The Gift of Asher Lev

by Chaim Potok

  I stood a long time at the painting of the artist and his wife and son by the sea: the artist supine on the sand and nude, his left hand covering his sex; his infant son touching his father’s ear with a finger of his left hand; his wife placing a gentle restraining right hand upon the child’s shoulder. Beyond the yellow beach lay a dark, menacing sea and sky. I felt myself a voyeur on that beach, straining toward that family’s every word and act. I gazed intently at the face of the child, and I saw it was Avrumel; at the face of the woman, and saw Devorah; at the face of the artist, and saw myself—the three of us on that beach, with sea and sky meeting in a distant, menacingly dark horizon that cut directly across the back of the woman’s head.

  From somewhere behind me came a soft whistling. A man slipped silently into the space to my right. He was short and bald save for a fringe of disheveled white hair that ran around the back of his head like a garland. His forehead, flecked with small brown spots and deeply furrowed, moved from a high ridge of bone to the thin curving white lines of the eyebrows and the black smoldering eyes set in wrinkled sockets. Twin trenches came down from the sides of the broad nose and formed vague semicircles around a mouth set in a disdainful smile. He wore a black shirt and dark-red trousers. He stood gazing at the picture, enveloped in an aura of pulsing energy, faintly luminous, magnetic, chilling. The room seemed to be emptying of visitors. We stood alone, looking at the painting of the artist and his wife and son on the beach.

  “Well, what do you think of this one?” he asked in his Spanish-accented French.

  “I am still reading it and learning from it.”

  “Learning?” He raised an eyebrow. His tone was shaded with disdain. “What are you learning?”

  “The man’s sex is concealed, as are the woman’s breasts and sex. The child’s finger that probes the man’s ear is perhaps an echo of the man’s hidden member. The man lies on the sand as if dead; only the woman and child are in motion. The sky is threatening; the sea is dark. The mother of this child protects and castrates simultaneously. It is a picture both tender and terrifying. Of course, I am not dealing at all with its formal properties, which I think are flawless.”

  There was a lengthy pause. He stood very still, staring at the picture.

  “Are you finished?” he asked sullenly.

  “This is the first time I see the original painting.”

  “You disappoint me, Lev. Where did you learn to read pictures? In Brooklyn? From Jacob Kahn? Perhaps he did the best that could be done with someone born in Brooklyn.”

  I felt the heat rise to my face. “What difference does it make where someone is born?”

  “You don’t think it makes a difference? Málaga, Barcelona, Paris, Brooklyn? All are the same?” He peered intently at me for a long moment, his teeth bared. A musky scent rose from him, and the smell of turpentine. “That is amusing, Lev. Very amusing. Too bad there is no painter here able to capture the look on your face that accompanies your little piece of wisdom. Max Jacob might have enjoyed it. Perhaps Guillaume would have given it a paragraph or two. Barcelona and Brooklyn as sources for serious art. Amusing. All right, look at them.” He pointed a paint-splattered hand at the woman in the picture. “This is what you should see. You give them a baby to make them happy, to bind them to you, and they forget you are alive. You die in every way except as the supporter of their baby. It makes no difference what you give them. In the end, they leave you without balls. When the baby grows up, he also tries to cut off your balls. That’s the way the world is, Lev. Did they teach you that in Brooklyn?” He gave a brief, snorting laugh. Then he looked around. “You like this collection?”

  I nodded.

  “You know what a painter really is, Lev? A painter is a collector who wants to create a collection for himself, and he does this by painting himself the pictures he loves by other artists. This is a good collection.”

