The Gift of Asher Lev

by Chaim Potok

  “COMPELLING, MYSTERIOUS AND SUSPENSEFUL …

  It is as a novel of ideas that The Gift of Asher Lev succeeds best. The worlds of Hasidism and art are in many ways diametrically opposed, yet they are bridged in and by the character of Asher Lev, who brings to his work a religious fervor and to his religion an acute artisitic discernment. In dialogue that is rich and true and intelligent, Potok brings his ideas to life.”

  —Newsday

  “The Gift of Asher Lev is an artist’s account of his creative paralysis. Faced with the vastness of a white, empty canvas, Asher finds himself unable to paint. Denied action, he turns to thought. This novel is, among other things, his meditation on the processes of art, the activity of creation…. The Gift of Asher Lev reveals itself finally to be an allegory of the artist’s perilous journey, from success to the renewal of creativity.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Potok excels at capturing the concrete details of his settings…. The world of the Hasidim is intriguing, and [he] has knowledgeable insights to share about art.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “The Gift of Asher Lev is an artists meditation on his seeming loss of creativity and his struggle to come to terms with the warring factions of his own spirit. It is a story told not only through the voice, but also the eyes of the artist—is is rich with details of shape, color and texture. Potok’s language itself seems to shimmer with the visual perceptions of a painter.”

  —The Seattle Times

  ALSO BY CHAIM POTOK

  I Am the Clay

  Davita’s Harp

  The Book of Lights

  Wanderings

  In the Beginning

  My Name is Asher Lev

  The Promise

  The Chosen

  The Gates of November

  Old Men at Midnight

  Surely all art is the result of having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  BOOK ONE

  1

  Afterward I lived in Paris, in the same apartment where I had painted the Brooklyn Crucifixion. I married Devorah, and we moved to the Rue des Rosiers. Some years later, Devorah gave birth to a girl, and we named her Rochel, after Devorah’s mother, of blessed memory, who was taken away in the July 1942 roundup of French Jews. We called her Rocheleh, beloved little Rochel.

  I made many drawings and paintings of Devorah and Rocheleh, but I kept most of them for my own collection and would not show or sell them. I made many drawings and paintings of Paris and of the old ones in our neighborhood and people eating on the terrace of the café diagonally across the street from our apartment house on the Rue des Rosiers, and Lucien Lacamp, one of the righteous of the Gentiles, and Max Lobe, Devorah’s cousin, who came often to visit us.

  Then Max went to live in the south, and Jacob Kahn, who was in his late eighties, came to live in France, and I made many drawings of Jacob Kahn. “You are even better now than when I first taught you,” Jacob Kahn said to me one day. “But you do it too easily, Asher Lev. You are too comfortable. There is no sweat in your armpits.”

  One afternoon I was tending to Rocheleh, who was ill, coughing and wheezing in the chill air of the Rue des Rosiers apartment, when Lucien entered, his square features oddly tight, his usual soldierly carriage gone slack. It was a Sunday afternoon in early April. “The master is dead,” he said, his eyes wide and moist. He had been a paratrooper with the French Foreign Legion in Vietnam, and now there were tears in his eyes. For days afterward I saw clearly within myself, as if thrown upon some inner screen, the ghostly face of the Spaniard. There it lingered in myriad ways: young and with the black hair combed diagonally across his forehead; broken and rearranged in Cubist forms; grotesque as in his crucifixion painting; middle-aged and furious as when he worked on the Guernica; old and lecherous as in his erotic drawings; skeletal with stark terror-filled eyes as in his final self-portrait. Jacob Kahn, himself old and weary, wrote me: “The king is dead. Endless memories. The past is a parade before my eyes. The secret language we invented during those years in Montmartre and Montparnasse. It was a glorious birth. We brought into the world a new child. Dirty, cluttered studios in rotting buildings in decaying neighborhoods. Our best years. He was our center. Who replaces the king, Asher Lev? No one. In art, chaos is now king. Your old teacher and friend who asks you to take care of yourself and to sweat. Jacob.”

