The Gift of Asher Lev

by Chaim Potok

  “John Dorman got it for Avrumel in a store in Nice. Avrumel thinks he was born with it.”

  “John Dorman is the writer who lives next to you?”

  “You met him. We were over at his house the last time you were in Saint-Paul. A man in his seventies, reddish face, white hair.”

  “The man who drinks.”

  “He has a drinking problem, yes. The novel he published in the late thirties is a classic.”

  “You told me he no longer writes.”

  “He writes, but he doesn’t publish.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know. He says he lost his beginnings. His first world, he calls it. He lost his first world. Also, he was with the Communist Party for a while, and left when Stalin signed the pact with Hitler.”

  “I remember we talked about communism. He seemed to me a lonely man, a person without a community.” He paused a moment, looking at me. “And you, Asher? Are you all right?”

  I was quiet.

  He leaned toward me. “Asher?”

  “There are problems.”

  “What happened in Paris? Your mother and I heard about the exhibition.”

  “The show sold out. But the critics hated what I did. They were … nasty.”

  “Sold out? You mean everything was sold?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many paintings were in the exhibition?”

  “Eighteen.”

  There was a pause. “The critics are important, Asher?”

  “The important critics are important. They tell you what you already know and are afraid to admit. I’m repeating myself, and that’s not good.”

  “I know less than nothing about art, Asher, but it seems to me that Max Lobe repeats himself.”

  “Max Lobe is a fine artist, but he’s not an important one. Everyone loves Max, but the critics don’t pay much attention to him. They pay a lot of attention to me because they know who my teacher was and what I’ve been doing all these years, and they’re warning me to consider where I’m going. Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe I’m another John Dorman.”

  “John Dorman is a good friend?”

  “He’s a very dear friend. To me and to Devorah.”

  “A drunkard is your dear friend?”

  “He’s an alcoholic. He can’t help what he does.”

  “Asher, an animal cannot help what it does. A human being is able to control himself if he wills it.”

  “I think we’ve been through this conversation before.”

  “That is God’s gift to us. It is what separates us from the animals. Our minds and our will.”

  “John Dorman’s mind is pickled in alcohol, and his will isn’t strong enough for him to stop. He’s not an immoral person. He’s sick.”

  “That is very sad, Asher.”

  “It certainly is. It’s the great American success story.”

  “Success? Where is the success? It is a tragedy.”

  He shook his head and drank from his cup. The irony was lost on him. Someone once told me the Japanese have no sense of the ironic. Tell a Japanese on a rainy day that the weather is just great, and he will look at you in bewilderment. Perhaps one should not affect the ironic mode in the presence of one who has just buried a beloved brother. Was there anything in the Talmud or in Hasidic teachings on that? Do not be ironic in the presence of death. When else, if not then? I was feeling tired and light-headed. The too-long day. Jet lag. The prints in my uncle’s home. The locked doors. The doorposts without mezuzahs. The doorways in my parents’ home had mezuzahs on them. That was the way you did it in a traditional Jewish home: you obeyed the biblical commandment “And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.” Every door, except the door to the bathroom, had its own mezuzah, its own little case with the small rolled-up scroll of parchment bearing on one side the first two paragraphs of the “Hear O Israel” from the Book of Deuteronomy, carefully rendered by a scribe, and on the other side the Hebrew word Shadai, one of the sacred names of God. Devorah had bought mezuzahs for the front doors of Max Lobe’s house and John Dorman’s house, and we had all made a ceremony of putting them up. Mezuzahs are sacred; they are believed to possess power. Some years ago, after a bus disaster in Israel, one of the Hasidic Rebbes in Brooklyn announced that children had been killed because the mezuzahs in their town had not been checked in a long time and some were probably spoiled, the writing worn after too many years. The acrimony, the verbal attacks against that Rebbe by so many other Jews, that had followed that announcement! But the Rebbe had stood by his statement. And now, two doors without mezuzahs in my uncle’s home. Did my father know?

  “I like the art Uncle Yitzchok has in his house.”

