by Chaim Potok
Now I slowly turn the page—and they are gone.
Outside my hotel room, it is still drizzling. The evening has begun its slow glide across the vast gray Parisian sky.
The following day I walk to the new Musée d’Orsay and wander through its nineteenth-century world. I look carefully at Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans and The Artist’s Studio. I take a taxi to the Pompidou Center and gaze up at its gaudy oil refinery look, at the crisscrossing white steel rods and exposed brightly colored pipes, ducts, girders, vents. I watch the jugglers in the plaza and draw an elderly bearded sketch artist sketching a fire-eater, and I ride the glass-enclosed tubular escalator to the roof garden and stand there a long time, looking out at the city. Kings, wars, a revolution, uprisings, barricades, riots, military occupation, treachery. Disorder and frequent sorrow the mulch for creativity. Like Florence. Is a Brooklyn tranquillity—community, continuity, serenity of soul in a sacred world—a killing acid?
I wandered through some parts of the Pompidou. I took a train to the Louvre and visited old friends. I made swift pencil drawings of the Avignon Pietà, Delacroix’s The Massacre at Chios, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, Tintoretto’s Susanna at the Bath, El Greco’s Christ Crucified, Rembrandt’s Pilgrims of Emmaus, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Old familiar friends. Just to keep the eyes working and the fingers nimble. I had copied them many times before. Run the eyes across each minute detail of the facture; keep the circuit to the fingers clear and clean, and render what the eyes see. Old and dear friends. Jacob Kahn took me through the Louvre the first time. Old and dear and dead friend. My drawing of the Mona Lisa begins to draw a crowd. People gather around me, peering over one another’s shoulders. Someone says, “I think that’s Asher Lev.” A guard approaches, looks at the drawing, nods approvingly, and saunters away.
I walk back to the hotel, past the quai with the trumpet players in the rain, past the apartment house on the Quai Voltaire where Jacob and Tanya Kahn once lived, past the street where rain like grapeshot caught me three days before. What were they doing there, those trumpeters? Whom were they heralding?
When I returned to the hotel there was a message from Shaul Lasker. My father had arrived safely.
The next morning I took a taxi over to a studio on the Rue de l’Université and spent some time helping a young artist select paintings for his first one-man show in Paris. I had met him in Nice two years before at a party given by Max Lobe. He was in his mid-twenties, very talented and very unsure of himself. “This one is good? You are sure, maître? It is not too facile? And this one? The fête galante in the style of the Fauves? Yes, of course, an Expressionist satire. You like it? I am happy. But this one you do not like. The linear perspective is a cliché? It is intended as irony. Yes, I will put it aside for the time being. I thank you, maître. Will it be a good show, do you think?” He smoked and sweated and paced. His girlfriend was in the studio. She had long shiny raven hair and was lovely. She kept staring at me. They were both French, he from Paris, she from Lyons. I wished him good luck and said goodbye to the girlfriend. Outside, the air was cool and wet. I returned to the hotel.
Later that afternoon, I packed my bags, checked out of the hotel, and took a taxi to the Ladover yeshiva.
5
The taxi rolled past the apartment house in which I had created the two crucifixion paintings, turned into a wide tree-lined boulevard, went on for two more blocks through heavy afternoon traffic, and came to a stop. I paid the driver. He helped me with my bags, climbed back into the taxi, and drove away.
I stood on the sidewalk in front of a cream-colored four-story stone building. Stone front stoop, wooden entrance doors, tall windows, ornate grillwork on the narrow balconies. It looked like any of the other buildings on the boulevard. Once there had been a small sign over the doorway: LADOVER YESHIVA DE PARIS. But it was removed in 1982, during the time of the terrorist bombings of Jewish institutions in Paris.
Parked at the curb was a police car with two gendarmes in the front seat. I saw them watching me.
The front doors opened, and two young men in dark suits and dark hats and white open-collared shirts came out and let the doors close behind them. They wore short dark beards and were of the same height. I heard them talking in Yiddish and saw them break off their conversation when they noticed me. I imagined them looking at me, saw myself through their eyes: baggy chinos, creased photographer’s jacket, fisherman’s cap, red beard.