  Then Devorah and I and Rocheleh moved to the south, to Saint-Paul-de-Vence. A son was born to us, and we named him Avrohom, after Devorah’s father, of blessed memory, who was also caught in the July roundup, and we called him Avrumel.

  We lived in the warmth and golden air of Saint-Paul. I traveled a great deal, alone: exhibitions, commissions, the needs and politics of art. In Paris I drew the face of a student who had been clubbed by riot police. In Italy I drew the face of a terrorist on trial for assassinating the minister of justice. In Japan I drew the face of a survivor of Hiroshima. Some of the drawings I later turned into paintings.

  Two or three times a year the Rebbe would write me and send his blessing. He wrote when Rocheleh became ill, and Devorah framed the letter and hung it on the wall near the bed in Rocheleh’s room. He wrote when Avrumel was born. “I give your son my blessing, Asher Lev. May he grow up to be a leader of his people.”

  Once, only once, two years after the Rebbe sent me away, I returned home to stay overnight with my parents in Brooklyn. There was the phone call, and I never went back. Every time I thought to return I remembered the phone call. I told Devorah about the phone call, but not my parents. The whispery voice, a ghostly sibilance from the Other Side, the sitra achra, the realm of the demonic created by the Master of the Universe for reasons known only to Him. I traveled everywhere, but not home. That voice.

  In the Galilee I drew the face of an Arab man working for Israelis on a kibbutz. In the Old City of Jerusalem I drew the face of a young soldier standing guard on the Temple Mount not far from the Mosque of Omar. In Meah Shearim, the very religious neighborhood of Jerusalem, I drew the face of a retarded Hasidic girl. In Hebron I drew the face of an Arab boy talking about the Jews. In America I drew the face of a sick, aged Indian woman on a reservation in South Dakota and the face of a homeless black man on a glacial street in New York. In South Africa I drew a legless man on a bunk in a vile hovel in a black township outside Cape Town. The customs people were angered by my drawings. I told them I didn’t make the drawings to cause trouble; I was an artist, and an artist draws what he sees and feels and thinks. But they tried to confiscate the drawings anyway and that made the newspapers and later they said I could never go back to South Africa.

  In Paris in the winter of last year I had a show, and the critics were disappointed and angry. I was repeating myself, they said; it was all getting too easy for me: the superlative technique, the resplendent avant-garde flourishes, the virtuoso renderings of color and line. Le Monde called it “Rococo Expressionism” and “a false continuity.” The International Herald Tribune talked about Asher Lev mired in technique and treading dangerously the paths of a potentially mawkish sensibility. The critic for Le Figaro wrote, “Miserabilism might be acceptable if you are 16 years of age and your name is Pablo Picasso. It is not acceptable if you are 45 and your name is Asher Lev.” Even a noted music critic joined in: “In the case of Anton Bruckner, it is sometimes difficult to make a distinction between ‘establishing an individual style’ and ‘repeating oneself’—unlike the Asher Lev exhibition currently on view at the Maeght, where the latter judgment is clearly the more judicious one.” John Dorman, the American writer who lives in the house next to mine, suggested I go away for a rest. Max Lobe ag
reed. Douglas Schaeffer called and urged that I put Paris behind me and prepare for a show in his New York gallery. The Paris newspapers kept writing about the show. Then the magazines began to appear.

  Afterward I went to Switzerland alone for a while, and then I returned home to Saint-Paul. But I couldn’t work. I was very tired, and the primed canvas seemed large and unconquerable, and even after I covered it with a wash of umber it was still too large, and it would be there looking at me when I came into the closed studio every morning to begin my work. That was the winter.

  Then my uncle died.

  He had often been a father to me during the years when my own father was away on long journeys for the Rebbe, and for a period of time I had lived in his home. My mother phoned us around midnight. “Your Uncle Yitzchok is dead…. Yes, very sudden….

  A heart attack.” She was weeping.

  Instantly, I saw his face: round and smiling; the parallel ridge-lines across his forehead; the little mole on the cheekbone beneath his right eye; the moist thick lips around the cigars he favored; the long flow of untrimmed white beard. I heard his loud and cheerful voice. My Uncle Yitzchok.

