The Gift of Asher Lev

by Chaim Potok

  The walls were covered with announcements, schedules, calendars in Hebrew and English, and a picture of the Rebbe. A stout woman with gray hair and half-moon glasses sat behind the reception desk. She looked up from her typewriter and her eyes drifted over my raincoat—one of my father’s old coats, two sizes too large for me—and my bearded face and fisherman’s cap.

  “Can I help you?”

  “My name is Asher Lev.”

  She stood up. “Rav Greenspan is expecting you.” Standing, she picked up her phone and pushed a button. “Mr. Lev is here.” She put down the phone and came around the desk. “Please,” she said. I followed her to a door marked OFFICE OF THE PRINCIPAL. At the door, she said in a low voice, “I love your work, Mr. Lev. I saw your last show in the Schaeffer gallery. Was it three years ago? The painting of the women dancing, the one that was so—uh—controversial. I loved it. I bought one of your prints. The waiter in the café in Paris. I love it.”

  “Are you and your husband collectors?”

  “I collect a little. My husband, of blessed memory, has gone to the Truc World. He was a great follower of the Rebbe. But all he knew was diamonds. I do this”—she indicated the office—”to keep busy. Are you staying long? You must go back and make more pictures.” She opened the door for me, and I stepped into Rav Greenspan’s office. She closed the door quietly behind me.

  A tall, barrel-chested, dark-bearded man stood behind a desk, listening to the telephone in his large hand. He kept moving back and forth behind his desk. He saw me and, reaching across the desk, took my hand in a powerful grip, put the mouthpiece against his chest, and said, “Sholom aleichem,” in a resonating voice.

  “Aleichem sholom.”

  He waved me into a chair and proceeded to speak in Yiddish into the phone—something about a consignment of textbooks that had not yet arrived. “What kind of businessman are you?” I heard him say. “I have forty children waiting for those books, and you don’t know where the shipment is. Next time I’m going to your competition.” I looked around the office: pale-green walls; low freestanding bookcases stuffed with textbooks; school schedules on the bulletin board alongside his desk; and, on the wall behind the desk, a picture of the Rebbe. A wind had risen, and through the single window across from the desk I saw the rain slanting and blowing in waves across the parkway and splattering upon the panes, obscuring the trees and the cars and the people on the street. Rav Greenspan had put down the phone and was talking to me. Did I want a cup of coffee? Tea? It was good of me to come. He knew I was here for only a few days and time was precious. Deepest regrets about my uncle. A great man, a generous man. Did I mind it if there were teachers present from other departments in the school? Good. Was there anything I wanted or needed? There were no restrictions on what I could say; the yeshiva was not, God forbid, a prison. I could speak for twenty minutes or half an hour and then ask for questions. The children had been encouraged to come with questions. They were all eager to meet me. He looked at his watch. “It’s time. The class should be ready. Are we ready? Good.”

  I followed him into the main office, past the receptionist, and out into the entrance hall and along a brown-tiled corridor to a flight of gray marble stairs. We climbed the stairs. Would I be interested in knowing how many students were in the school? Four hundred and fifty-two. Kindergarten through eighth. “The curriculum is the same as when you were here. Sacred subjects in the morning, secular subjects in the afternoon. Friday morning, secular; Sunday morning, sacred. The high school is on Ocean Parkway. No room for it here. We’re growing. Every year we grow, thank God.” Through small windows set in classroom doors I saw teachers, students, blackboards, pale-green walls. Rav Greenspan went on talking. He had recently seen a program on public television about the artist Jacob Kahn. Had I known Jacob Kahn?

  Yes, I had known him.

  “The program didn’t mention that he was a follower of the Rebbe. He wasn’t an observer of the commandments, but he had great belief in the Rebbe, as his father had before him, and from time to time he gave us prints and drawings we could sell through his dealer, a Mr. Douglas Schaeffer. That way he helped out the yeshiva. A fine man. It’s good for us to have a world-famous artist as a follower of the Rebbe. It shows the children that the world knows of the Ladover Hasidim.”

