The Gift of Asher Lev (12 page)

A man in his late twenties emerged from the door to the radio station. He was stocky and red-bearded and wore a dark skullcap and a white shirt, the sleeves pushed up to just below the elbows. He started hurriedly along the corridor, spotted me, and stopped.

“Can I help you?”

“Thanks, no. I’m just looking.”

He was looking, too—at me, his eyes narrowing. Baggy trousers, rumpled shirt and windbreaker, fisherman’s cap. Weary, bearded, and somewhat bedraggled. A street person looking for a handout, a bathroom, a place to sleep?

“I’d be happy to help you. Are you looking for someone in particular?”

“No. If I’m not supposed to be here, I’ll leave.”

“Do I know you from somewhere? May I ask your name?”

“Asher Lev.”

He stood very still, looking at me. “Ah,” he said. “Well. Asher Lev. No problem. Please look around. I’ll be happy to show you the building myself.”

“I know the building.”

“Ah. Sure. Right. Well, good to meet you.”

He went hurriedly into an office.

By the time I was halfway down the staircase, office doors had opened along the corridors on the first floor and bearded men stood in doorways, staring at me. I went out of the building.

Computers. Radio. Television. Books. Newspapers. Magazines. More than two hundred yeshivas all over the world. Synagogues everywhere. Campus houses. Liaisons with governments. Emissaries crisscrossing the planet, journeying, journeying—for Torah, for Ladover Hasidus, for the Rebbe, for the Master of the Universe. How had it happened? From one man fleeing Eastern Europe and France, the Nazis at his heels; from a few hundred followers in a neighborhood in Brooklyn—an empire! In Paris he had lived awhile with Devorah and her family; her father, of blessed memory, had been a follower of the Rebbe’s father and then of the Rebbe. She remembered the Rebbe, even though she was only four at the time. She told stories about him to Rocheleh; bedtime stories about the struggles of the Rebbe to save Jews, clandestine meetings, comings and goings in the night. She told them to Avrumel, heroic stories, tales of selflessness. A family saved here, a Jew saved there, false passports, exit visas, deceiving the French police, escaping from the Gestapo; fleeing, fleeing. To Brooklyn—where he rode the waves of the renaissance of American fundamentalism and built the Ladover movement into a worldwide evangelical Jewish movement, sending out its good word only to Jews: love one another; be proud of your Jewishness; light Shabbos candles; observe the commandment of family purity; put mezuzahs on your doorposts; recite the blessings over the palm frond and the citron; worship the Master of the Universe with wisdom and joy; support the Rebbe in his efforts to hasten the redemption. The Rebbe is the Rebbe not only of the Ladover but of all the Jews. The Rebbe prays not only for the Jews but also for the righteous among the Gentiles. The Rebbe is king. The Rebbe is the Messiah. The Rebbe is a gift from God to the world.

John Dorman told me one evening as we sat over drinks on the terrace of Max’s home, “You’re in the middle of it, Lev. That’s why you can’t see it.” Max refilled his glass, and he went on talking. The Ladover success as a fundamentalist movement on America’s essentially secular soil was what kept it in the news, John said, put it on front pages of the
New
York
Times,
gave it full-page spreads in the religion section of
Time,
splashed it on the cover of
New York
magazine, made of it sufficient high-culture interest to warrant multipart treatment in
The New Yorker.
The
movement was an American success story. That was why it could not easily detach itself from its most notorious son: Asher Lev. He was their perpetual dilemma, their Great Embarrassment. The movement prided itself, announced to all, that it was both profoundly traditional
and
part of the contemporary world. Any story about the Ladover invariably mentioned Asher Lev, the contemporary artist; any story about the iconoclastic Asher Lev unfailingly took note of his fundamentalist Ladover origins. They were inextricably linked. Ladover and Lev. Lev and Ladover. “It’s as plain as the yarmulka on your head, Lev,” John Dorman said, sipping his drink and looking out across the green valley at the walled village and the Cubist dwellings and the far range of hills. “You’re a pain in the ass to your own people. At the same time, you’re one of their most valuable
assets.
Ha, ha. Very sorry. I’m an old drunk, Lev, and Elizabethan wit is not my bag.”