  Devorah called a friend of ours who worked at the airport in Nice and got us four seats on a morning flight to New York. We began to pack.

  I called Max Lobe and listened to his soft voice. “This is the uncle who visited a few years ago, who bought a drawing from you when you were six? I am very sorry, my friend. Do you need me to come over? Devorah is all right? Do not worry about anything. You will be away ten days? What of Rocheleh? Will she not be affected by such a long trip? I will ask Claudine to take in the mail and see to the gardener and all the rest. Is the studio locked? Travel well. My condolences to your family.”

  I called John Dorman and heard his slurred words. “Real sorry to hear that, Lev. Heartfelt condolences. Ten days? It’s okay to take your daughter? Listen, do me a favor, get me some decent American writing pads while you’re there. Can’t stand these French pads. Safe trip.”

  Devorah woke the children at their usual time and told them we were going to New York. They looked bewildered and a little frightened. Rocheleh put on a brave face and helped Avrumel get dressed. Neither of them remembered Uncle Yitzchok from the one time he had visited us in Saint-Paul.

  The taxi arrived. It was a lovely spring morning, the sun glistening on the red-pantiled houses of the villages, the air cool and clear and honey-colored all through the cypress-studded valley to the green hills and the sea. The driver helped me load the bags. I locked the house and the gate, and we drove to Nice to the airport.

  We were on line waiting to board the flight when Avrumel, five years old and still confused by the abrupt wrenching from his comfortable world, suddenly realized he had forgotten to bring Shimshon, the Samson rag doll that had been his companion since birth and with which he held long, intimate conversations. He began to cry. Devorah said she was sure we would be able to buy him a new Shimshon doll in New York, but he was inconsolable. She held him as he cried. Eleven-year-old Rocheleh, pale of face and large of eyes, said, in her tone of grownup disdain, “He’s such a child.”

  Avrumel had on his high red sneakers and green jogging suit. He sat next to me in the Airbus, weeping. I took my drawing pad and a soft-leaded pencil from my attaché case and quickly drew from memory an exact and realistic picture of Shimshon, shading it into three-dimensionality with the side of my small finger. Avrumel watched through his tears as his rag doll came to life under the point of my 4B pencil: frayed right ear, gouged right eye, thick-chested, broad-shouldered, wearing a tunic and sandals, its chiseled face topped by an enormous shock of hair. I gave him the drawing, and his freckled face broke into a smile of delight. He hugged it to himself.

  “Ça va, Avrumel?”

  “Ça va, Papa.”

  I sat in my seat looking at my son and seeing the face of my uncle and listening to his voice.

  • • •

  We were seated in the four-seat center row: Rocheleh on the aisle, Devorah, Avrumel, and I. The Airbus bumped through dense clouds and turbulent Mediterranean air. I felt it banking and saw through the window to my left a hazy pale-blue world of sea and sky. Avrumel fell asleep. Rocheleh was reading Alice au pays des merveilles, in which she had been living for the past three days. Her light-brown hair was combed back into a high ponytail. She wore blue sneakers and white knee socks and a lilac-colored dress-length jersey with a picture of Madame Curie on it Madame Curie was Rocheleh’s love ever since she had read a cadet biographie of her by Eve Curie a year ago. I had drawn the picture of Madame Curie, and a T-shirt shop in Nice had baked it onto her jersey.

  Devorah sat holding tightly to the armrests of her seat as the Airbus bucked on its climb through the clouds. She wore a light-gray cotton suit and a gray print blouse and had on her brown pageboy wig, which normally gave her a young, almost schoolgirl appearance. But now her face was locked with anxiety. Her eyes kept darting about. She had never flown before. Was the sealed interior of the aircraft bringing back poisoned memories?

  “Are you all right, Dev?”

  “I am so-so. How long is it to New York?”

  “I think about nine hours. Can I do something for you?”

  “Did you say the prayer for a safe journey?”

  “I said it.”

  She sat very stiff and straight, staring into space. The Airbus went on racing through the clouds on its climb to cruising altitude.