  “Art?”

  “Bak, Agam, Ardon, Moreh. All the others. Very nice. I had no idea Uncle Yitzchok was interested in art.”

  “He was interested,” my father said, looking down at his cup and indicating by his tone that he himself was not at all interested in talking about it. He had not the vaguest notion about art. He was a graduate of Brooklyn College, where he had majored in political science, had a master’s degree in political science from New York University, read widely, subscribed to magazines and journals—the house was strewn with current and back issues of the New York Review of Books, Commentary, National Review, Time, the New Republic, Foreign Affairs, France Today, Soviet Life, and other, more technical publications in his field. A sophisticated man—yet blind to the world of art: Greek, Roman, African, Asian, Christian, secular, Jewish; it made little difference to him. The boundary of his artistic appreciation was the kitsch of a calendar scene: Abraham at the Covenant; Isaac on the altar about to be slaughtered; Moses at the parting of the sea; Miriam and the women dancing; Moses on Mount Sinai. The vast, rich, nuanced, exhilarating, disturbing, iconoclastic world of modern and contemporary art was locked to him.

  “I read an article on Picasso a little while ago,” he said now, looking up from his cup of coffee. “He was not a nice man.”

  “That’s right, he certainly wasn’t a nice man.”

  “You admire Picasso?”

  “Do we admire Maimonides? It’ll take the world of art three hundred years to absorb the work of Picasso.”

  He was shocked. “You compare Picasso to Maimonides?”

  “Niceness and greatness are two very different qualities.”

  “Not in Yiddishkeit, Asher. Not among Hasidim. What a person does is what he is.”

  “Not in art.”

  “A man can be a murderer and still be regarded as a great artist?”

  “A man can be a good doctor and not be nice.”

  “Would you put Rocheleh into the hands of a physician who is a cruel person? You live in a world where a man like Picasso is your king. What a strange world you are in, Asher.”

  “Picasso has been dead for fifteen years. No one is king in art today.”

  “It is not a world I thought my son would belong to.”

  He lapsed into silence. We sat quietly. He stared a long time into his cup. Then he looked at me and shook his head. “I am sorry, Asher. I spoke out of anger. This is a difficult time for me. My brother’s death. I cannot reconcile myself to it.”

  I was quiet.

  “So much depended upon him. He was my—my support. His sons are not as generous as he was. Especially Yonkel. Very angry and very greedy.”

  “If the Rebbe tells him—”

  “The Rebbe is old, Asher. The Rebbe is tired. Not everyone listens all the time to the Rebbe.”

  I scared at him.

  “There are times,” he murmured, “when I think that—” He stopped and took a deep breath and shook himself. He looked wearily around the room, blinking. The kitchen gleamed. Hidden sources of energy fed its appliances: the refrigerator, the two ovens, the microwave, the two dishwashers. “Enough,” he said. “That is the work of the sitra achra. It enters you and wants you to wallow in sadness and self-pity so your work ca
nnot be done. Enough. All will be well, with the help of God. Yes, Asher? All will be well.”

  He fell silent. The refrigerator hummed into life, its soft pulsing filling the kitchen.

  “Asher, you are certain you cannot remain for a while after the week of mourning?” It seemed an effort on his part to ask that: entreaty was for him an utterly uncharacteristic act.

  “I have to be in Paris next week. I promised Max I would work with him on a print.”

  “You cannot change the appointment?”

  “Printers are involved. We’ve reserved time and a press. Max says he needs my help. It has to do with a new process he wants me to teach him.”

  “You will teach Max Lobe? He is fifteen years older than you.”

  “I learned the technique from Jacob Kahn. It’s a complicated process.”

  “You have been with us only once in twenty years, Asher.”

  The phone call returned frighteningly to mind. That cold hollow satanic voice. “I have my own life now,” I said.

  “All right, Asher. As you wish.”

  The refrigerator hummed in the brittle silence.