  “All women aren’t as you describe them,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed. “How would you know? How many women have you had? They are all that way; they are good at concealing it, though some are more clever than others. You know about concealing things, Lev. But you are not yet really good at it. You wear your heart on your face. Your uncle was good at it. He was very good at it. Cézanne was damn good at it. All the anxiety concealed behind those apples. I would not care a damn about Cézanne if it wasn’t for that anxiety. Your leader is an expert at hiding things. His riddles. Truth has to be given in riddles. People can’t take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed, Lev. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it. You tell people God is a murderer, they can’t take it, they become angry, they kill you like you’re a bull. Why are you shaking your head? You don’t think God is a murderer? What do you know about God? You think in Brooklyn you really learn about God? In Spain is where you learn about God. God killed my little sister. That’s right, Lev. A little girl, suddenly sick and dead. Everything He touches is destroyed. Casagemas, Apollinaire, Eva, Max Jacob. How do you worship Him, Lev? He’s the true destroyer. Satan works out in the open, cards on the table. He gives it to you straight, no games. God plays at sweetness and goodness, and kills you. Who’s worse, Satan or God? Satan at least has the decency to show us his real face. So I pay God back with my paintings. I tell the truth in my paintings, but I conceal it. He knows it’s there, and He has to wait sweating as people figure it out and it sinks in. I paint pictures like this, and people come along and slowly learn to read them. That’s how I pay Him back for His sweetness.”

  “Why does the horizon divide the woman’s head?”

  He looked at me. I felt myself held in the diabolic lure of his eyes. “You don’t like it? Too bad.” Tant pis was the French, uttered with derision. “Figure it out for yourself, Lev. It’s time you learned to work with riddles.”

  A burst of white light filled the room: people had entered the gallery and someone had set off a forbidden flash to photograph the painting of the family on the beach.

  The light erased the presence of the Spaniard.

  I stood there trembling and taking deep breaths.

  Max Lobe once told me that it took him days to recover from a museum encounter with the Spaniard: he felt bereft of talent, an obsequious courtier, inadequate, drained. I, on the other hand, always felt myself soaring, charged with his malevolent energy. I could ride his demoniacal imagination to the brightest and hottest of stars.

  I continued on slowly through the galleries to the room that contained his collection of pictures by Matisse, Cézanne, Rousseau, Renoir. Matisse’s Marguerite was there! What had the Spaniard ever seen in Rousseau? What had his eyes caught in the imagination and painstaking renderings of that naïf? It eluded me.

  A short while later, in the museum bookshop, I asked for a copy of the catalogue. They were out of the English translation. I bought the French edition and stood near a wall, turning its pages. I found the reproduction of the 1930 oil painting La Crucifixion and began to read the commentary on the facing page. I read until “Picasso assemble comme dans un puzzle différents motifs des compositions anciennes, d’où la complexité de l’oeuvre, qui est un véritable dictionnaire du vocabulaire plastique,” when I heard someone say, “Isn’t that Asher Lev?” I hurried out of the building into the wet streets and headed for the Métro.

  Near the Métro I changed my mind and decided to walk. I walked for nearly an hour from the Rue de Turenne and the Rue des Francs Bourgeois toward the Rue des Rosiers, where I had once lived with Devorah and Rocheleh. I kept taking wrong turns and asking for directions from gendarmes. Buildings were splashed with graffiti. MITTERRAND DEHORS. AU LIEU D’AVOIR DES IDEES BIEN ARRETEES, LE PEN FERAIT BIEN D’ARRETER D’AVOIR DES IDEES.

  I went past a Hebrew bookstore, its display window stocked with candelabra, wine cups, spice boxes, rams’ horns, books. The sign in the window read EN VENTE ICI MEZOUZOTS ET TEP
HILIN KACHERS. I walked on down the street and turned the corner into the Rue des Rosiers.

  Near the corner I took a table on the terrace of the small café that had a kashrut certificate in its window. COMMUNAUTE ISRAELITE ORTHODOXE DE PARIS. STRICTEMENT KACHER. A waiter stepped out of the interior of the café. He looked to be in his fifties and combed his thinning hair sideways across his head. I ordered a salad, vegetable soup, and lemon tea.

  “We have an excellent strudel today,” the waiter said.

  “Another time.”

  He went back inside.

