himself in his studio, and painted. I saw the canvas when it was done. It radiated his anguish.

He said to me once during those days of pain, “This will be a new dark age. I remember Germany. But where can I run to now? I think I will not enjoy reaching eighty.” Later Tanya Kahn called and said he was not well. Yes, he was indulging himself again. No, she had no idea how long it would last.

It took almost a week. When I saw him again, he would not talk about it.

My second show took place the following spring. The critics were very kind, except for our friend of the Picassoid forms, who had other things to say this time.

“We are not rich yet,” Anna Schaeffer said. “But I am beginning to feel optimistic.”

“You are a greedy old woman,” Jacob Kahn said.

“A greedy rich old woman,” Anna Schaeffer said.

In July, I went with Jacob and Tanya Kahn to Provincetown. My parents returned from Europe in the middle of August. My father’s work was done. He had been reassigned to an office next to Rav Mendel Dorochoff on the second floor of the Ladover building.

My parents moved back into our old apartment and when I returned from Provincetown I moved into my old room. I could not paint in that room because it was too small. There was a brief family meeting with my aunt and uncle and my parents. My father’s suggestion resolved the difficulty. I lived with my parents and painted in my uncle’s house.

    They had lived years without me. Now they possessed a language of shared experience in which I was nonexistent. Often they would slip into the shorthand of private signs and notations that form the speech of people who have been together intimately for great lengths of time. There were smiles about the train system from Vienna to Zurich, expressions of wonder at the cleanliness of Switzerland, grimaces over the traffic in Paris. There was quiet laughter over incidents with coal stoves, and leaking roofs, and windows that rattled in high winds. “How do you know about that window?” I heard my mother say delightedly once to my father. “You didn’t stand there waiting for me. I stood there waiting for you.” “I know about that window, Rivkeh,” I heard my father say. “The concierge said the window had been rattling since the days of Napoleon. It was an anti-French window, the concierge said.” And they laughed.

It sounded strange to hear them laughing about my mother’s habit of waiting at windows. They talked to each other with ease and assurance and knowing intimacy. Often I felt they were together now as they had been before I was born.

My father was in his middle forties. There was vigor and dignity about his gray hair and clear dark eyes and thickset shoulders. His limp was barely noticeable. He walked surrounded with the sense of his achievement in Europe. And when I watched people come up to him in the synagogue I saw by the manner in which they addressed him that his success was the common knowledge of our entire community.

My mother had lost her thinness. I had not thought her capable of putting on weight. But her body had filled, and though the thin lines of her face had remained and the cheekbones were still high, I could now feel the flesh on her once delicately boned fingers. Her eyes glowed; she seemed luminous; her years with my father had returned her to her young world of hope and fulfilled dreams. And on occasion I would hear between her and my father words with private meanings and see them exchange bedroom glances.

My father’s attitude to my work had undergone a quiet change. He lived now upon a mountain of achievement that gave him the strength to be indifferent about my art and no longer to see it as a threat. He regarded me as if from a distance and disliked me without rage.

He came into my room one night, a few weeks after we had settled back into the apartment, and said, “Asher, your mother showed me some of the articles written about you. Are those art magazines important?”

“If you’re an artist, they’re important.”

“What does the expression ‘Picassoid forms’ mean?”

“The shapes that Picasso creates in his art.”

“I didn’t like what that man wrote.”

“I didn’t either, Papa.”

“It was strange to see your name attacked with such cruelty. Were you upset?”

“Yes.”

“He was very cruel.”

“We have different views about art.”

“Goyim take art very seriously, Asher.”

“So do many Jews.”

We regarded each other for a moment. Then he said, “I’m glad the critics like what you do, Asher. I’m glad you didn’t shame us.”

My mother asked me the next morning as we walked together along the parkway, “When will your next show be, Asher?”

“A year from January.”

“Will there be paintings of nudes?”

“Yes.”

She was silent.

“Why, Mama?”

“Your father wants to see it. But he won’t go if there are nudes.”