  “Now all you need is a novelist or two, a rock singer, and Barbra Streisand, and you can conquer the world.”

  The lightheartedness I thought I had put into my witless remark was entirely lost on him. He turned a weight of sudden earnestness upon me. “You know Barbra Streisand? Can you get her for us?”

  “What do you mean, ‘get her’?”

  “For a concert. Or to sing at a dinner.”

  “I don’t know Barbra Streisand.”

  “If we could get someone like Barbra Streisand, I could put up the new building in a year. We need a new building. We have a property two blocks from here for a junior high school. Ah, here we are. This is the classroom.”

  We stopped in front of a door in a quiet corridor. Through the small window I caught a glimpse of a young, stunningly lovely dark-haired woman seated behind a desk, and rows of children’s faces, and a tall wall of windows wet with rain.

  “You should know,” Rav Greenspan said, “that the teacher is not Jewish. She is one of the best teachers in the school. All our teachers are either Ladover or not Jewish. We do not have non-observant Jews teaching here. They are bad examples for the children. Come, they are waiting for you.”

  He pushed the door open, and I followed him into the room. The door closed to the soft hiss of its hydraulic stop.

  Every head in the class turned to look at me.

  The teacher rose to her feet behind the desk. She wore an ivory-colored, long-sleeved, high-necked blouse and a dark-blue skirt. As if on signal, all the students immediately stood.

  “Miss Sullivan,” Rav Greenspan said. “This is Mr. Asher Lev.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you,” she said. She did not offer me her hand.

  “Please take your scats,” Rav Greenspan said to the class.

  Only the quietest of shuffling sounds were heard as the students quickly sat down.

  Miss Sullivan moved away from behind the desk and stood before the wall of windows, silhouetted against the gray light of the wet morning. Her black hair was combed straight back in a French twist.

  Rav Greenspan stood in front of the class. “Children, good morning. I want to introduce to you Mr. Asher Lev, who is a very famous artist. Many of Mr. Lev’s paintings are in museums in America and Europe. He grew up in this neighborhood and went to this yeshiva. He has agreed to come here this morning and talk to us about art and about his work, and to answer any questions you might have. Here is Mr. Lev.”

  Rav Greenspan moved away from the desk and went along the wall opposite the windows to the back of the room. He stood leaning against the wall and folded his arms across his chest. Standing there in the rear of the room, he seemed suddenly a dark and vigilant guardian presence.

  I stood alone in front of the class.

  There were about twenty-five students in the room, all girls; the boys’ division of the yeshiva was in the adjoining building. They sat in four rows, each at a separate desk. In the fifth row were three adults, two of them women; the third was an elderly gray-bearded man in a dark suit, a dark tie, and a dark hat. I remembered seeing him in my Uncle Yitzchok’s house during the week of mourning but did not know who he was. Rocheleh sat in the second row, near the wall of windows. Through the ponderous silence in the room I heard the sudden oncoming and receding blare of the horn of a passing car.

  I saw them all looking at me, and I did not know what to say. It was warm in the room, and I had begun to sweat beneath my fisherman’s cap. Outside, the rain continued to fall, and the corners of the windows were misted over. I looked at the rows of faces. Girls in ponytails and braids and short curls and side-parted loose hair, the long side held by a barrette. Thin faces, square faces, rect
angular faces, owlish faces, round faces, cylindrical faces, triangular faces, pale faces, flushed faces. There was Rocheleh, waiting. One of the girls had red hair and sat low in her chair, as if afraid to be seen. She was watching me out of wide blue eyes. Eyes, eyes, waiting. Start as you would a drawing. Start with a point. A second point. A line. A clear and immediate truth.