  Diagonally across the street from me, on the corner, was a large restaurant, its terrace crowded with tourists. Flower boxes with green shrubs separated the terrace from the traffic on the street. Waiters in red jackets with white towels on their arms came and went. The restaurant’s huge deep windows followed the corner and faced the street on both sides of the turn. Behind the windows, long salamis hung from hooks; there were shelves of wine bottles, breads, racks of smoked meats and Norwegian salmon; neon lights advertised Smirnoff and Cinzano.

  A waiter emerged from the restaurant, carrying a tray. He set it down on a small folding table and began serving a young couple seated near the curb. A small scrawny black dog with floppy ears and a white diamond-shaped patch on its head loped along the street and came to a stop at the table, where it stood gazing hopefully at the tray. The young man and woman, eating, looked at the dog but did not see it. After some while it went away, its tail drooping. The waiter hovered over the young couple. His face was lean, bony, clean-shaven. He had close-cropped gray hair and a military manner. Standing near the table of the young couple, he raised his eyes and saw me. His closed features did not change expression. He went back inside the restaurant.

  My waiter brought my food. I sat eating and looking out at the street. The sidewalks and curbs were still wet from the morning rain. Behind the wrought-iron grillwork of narrow balconies, the windows of the four-story gray and yellow houses gazed at one another dully across the asphalt street. A tall bearded man in a dark-gray suit and a dark hat walked past me, carrying a brown attaché case. His curled earlocks swung against the sides of his face. From the window of our Brooklyn apartment my mother and I would watch my father starting out for his office or beginning one of his journeys for the Rebbe, carrying his attaché case, limping slightly and finally vanishing beneath the densely branching trees along the parkway. The apartment then forlorn without him and my mother turning to her books and I at my desk in my small room with my pencils and crayons and drawing pads. On the Rue des Rosiers the bearded man with the attaché case turned into the kosher butcher store, and I could no longer see him.

  I paid for the meal and walked down the street past clothing stores and a kosher fast-food place and the butcher shop, into the courtyard of an apartment house. The nameplates on the wall inside the entranceway did not have the name I was looking for.

  I crossed the street and walked back up past the large restaurant. Through the plate-glass window of the Hebrew bookstore I saw a short, stout, gray-bearded man in a skullcap standing behind the glass counter, reading a book. I opened the door and stepped into the tinkling music of an overhead bell. The man behind the counter looked up from his book. I closed the door, and the bell sounded again.

  “Is it permitted to look around?”

  “But of course, of course.”

  The store was small and densely stocked with religious articles and books. Glass shelves held skullcaps, prayer shawls, tefillin sacks, mezuzahs, neck chains with six-pointed stars. Along the walls stood glass cases filled with jewelry, candlesticks, Havdalah candleholders, spice boxes, books. There were books nearly everywhere—on shelves on the walls, in stacks on the floor, on a chair in a corner, on the edge of the counter, on angled shelves in the window.

  Near the door was a shelf laden with coloring books and little boxes of crayons. The books contained pictures drawn from the Bible: Abraham gazing at the heavens and discovering God; Isaac bound to the altar, Abraham standing above him, a long knife in his upraised hand; Jacob receiving the blessing of Isaac; the way-side tomb of Rachel; Joseph in the garb of an Egyptian prince; the death of Jacob; Moses at the burning bush; the Israelites at the parting of the sea; Moses receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai; Moses gazing at the Land of Canaan from afar.