We took our separate trains. She traveled to New York University, where she taught Russian affairs. I traveled to Brooklyn College, where I majored in sociology and studied Russian. I had decided to major in sociology. It was a safe subject and would not interfere with my painting.

She came into my room that night as I was reading an article in a French art magazine about a recent Picasso exhibition in Paris, and said, “Asher, may I interrupt you?”

I put down the magazine.

“Asher, your father asked me to talk to you.” She looked uncomfortable. “Do you know the Zalkowitz family?”

“No.”

“They live on President Street near your Uncle Yitzchok. Reb Zalkowitz is in the Diamond Exchange in Manhattan.”

I said nothing. She seemed very uncomfortable.

“They have a daughter,” she said.

I stared at her. Then I laughed, suddenly and loudly.

“Asher. Please.” She looked hurt. Pink spots appeared on her high cheeks. She turned and went from the room.

I stopped laughing. After a moment, I found myself trembling with dread.

My father said to me in the kitchen the next morning, “Reb Zalkowitz is a fine and generous man.”

“I’m sure he is.”

“Asher, isn’t it time?” He said it gently.

“No,” I said. “No.”

He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “Drink your juice, Asher. All the vitamins will go out of it.”

I sat in the living room with my mother one night in November. My father was at a staff meeting. It was raining outside. I could hear the rain thudding heavily against the window. My mother was at her table alongside the window, bent over a pile of student papers. She wore glasses now for her reading.

I saw her look up and gaze out the window. The blind had been drawn but the slats were partly open and we could see through them to the glitter of lights in the wet street below.

“In Paris when it used to rain, it was the worst time of the year,” she murmured. She looked at me and smiled. “I’ve waited at the windows of almost half the cities of the world for your father. I’m used to it now. What are you reading?”

I told her. She looked back out the window.

“He was a great writer,” she murmured. “Stalin killed him, too. And he wasn’t a Jew.” She looked at me again. “Where did you get the book?”

“One of my professors.”

She nodded. “Asher, when you were very young your father used to worry that you were retarded because you weren’t learning to read and write as quickly as others. I used to tell him you would learn well only those things that interested you. What is the other book you have there?”

“It’s about the Russian Constructivists. Russian artists.”

“Asher?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Asher, I don’t want to interfere in your work. But your father asked me to talk to you.”

I looked at her and waited.

“I’m embarrassed to ask you again, Asher.”

Still I waited.

“Asher, will you have paintings of nudes in your next exhibition?”

“I don’t know, Mama. The next exhibition is more than a year away.”

She was silent. Then she said, “I want you and your father to be friends, Asher. Please. That means a great deal to me.”

My father came into my room the following night and said, “I asked the Rebbe why he insisted that you study French and Russian. He said he thought it would be helpful to you.”

“It has been.”

“Yes? How?”

“There are good books about art in French and Russian.”

His face stiffened.

He said to me the next morning at breakfast, “Asher, were you planning to go anywhere special next summer?”

“I haven’t been planning anything yet for next summer.”

“Your mother and I thought you might spend a week or two with us in the Berkshires.”

“I think I’ll be painting all summer. I have the show in January.”

“The show,” he murmured, rubbing the side of his face. “The show.”

“Aryeh,” my mother said gently. “Please.”

He said to me one evening, in the course of a long conversation, “Asher, when a painter thinks of a painting is it the same thing as when a writer thinks of a book?”

“Yes, with some painters. They’re literary painters. I think that’s bad painting.”

“How do you paint, Asher?”

“I paint my feelings. I paint how I see and feel about the world. I express my feelings in shapes and colors and lines. But I paint a painting, not a story.”

“You paint your feelings?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes feelings are dangerous, Asher. Sometimes they are from the sitra achra.”

I looked at him.

“Sometimes feelings should be concealed and not let out in the open.”

“Some people can’t conceal their feelings, Papa.”

“Who?”

“Some people.”

“Such people can be dangerous, Asher.”

“Yes.”

“I’m trying to understand you, Asher. But it’s very difficult.”