  “Good morning,” I heard myself say, and cleared my throat and said it again. “Good morning,” and somehow went on. “I once studied in this yeshiva, and I thank God for keeping me alive and enabling me to be with you today. I studied English and wrote compositions and stared out the windows a lot. But an artist is supposed to tell the truth, and the truth is that mostly I used to draw in my notebooks and get my teachers very annoyed at me.” A whisper of subdued laughter skittered through the class. “My classmates thought I was strange. That was almost all I ever did. Draw, draw, draw. Does anyone here draw, draw, draw all the time?”

  All were silent.

  “But everyone draws sometimes.”

  A general nodding of heads.

  “What sorts of things do you draw?”

  Immediately hands went up throughout the room. I called on one after the other. “A Pesach Seder.”

  “A succah, and the lulov and esrog.”

  “Dancing with the Torah.”

  “Playing with bows and arrows on Lag Bo’Omer.”

  “Houses.”

  “Gardens.”

  “Moshe Rabbenu on Mount Sinai.”

  “A Shabbos table.”

  “Noah in the ark.”

  “Very good,” I said. “It looks like all of you draw. Now tell me this. Why do you draw?”

  Again the hands shot up. Rocheleh sat quietly near the windows, watching.

  “It’s fun,” one girl said.

  “I like it,” said another.

  “The teachers tell us to,” said a third.

  Soft laughter spread through the class. Miss Sullivan smiled. Rav Greenspan stood leaning against the rear wall, his arms folded across his barrel chest. The two women and the man in the back row sat listening impassively. Rocheleh had not yet raised her hand. The rain fell in sheets on the parkway and it seemed as if night had come.

  “Why do teachers do that?” I asked.

  “It helps us remember things better,” a girl in the front row said.

  “Yes. What else does it do?”

  Silence.

  “Doesn’t it do something else, when you draw? Think about it for a moment. Anybody.”

  Tentatively, from the second row, a girl in braids: “I think that sometimes it helps me express my feelings.”

  “How does it do that?”

  “When I’m angry I use a lot of red.”

  “Docs anyone else here ever draw their feelings?”

  “Sometimes if I don’t like someone I make the faces ugly,” a girl not far from Rocheleh said.

  The two adult women in the back row glanced at each other.

  “How about if you draw someone you like?” I asked.

  “I try to make them pretty.”

  “Docs anyone else here ever draw her feelings?”

  There was silence.

  A trickle of sweat slid with an insect touch along my spine. I wanted to step to the blackboard behind me and scratch my back against it. The silence continued. A number of the children shifted restlessly in their scats. What else? Think. Think! Two points. A line. Form. Space. The two-dimensional plane. Color. A painting. The paintings on Uncle Yitzchok’s walls. Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, Bonnard, Chagall, Utrillo, Soutine.

  “Are all drawings the same?” I asked.

  “No!” resounded throughout the room.

  “How are they different?”

  “Some are better than others,” the girl sitting directly in front of me said.

  “How are they better?” I asked her.

  “They’re better. They’re more real.”

  “They’re truer,” a second girl said.

  “You mean they’re more like photographs?”

  “That’s right,” the second girl said.

  “Does everyone agree that a drawing that’s like a photograph is better than one that isn’t?”

  Amid the general nodding of heads I saw Rocheleh; she was the only one in the room shaking her head. But she said nothing.

  “You mean a drawing like this”—I removed a stick of orange chalk from the box I had bought at the stationery store and drew rapidly on the blackboard a child’s representation of a ram: awkward spindly legs, poorly proportioned head and body, scraggly horns—”is less true and less real than a drawing like this?” I drew, using a single unbroken line, a realistic contour of a ram, then quickly shaded its underside with the length of the chalk, giving it the appearance of three-dimensionality.

  From the girls in the room came a universal “Yes!”

  “But what about this kind of ram?” I drew with no shading a line abstraction of a ram, exaggerating the contours of its hindquarters in order to give emphasis to its power, and embellishing the soaring swirl and majesty of its horns. “Which is the truer ram?”

  Silence. I saw their wide young eyes moving from drawing to drawing—the childish, the realistic, the abstract—and saw, too, the faint smile on Rocheleh’s face.