  Above the shelf of coloring books was a shelf of artbooks: Chagall, Agam, Bak, Bergner, Rivers, Newman, Rothko, Tobiasse. I took down from that shelf the book titled The Unorthodox Art of Asher Lev. It had been published three years before by a New York house specializing in artbooks. The color reproductions, remarkable in their fidelity, and the text, written by a noted New York critic, were on heavyweight, glossy paper. Holding the book in my left hand, cradling it, feeling its substantial weight, I turned the pages, looking at the reproductions. Nearly twenty-five years of Asher Lev lay between those covers: paintings, prints, pastels, pencil and charcoal and pen-and-ink drawings, watercolors, gouaches, sculptures. The trees and houses of my Brooklyn neighborhood; the rowboats in the lake in Prospect Park; pigeons on Brooklyn Parkway; old ladies gossiping on the parkway benches; old men walking, talking, gesticulating; a homeless woman asleep on a Manhattan sidewalk; a Hasidic young man eyeing a streetwalker on a Manhattan corner; Hasidic teenage boys with earlocks and skullcaps at a game of baseball; a Portuguese fisherman painted during one of the summers I spent in Provincetown with Jacob and Tanya Kahn; my mother at her desk behind books on the Soviet Union and the papers of her students; my father walking along Brooklyn Parkway with his attaché case; a black man dead on a New York street, the passersby looking at him but not seeing him. There were fine reproductions of Village Burning, Old Man Journeying, and Village Death, which had been in one of my earliest shows at Anna Schaeffer’s gallery. I didn’t even know where those canvases were now. America? Japan? Switzerland? West Germany? Brazil? France? The two Brooklyn Crucifixion paintings were in the book, each on its own full page. Some of the later paintings had caused an even greater furor than had the crucifixions. The author of the text quoted the Time magazine critic who claimed that I was using my art to attack in a mean-spirited way the religious tradition in which I had been raised and which, he claimed, I unconsciously detested. The Sacrifice of Isaac, The Deceit of Rebekah, The Death of Moses, The Song of Devorah. Huge canvases, positive and negative space constructed with fastidious care; weeks of preparatory drawings, some of which were reproduced in the book; weeks of work to lay on the colors; fusions of geometric and biomorphic forms. The subject was not literature but color, texture, space, forms. How some of the religious press had railed against those paintings! Blasphemy. Perversions. Satanic sensuality. Deliberate desecrations of the name of God. Anna Schaeffer would send me press clippings along with accompanying notes. “The voice of the religious is heard again throughout the land.” “It appears the Baptists have joined your compatriots in Lev bashing.” “How safe you must feel in the south of France. Come to New York and see what it is like to show Asher Lev. Some poisonous clippings enclosed. When may we expect your next show?” “This old woman is both exhilarated and exhausted by the tumults you cause. Your parents were in to see the show. Your mother embarrassed. Your father in a barely contained rage. Enclosed clippings show some Catholics share their sentiment and have joined the anti-Lev chorale. Entire show sold out. What next?” She had died soon afterward.

  Burdened by memory, I closed the book and put it back on the shelf. The bearded man behind the counter had been watching me go through the book and now seemed disappointed that I was not buying it.

  “Tourist?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I decided to say.

  “From where?”

  “America.”

  “From where in America?”

  “New York.”

  “Brooklyn?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have relatives in Brooklyn.” He mentioned some names.

  “Brooklyn is a big place.”

  “They
are Ladover Hasidim.”

  “There are thousands of Ladover in Brooklyn.”

  “You are a Ladover?”

  “Yes.”

  “You heard of this Asher Lev? I saw you looking at the book.” He had clearly not opened the book. There was a full-page picture of me facing the title page.

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “You know him?”

  “Slightly.”

  “I have heard that he converted.”

  “What?”

  “He became a Christian.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “I heard it. Who else would make such paintings?”

  “You’ve looked at the paintings?”

  “Feh! Why would I want to see such paintings? They are a desecration of the name of God.”

  “Why do you carry the book?”

  “My wife gets it for the store. She says he is a very important painter and people buy books about him. What can one do? One must make a living. We have, thank God, eight children. Always my wife is in the store. But today her mother took sick. For me, you understand, this is time stolen from the study of Torah.” His earnestness shone in his pale-blue watery eyes. “This Asher Lev, his father is the Rebbe’s right arm. A great man, the father. I heard he recited Kaddish for his son when he converted. As the prophet says, ‘I reared children and brought them up, and they have rebelled against me.’ A father is not to be blamed for the actions of a son. Such a heartbreak no one should know, especially a great man like Rav Aryeh Lev. Tell me, you can maybe learn?”

  “What?”

  “You look like a man who can learn Torah. I have in the back some exceptional holy books.”

  “Not now.”