  There were footsteps in the hallway. My mother entered the kitchen, wearing a pale-blue housecoat. From beneath the edges of her yellow kerchief protruded an occasional curl of her short-cropped silver hair.

  “Forgive me for interrupting. I came in for a cup of coffee.”

  “Rivkeh, Avrumel forgot his Shimshon doll in Saint-Paul. Asher wants to know if there is anyplace nearby where we can get him a new one,” my father said.

  “I already told Devorah about a store on Kingston Avenue. We will go there tomorrow.”

  “I told you your mother would know,” my father said to me.

  “He prefers the old, but he will settle for the new,” my mother said. “You have lovely children, Asher.”

  “Devorah is the one to tell that to. She’s with them day and night.”

  “I have told her. I must get back to the examination papers. The way young people write English these days. It is absolutely a scandal. It is as if English is a foreign language. Do you want to hear some examples of American writing? ‘Intents and purposes’ someone writes as ‘intensive purposes.’ ‘Fallen by the wayside’ is ‘fallen by the waste side.’ ‘Next-door neighbor’ is ‘next-store neighbor.’ ‘Dog-eat-dog world’ is ‘doggy-dog world.’ Can you believe that? It is a mystery to me where they learn to write like that.”

  “Your mother wants to retire so she can travel with me and spend time visiting with you,” my father said.

  “And finishing my book. I must finish that book.” She was writing on the Politburo and the changes in the processes of succession in the Soviet Union. Some years ago, the University of Nice had asked me to do a mural for its library building, and one day, while passing through the catalogue room, I had looked for my mother’s name: “Lev, Rebekah.” Three of her books and one volume of her published papers were in the library, in French. She taught Russian history and political theory in the Russian Studies Department of New York University.

  I watched as she poured herself a cup of coffee. Short, slight, delicately boned, a fragile look that belied her tenacity and strength. The soft lights and pastel colors of the kitchen. The hypnotic hum of the refrigerator renewing its energy. My mother sipping from her cup and nodding with satisfaction. “I teach only one class tomorrow. We will get the Shimshon doll for Avrumel tomorrow. Now I’m going back to those papers, so I won’t wake up at four in the morning, worrying about them.”

  She took the coffee cup with her out of the kitchen. I heard her receding footsteps.

  “Mama looks good,” I said.

  “She is well, thank God. She looks forward to retiring.”

  “Will you retire, too?”

  “I? Of course not. The work of the Master of the Universe is never over.”

  “Artists don’t retire, either. They just fade away.”

  My father smiled sadly and sipped from his cup. “Paris was that bad?”

  “Paris was a disaster.”

  “I am truly sorry, Asher.”

  “The thing is, I’m not sure I know what to do now. That’s the thing. I don’t know where I’m going.”

  He did not respond.

  “It’s nice to be able to retire. Comforting.”

  “You think so?” he said.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No,” he said. “Endings are never nice.”

  I wandered alone through the hallways of the house. Mezuzahs on the doorposts. Rocheleh was asleep, breathing tranquilly, covered to her chin with a light blanket. I hoped her pillow was all right. Avrumel lay snoring slightly and looking forlorn even in sleep, his blanket a shambles. Where was the drawing I had made on the Airbus? No doubt crumpled somewhere amid the chaos of his blanket. Devorah and my mother were talking together quietly in my mother’s study. I went to our room and got out of my clothes.

  In the bathroom I brushed my teeth and washed and saw on the full-length mirror the faint outline of the awkward drawing I had made of myself the day before. The vanishing vapor had left a residue on the glass: the mark of my finger in the fog.

  Devorah was in the room when I came back. Her head was uncovered.

  “Your mother and I had a lovely talk.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “It’s a pity all these years have gone by and we never got to know each other.”

  “It wasn’t my doing.”

  “No one is blaming you, Asher.”

  “Of course everyone blames me, Dev. Haven’t you heard? I’m not in control of my mind or my will. Listen, I’m tired. It’s four o’clock in the morning Saint-Paul time.”

  “They say you should adjust your body clock immediately to your new time zone and not pay attention to where you came from.”