The two young men came over to me.
“Can we help you?” one of them asked in American-accented French.
“I’m here for Shabbos,” I said in English. “Is Rabbi Lasker inside?”
The young man nodded. The other stood looking at me curiously.
“Where are you from?” the first one asked in English.
“Brooklyn.”
“No kidding. Crown Heights?”
“That’s right.”
“No kidding. What street?” I told him.
“Hey, I live one block away, but I’ve been in the Paris yeshiva for two years. My father wrote me the parkway is all torn up.”
“That’s right. They’re repaving.”
“I know you,” the second young man suddenly said. “It comes to me. Aren’t you Asher Lev?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a familiar face, I told myself. I know that face.”
“Asher Lev,” the first young man said. “I once read a book about you.”
“I knew I recognized your face,” the second one said. “The minute I saw you, I knew.”
“I have to tell you right off that I don’t like what you paint,” the first one said. “I have to be honest with you.”
“Did you see the article on your father in today’s Le Monde?” the second one asked. “They interviewed him about Russian Jewry and glasnost.”
“I didn’t see it.”
The gendarmes sat in the police car, smoking; they had lost interest in me as soon as the two young men and I had begun talking.
“It’s a good article,” the second one said. “There’s a good picture of your father and the foreign minister.”
“We’ll give you a hand with your bags,” the first young man said. “Tell me something. How do you get away with painting crucifixions and nudes and all that other stuff? Doesn’t the Rebbe tell you not to do it?”
“It’s a long story.”
“In the newspapers and magazines where I see your picture, your beard isn’t so gray,” the second one said. He picked up my large bag; the other took the attaché case.
I followed them along the cement walk to the double doors and into an office on the right side of the entrance hallway. They put down my bags.
Shaul Lasker sat behind a cluttered wooden desk, his ear to the telephone. He got quickly to his feet and shook my hand across the desk, his ear still to the phone. He gave me an upright index-finger signal to indicate that the conversation would be brief, pointed to a chair, and sat back down. The two young men wished me good Shabbos and left. I took a narrow slatted wooden chair and waited.
The office was small and had three wooden chairs, a single tall window, and the desk. The walls were painted the same pale-green color as the walls in the Ladover yeshiva in Brooklyn, where Rocheleh and Avrumel had attended classes and I had taught an art class weeks back. I shuddered, thinking about that class. A fiasco. But a lovely-looking person, that Miss Sullivan. I would have liked to be able to paint her. Silhouetted against the rain-splattered windows of the room. The softness of her against the cold grayness of the rain. And the geometrics of her form: the head held a certain way, the arms in this position, the legs here, the torso slightly curved…. All right. Enough. You’re in a yeshiva. So much for the Spaniard in Asher Lev. I wondered who had erased the picture of the Rebbe I had drawn in chalk on the blackboard. A large bulletin board took up most of the wall across from where I sat. Tacked to it were lists, schedules, announcements in French and Yiddish, and a recent letter from the office of the
Rebbe, typed in either Yiddish or Hebrew; I could see the headquarters letter-head and the signature of the Rebbe, but I was too far away to make out the words. A large framed color photograph of the Rebbe hung from the wall behind Shaul Lasker’s desk. It showed the Rebbe in a dark suit and tie and dark hat and had been taken about twenty years before.
Through the tall window of the office I saw the boulevard and its leafy trees and the police car at the curb with the two gendarmes and the afternoon traffic on the street. In two hours it would be Shabbos. What time was it now in New York? What was Avrumel doing? Playing baseball? Studying Torah? Listening to a story about one of the Rebbes?
Shaul Lasker was talking to me. “You look tired, Asher. Are you all right?”
“I’m okay. How’s my father?”
“He’s terrific, thank God. He runs around like he’s in his forties. You called home since you got to Paris? What do you hear about the family?”
“They’re fine, thank God.”
“What’s next from you? Paintingwise, I mean.”