I said to Jacob Kahn, “How do you explain a man who has a master’s degree in political science, has traveled through half the world, has lived in Europe for years, and doesn’t understand the first thing about painting?”

“Asher Lev, there are professors of art who do not understand the first thing about painting.”

“I’m talking about my father.”

“I know whom you are talking about. Why should your father understand painting? From a yeshiva education you expect a man to understand painting? From a yeshiva education you get a case of aesthetic blindness.”

“I have a yeshiva education.”

“Asher Lev, you took from your yeshiva only the things that didn’t interfere with your art. You are a freak. They could not give you a case of aesthetic blindness. They would have had to kill you to do that.”

“My father has a college education and a master’s in political science.”

“So? He has a master’s in political science. So? Asher Lev, I know your father. I have talked with him about art. He will appreciate a pretty calendar picture of Abraham and the angels
or Rebecca at the well. But he would not want his son to dedicate his life to making such pictures. He certainly would not want his son to dedicate his life to making the kind of pictures his son is actually making. I personally am acquainted with two professors of history, one professor of Talmud, a mathematician, two professors of Bible, a politician, and the president of a great corporation who are afflicted with aesthetic blindness and feel the same way as your father. Why are you so surprised about your father? Please. I am tired of talking about your father. I would like you to keep your problems with your father out of my studio. You make a fog in the air with those problems. Now, you were explaining to me what you did in this painting. Tell me again about your concept of unity and shape.”

Between terms, I flew to Chicago with Jacob Kahn for a Matisse exhibition. My father came into my room the night I returned and said, “You didn’t tell me you would fly to Chicago today.”

“I didn’t think it mattered.”

“You didn’t think it mattered? A trip to Chicago doesn’t matter?”

“I’m not a child, Papa.”

“It has nothing to do with your being a child. I might have had a message for you to deliver.”

I stared at him.

“There are Ladover in Chicago. I might have wanted you to take something for me.”

I did not understand what he was saying.

“Asher, was it worth a trip to Chicago to see that man’s paintings?”

“Matisse is one of the greatest painters of the century, Papa.”

“It’s expensive to fly to Chicago to see paintings.”

“I have the money, Papa.”

“I know you have the money, Asher.”

“I’m spending it on things that are important to me.”

“It won’t hurt you to do something on your trips that is important to us. Next time you travel, please let me know.”

A week later, I told him about a trip I would be taking to Minneapolis for a Giacometti exhibit. He had never heard of Giacometti. He gave me an envelope containing a letter from the Rebbe. The plane landed in a snowstorm. A man walked quickly over to me as I came out of the jet passenger tunnel. He wore a dark-brown coat and a dark-brown hat and looked to be in his late twenties. He had a black beard and spoke unaccented English.

“Excuse me. Are you Asher Lev?”

“Yes.”

He told me his name. I handed him the envelope. He put it into an inside pocket. “I’d offer you a lift, but I’m not going into town.” He walked away quickly.

“Were there any problems?” my father asked when I returned.

“No.”

“Did he give you a message for me?”

“No.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No. What was in the letter, Papa?”

“A message from the Rebbe.”

“What kind of a message?”

“The man you met is the head of our yeshiva in Minneapolis. His wife is ill. The Rebbe sent her a blessing. The Rebbe likes such things to be delivered personally.”

During the spring vacation, I traveled with Jacob Kahn to a Braque exhibition in Boston. We were met at the airport by a tall thin man with a dark beard and a dark suit and hat.

“Asher Lev?” He spoke with a New England accent.

“Yes.”

He told me his name. I gave him an envelope and he walked away.

Jacob Kahn smiled and shook his head. “Asher Lev, I wondered how long it would be.”

“The Rebbe believes in the personal touch.”

“It is part of his greatness. We have a clever Rebbe.”

“How is it he doesn’t have you delivering messages?”

“I never tell them my travel plans. You think I have nothing else to do but be part of the Rebbe’s private courier service? Come, let us go see Braque. I may have watched him do some of the paintings they are showing.”