  “I intend to pay careful attention to where we came from.”

  “You are in one of your moods, my husband.”

  “My father wanted to know what happened in Paris. My mother is talking about retiring. I’m ready to go home tomorrow.”

  “Do you really want to?”

  “I want to, yes, but we won’t.”

  “Your mother suggested we put Rocheleh into the Ladover yeshiva for the time that we’re here.” I looked at her. “How can we do that?”

  “She’ll be in the same grade she attends in the yeshiva in Nice.”

  “What does Rocheleh say?”

  “She is willing to try.”

  “Are you sure it’s all right?”

  “What can be wrong with it, Asher?”

  “And Avrumel? What will you do with Avrumel?”

  “He can go into the kindergarten. Your mother says the yeshiva has a very fine kindergarten.”

  “I guess it’s okay. You’ll have time to work on the book.”

  “There are also other things I can do. I want to get to know your parents.”

  She went to the bathroom. I lay on my bed in the silence of the room. Off-white stippled walls, a French-style bureau, a beige carpet, two soft chairs, twin beds. The Rebbe gazed at me from the wall above the rolltop desk. That picture, too, was about twenty years old.

  Devorah returned and climbed into her bed. The mattress barely moved beneath her weight.

  “Will you want the lamp on, Dev? My father gave me a night light we can use.”

  “Leave the lamp on for tonight, Asher.”

  She lay with her hands behind her head, slender, small-boned, her elbows pointing outward, her thin white wrists jutting from the frilly sleeves of her pink cotton nightgown. Her short brown hair, streaked with wisps of gray and always concealed beneath a wig or a kerchief when she left our room, grew in tiny curls upon her head. She looked over at me. Her gray eyes were blurred and moist.

  “I am wondering what John is doing.”

  “Drinking, no doubt. Maybe writing. Missing you, that’s for sure.”

  “Poor John. Let’s not forget that we promised to get him some Ame
rican writing pads.”

  “It’s on my list. American writing pads for the ex-Communist John Dorman.”

  “You are in a mood, my husband.”

  “Devorah.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to stay on longer than the week of mourning?”

  “We should think about it, Asher. Can it hurt to stay on a week or two longer? Grandparents have a right to enjoy their grand-children. Now I am very tired. How is it I am not yet asleep? Good night, my husband.”

  “I have to be in Paris next week with Max.”

  “That’s one of the reasons God gave us the telephone, Asher. Appointments can be postponed. Max will understand. I am already asleep, Asher. I am talking to you in my sleep.”

  She recited softly to herself the Krias Shema, then turned on her side, her face to me. Almost immediately, she was asleep.

  I lay wide awake in the bright light cast by the lamp on the night table between our beds. From the hallway outside the closed door came the sounds of shuffling feet and a low, soft whistle. I shivered and closed my eyes and lay still in the light. The Bak print entered my eyes: the keys in the rock-strewn landscape, the luminous keyhole in the sky; and the Moreh print: the bearded old man on the wheeled crucifix-shaped stake hovering over a grim and water-scourged vista. The look of loathing on my Cousin Yonkel’s face, as if I were decaying vermin forbidden to the touch. Aunt Leah weeps. Will I get a chance to see the children? The Rebbe beckons to me from the oil painting on the wall between the drawings of Aaron in the wilderness and Isaac bound to the altar. I fall asleep with the Rebbe still beckoning to me, the light of the lamp full in my eyes.

  A cement walk divided the front lawn of my parents’ home. Rows of rhododendrons separated the lawn from the sidewalk and the two adjoining properties.

  The house had been purchased for them by my uncle about ten years after I had left the neighborhood to live in Europe. When my mother wrote me about the purchase, I imagined hearing my Uncle Yitzchok saying, “You can’t live in this tiny apartment any more! How does it look? The right arm of the Rebbe, and you live this way? People come in to see you, and they see this? The Master of the Universe has been good to me. Why shouldn’t I be good to my brother and sister-in-law?”