“I don’t know. I’m between things now.”
“Dawn between things or dusk between things?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
“The life of an artist, eh? Glamour, romance, security, the fast track. Come, I’ll show you where you’re staying.”
He picked up the heavy bag, and I took the attaché case and followed him out of the office. He was my age, short, stocky, goodhearted. His brown beard turning gray; his brown velvet skullcap slanted forward at a jaunty angle, the way my father used to wear his when I was a child, before my mother’s illness, before her brother’s accidental death, before my father began his rise through the Ladover hierarchy. A wave of memory rose before me: my father’s anger over my poor schoolwork; the hot humiliations of classroom mockery over my endless drawing. I followed Shaul Lasker through the entrance hallway to the courtyard and then into a long corridor. We went up a flight of curving metal stairs, our footsteps echoing, and stopped at a door. He put the suitcase down and fished in a pocket for the key.
“We only have one spare room in our apartment,” he said, “and I gave it to your father. Otherwise you’d be staying with us.”
He opened the door.
The room was small and narrow and furnished with a single bed, a small desk, an empty bookcase, a bureau, and two wooden chairs. A tall window looked out on a cement yard and small flowered lawns and the backs of buildings. On the wall over the desk hung a framed color photograph of the Rebbe. He looked the way he did when I was a child and he would go walking in the night beneath the trees of Brooklyn Parkway and I would be awake and standing at the window of our living room, looking down at the lamplit world below.
“The back door is always left open on Shabbos,” Shaul Lasker said, putting the key on the desk. “You can leave the key with the caretaker when you go out. And now I need to get ready for Shabbos.” He went to the door. “I’m sorry you can’t stay with us in the apartment. Eight children, thank God, they take up a lot of room. I’ll see you later in shul, Asher.” He closed the door quietly behind him.
I stood there in the sudden silence inside the room.
Someone knocked on the door. It was Shaul Lasker, looking sheepish and holding a white envelope.
“The most important thing I forgot,” he said in Hebrew, and handed me the envelope. “Your father asked me to give it to you.” He turned and walked away.
I closed the door and looked at the envelope. It was from the office of the Rebbe.
I went over to the desk and opened the envelope and removed the letter. It was handwritten. The writing—Yiddish and Hebrew in black ink, slightly tremulous but bold and clear—slanted across the creamy white paper, the personal stationery of the Rebbe. There was the Hebrew date in the upper right and the indication of this week’s Torah reading. And then the body of the letter:
To My Dear Asher Lev, Greetings and Blessings:
Your father, may he live a long and healthy life, will bring this letter to you, with the help of Hashem, blessed be He.
You and your family are very much in my mind and heart. I see before my eyes your pale and weary face and I know what an artist endures inside himself no matter how cheerful his demeanor and how loud his laughter. And you, dear Asher, endure not only the torments of your art but also the burden of your responsibility to the Ladover. We have hurt you, yet you love us. We have exiled you, yet you are tied to us. “Though He slay me, yet will I have faith in Him.”
All men of wisdom know that there are endless worlds and spheres, and in each sphere there are tens of thousands of heavenly creatures, beings without end, without number, all emanating from the single act of creation. The mouth cannot utter it, the mind cannot fathom it. And among the heavenly beings themselves there are gradations and categories without end, higher and higher—and all are possessed of wisdom, and all acknowledge their Creator. But our little world, our suffering world, in its closeness to the lowest of the spheres and with its mixture of good and evil because of the sin of Adam and Eve—how does our world continue to exist? What creates harmony between the upper and the lower worlds? That, my Asher, is perhaps the most difficult riddle of all.
Asher Lev, our teachers tell us that this harmony is the special creation of individuals who engage in certain deeds for the sake of the deeds themselves. Such deeds rise as a song, as the greatest of art, to all the spheres. And when the heavenly beings hear this song they take upon themselves gladly the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, and they exclaim in unison, Holy! Holy! Holy!—and there is peace in all of creation, and peace to all of Israel, and the beginning of an end to the exile.