  “Aren’t all three different ways of seeing the same object?” I said. “The first is a child’s way of seeing. The second is a realistic way of seeing, the way a camera might see, for example. And the third”—I pointed to the abstract drawing—”well, what is the third? How would you compare it to the second?”

  “It’s stranger,” a girl said.

  “Why is it strange?” I asked.

  “It looks strange,” she said. “I’ve never seen a ram like that.”

  “Have you seen a ram like this?” I pointed to the second drawing.

  “Sure. In the zoo.”

  “How many have seen a ram like this?”

  Most of the hands went up.

  “You’ve all seen this kind of ram?” I said. “This small? This color?”

  A murmur of confusion ran through the room.

  “What is this?” I asked, pointing to the drawing.

  “It’s a drawing,” a girl said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “It’s a drawing. It’s the closest to the way the ram looks to our eyes on the outside. Now, what is the difference between this outside look at the ram and this third drawing of the ram?”

  A girl in the fourth row—long dark hair, dark eyes, thin lips—raised her hand. “Is the third drawing an inside look at the ram?”

  “What do you mean by inside?”

  She did not respond.

  “Who made the drawing?”

  “You did,” she said. “Your inside.”

  “Yes. What do we call that sort of inside look? There’s a very important word for it that you all know.”

  A tense silence and the restive straining for the key that unlocks the mystery. I let a moment go by.

  “Anybody?”

  I gazed into the rows of upturned faces. In the rear of the room the two women, the gray-bearded man, and Rav Greenspan all seemed riveted, eyes fixed upon me, anxiously waiting. Miss Sullivan stood silhouetted against the windows, her eyes wide, a faint, fixed smile on her lips. A ram. Had I seen a ram in the zoo while walking there with Devorah and the children? Of all the animals I might have chosen to draw, why had I chosen a ram?

  Rocheleh raised her hand. Then the timid-looking redheaded girl near the back raised a hand, tentatively, and I nodded at her.

  “It’s an interpretation,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Exactly. It’s an interpretation. Now tell me this. Who do you study who is a great interpreter? Not of drawings but of words.”

  There was another silence.

  “You carry him around,” I said. “You study him every day. He’s the best and clearest of all the interpreters.”

  “Rashi!” half a dozen voices called out. One o
f them was that of Rocheleh.

  “What’s another word for interpreter?”

  “Commentator,” voices cried out.

  “Is Rashi the only commentator?”

  “No!”

  “Who are some of the others?”

  “Ibn Ezra.”

  “Ramban.”

  “Rashbam.”

  “Are they all the same?” I asked.

  “No!”

  “Do they all have the same ideas?”

  “No!”

  “What are they interpreting?”

  “The Torah!”

  “They are all interpreting the same thing. But they see parts of it differently, don’t they?”

  “Yes!”

  “Why do we print them all in the same Chumash? Why don’t we print only one of them? Why don’t we print only Rashi?”

  “The Chumash we use in our class has only Rashi,” a girl said tentatively. “But my brother’s Chumash has the others.”

  “The Chumash in the synagogue has all the others, too,” the redheaded girl said from near the back of the room.

  “Why do we print all the commentators?” I asked again.

  “It’s more interesting,” a girl said.

  “How can we choose which ones to leave out?” another asked.

  “You have to print all the good ones. My brother says that it’s exciting to have all of them.”

  Thank God for your brother, I thought. “Very good. Yes. Art begins when someone who knows how to draw goes from this”—I pointed to the second drawing—”to this.” I pointed to the third. “When someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it. If an exciting new way of seeing an old object results, well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? That’s the beginning of serious art. Here, let me show you what I mean.”

  I erased the rams. I looked carefully for a moment at Miss Sullivan: high cheekbones, thin straight nose, oval features, dark eyes, dark hair combed back flat into a French twist. “Here are the different ways three great modern artists would have seen and drawn the same person. The first one is an artist named Matisse.”