  I closed my eyes for what I thought would be a brief sleep and when I opened them we were out over the Atlantic, hours into the flight. Some minutes later, a young couple came down the aisle and stopped at our row. Devorah and Rocheleh had gone to the lavatory. Avrumel was asleep, my drawing of his Shimshon doll still clasped to his chest. The man had on a pink shirt and plaid trousers, and the woman wore a short-sleeved yellow cotton dress. Was I by any chance Asher Lev, the artist? the man asked. I said yes, I was. He said they were on their honeymoon and had been to Rome, Florence, and Venice. They lived in Chicago. His father was a collector and owned two of my paintings and some prints. The man talked with the hearty self-assurance one sometimes sees in wealthy Americans. His bride seemed nervous. He asked for my autograph. Then they wanted to shake my hand. I shook the man’s hand but politely declined the woman’s because it is not permissible in my tradition to shake a woman’s hand, and she looked surprised and hurt.

  A few minutes later, a middle-aged man came over and asked if he could take my photograph. He took the picture and thanked me and went away. I closed my eyes, feigning sleep, not wanting to be disturbed again. But I was quickly in a real sleep, and as in a fever dream saw myself as a child in my uncle’s jewelry store, asking if I could live with him because my parents were going to Vienna on a mission for the Rebbe and I did not want to go with them. I was frightened of Vienna; it was a city that hated Jews. My uncle took the cigar from his mouth and said something to me, but I could not hear him.

  Devorah and Rocheleh returned to their seats. I woke, dazed.

  The intercom crackled. The pilot announced that we would be late coming into New York because of strong headwinds. Devorah, busy with our food—she had made sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and cut up some raw vegetables before we left Saint-Paul; the airline had not had enough advance notice to prepare kosher food for us—Devorah gave me an apprehensive look. Her eyes blinked nervously.

  Rocheleh ate with her customary daintiness. Avrumel, as always, was reducing his food to its rudimentary state of powder and paste.

  The movie came on—something about the game of baseball; it did not interest me. I closed my eyes. As if I were the screen for some mad projectionist’s bizarre amusement, I began to see inside my head brief, clear, disconnected pictures of my past world, like a series of superrealist slides of my swaddling-clothes years: the Brooklyn apartment in which I grew up, its small rooms and white walls; my closetlike room and its paint-it-yourself furniture; my father praying in his tallis and tefillin near the
living-room window, tall, dark-eyed, heavy-shouldered, thick red hair and beard; my mother at her desk, small and slight, clear brown eyes, high-boned cheeks, long, thin, delicately boned fingers; my image of my great-great-grandfather, garnered from stories told me by my parents, coming to me in dreams like some mythic ancestor and thundering that I was wasting time drawing pictures; my father in his dark coat and hat, carrying his bag and attaché case and New York Times, ready for yet another journey for the Rebbe; my mother standing at the window of our living room, gazing out at the parkway, waiting for him to return; Jacob Kahn and I stripped to the waist, painting; Jacob and Tanya Kahn and I in their summer home in Provincetown: the shimmering heat, the sun on the baking sand, the hot wind blowing in from the ocean; Paris and my two crucifixion paintings; the rage of my Brooklyn community; the Rebbe saying to me, “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.” Pictures flashing kaleidoscopically into and out of view, a chilling slide show of memory.

  To get the pictures to stop, I recited silently and by heart some chapters from the Book of Psalms. That calmed me. I took from my attaché case one of the books I had brought along, a gift from John Dorman, the English translation by Joel Agee of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne. The exquisite still life on the pale-blue cover: bottles, apples, a glass, a cloth. What was it the Spaniard had once said about Cézanne? “If there were not anxiety behind those apples, Cézanne would not interest me any more than Bouguereau.”

  In the Rilke book I read:

  It seems to me that the “ultimate intuitions and insights” will only approach one who lives in his work and remains there, and whoever considers them from afar gains no power over them. But all that already belongs in the area of personal solutions. Basically it’s none of our business how somebody manages to grow, if only he does grow, if only we’re on the trail of the law of our own growth.