Asher Lev, in the name of my father and my father’s father before him, in the name of the sacred Rebbes who speak through me and act through me, I give you my blessing for wisdom and strength. May the final redemption come soon for the people of Israel and for all the world. Amen.
And he signed his name.
I sit in the silence of that small room, with its dim light and stagnant air, and read the letter again. What creates harmony between the upper and the lower worlds? … deeds for their own sake … rise as a song, as the greatest of art …
I fold the letter and slide it back into its envelope. I open my attaché case and insert the letter into the drawing pad and close the attaché case and leave it on the desk. I haul my suitcase onto the bed, open it, and begin to prepare for Shabbos. The Rebbe’s face gazes down at me from the wall over the desk.
The synagogue of the Ladover yeshiva in Paris was a near-duplicate in miniature of the large Ladover synagogue in Crown Heights. Double doors led to it from the main entrance hallway, diagonally across from Shaul Lasker’s office. Dark wood paneling, chairs, prayer stands, long tables, the curtained-off women’s gallery in the rear, the center bimah, the lectern, the dark wood Ark in front with its deep-purple velvet curtain, and, against the wall to the right of the Ark, the tall dark leather chair with its own prayer stand, but without the sectioned-off area in which the Rebbe sat. As I entered through the double doors, I half expected to see Cousin Yonkel close by the bimah, staring at me with rage in his eyes.
My father stood near the dark leather chair to the right of the Ark. Before him were about a dozen students of the yeshiva and a group of older men, some white-bearded. All wore dark suits and dark hats; some had on ties. My father saw me enter and beckoned me over to him. Heads turned. The group before him stirred, moved, divided. A path opened for me and I went through, feeling their eyes upon my face. My father embraced me. I felt the strength of his arms, smelled the soap he used, saw the white hairs of his long beard, the thick arcs of his eyebrows, the lines in his forehead and around his eyes, and the care with which he had knotted his dark tie beneath the collar of his starched white shirt.
“It is good to see you, Asher,” he said quietly. “Your mother sends her love. Devorah and the children are well.”
“How is Avrumel?”
“Avrumel is very well, thank God.”
I stepped back into the crowd, and my father resumed his conversation with those around him.
They were talking about the Arab riots in the territories occupied by Israel. One of the students asked if the Rebbe had said anything recently about making peace with the Arabs by returning territory. “The Rebbe says we must give back nothing,” my father said. “It is the sacred land promised by God to the Patriarchs. We have no right to give back any of it.”
Shaul Lasker stood nearby, looking at my father. They were all looking at him and listening intently. Someone asked how Russian Jewry was affected by glasnost, and my father said more was going on now in the Soviet Union than most people knew, and he could not talk about it but there was reason for hope. Someone asked about relations between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights, and he said it was uneasy but there had been a decrease in street crime since the start of the Ladover night patrols. Someone asked my father if he could repeat for them the Rebbe’s talk on the previous Shabbos, and my father said the Rebbe had not been in the synagogue the previous Shabbos. A hush fell upon the group. Glances were exchanged. There was an uneasy shuffling of feet.
An old man stepped up to the lectern in front of the Ark and began the Afternoon Service. It is a brief service and was soon over. One of the yeshiva students who had helped me earlier with my bags, the one who didn’t like what I drew and painted, began to lead the service that welcomes the Shabbos.
There were about eighty men in the synagogue. Our voices filled the room: chanted words warm and ascending through the innumerable spheres to the celestial beings and thereby uniting all of creation. The greatest of art. I heard clearly from time to time my father’s strong and slightly nasal voice rising above the others. He prayed with his eyes fixed upon the prayer book on his stand, swaying slightly back and forth. In his dark suit and white shirt and dark tie and hat, he appeared an austere and regal presence. I noticed the way people would glance at him, the subtle cues they would take from his motions and demeanor. Far away from the presence of the Rebbe, beyond the aura of the Rebbe’s luminescence, my father suddenly seemed bathed in a light of his own. I turned away from him after a while and gazed fixedly at my prayer book.