Walking through the neighborhood now, past the yeshiva, which Rocheleh and Avrumel were attending, past the Ladover synagogue, where my uncle’s funeral had taken place earlier that week, gazing at the people and the traffic, at this unkempt Crown Heights world, this miracle of a birth, I longed to be back home amid the flowered silences, the exquisite gardens, the scented air, the hills and valleys and sea of southern France. They had sent me into exile; exile had given me a new home. I was now in exile in Brooklyn.

I walked slowly back to my Uncle Yitzchok’s house.

Mourning is suspended on Shabbos. Sadness is forbidden on the Seventh Day.

That evening, after my mother and Devorah and Rocheleh lit Shabbos candles, I walked with my father to the synagogue. During the service, Cousin Nahum and Cousin Yonkel stood and quietly recited the Mourner’s Kaddish. The Rebbe did not appear. Afterward we all walked back together in shadows cast by the streedamps and the trees. Cousin Yonkel seemed restive, unusually irritable even for him. I was growing weary of Cousin Yonkel.

Later, in my parents’ home, we sat around a resplendent dining-room table and ate the first of the three Shabbos meals and talked
and sang zemiros. My father enchanted Rocheleh with some intriguing riddles.

“What is ‘riddle’?” Avrumel asked at one point, looking up from the chaos that was his meat plate.

“C’est une énigme,” Devorah explained.

“Énigme,” Avrumel repeated, tasting the new word; it did not clarify matters but offered some comfort by virtue of its being in his native tongue. He shoveled vegetables onto the table and into his mouth.

“Look at you,” Devorah said. “You even eat like Godzilla.”

“Never mind,” my mother said happily. “We have a new washer and dryer in the basement.”

We ate and talked and sang, and there was an abundance of food and wine and brandies and liqueurs, and the light softened and filled with haloes. My mother began to talk about the book she was writing on the power structure of the Politburo: a sequel to her earlier volume on postrevolutionary Russian-American relations, which had been published about ten years before and had earned her scholarly applause and a full professorship at New York University. She had been in her mid-fifties then. She had come late to scholarship, worked long and grindingly at it while being a wife to a roving ambassador and a mother to a gifted and troublesome child. She had published a great deal over the years; lonely hours at home while my father was on journeys for the Rebbe had finally turned her away from the living-room window to a pen, a typewriter, a computer. Her study, a small room adjoining the master bedroom, was crowded with file cabinets, boxes of cards, papers, the computer and printer, her desk, and two chairs. Most of her personal library was in her office at the university.

How many hours a week did she spend on matters having to do with the Ladover? I asked her.

“Many,” she said. “Two or three meetings, position papers for your father and the Rebbe. Many.”

“Is the Rebbe at the meetings?”

“Sometimes.”

“We should not talk about such matters on Shabbos,” my father interrupted. “Shabbos is for the Master of the Universe and for
Torah. Let’s sing more zemiros. Do you have a favorite, Rocheleh? Yes? Sing it for us.”

She sang, in her high, tremulous voice, a song taught her by Devorah—a song Devorah’s father used to sing at the Shabbos table. “Mosai yovo hamoshiach,” she sang. “When will the Messiah come …” The candles flickered upon her pale, thin face, her head slightly upturned so the words and the melody could flow more easily from bronchial tubes that turned treacherous at times and sealed off her breathing. Devorah sat looking down at the table, containing herself, chewing her lower lip. Then my father joined Rocheleh in the song, and a moment later we were all singing it together. “Mosai yovo hamoshiach …” Then my father sang his father’s melody to Yoh Ribbon Olom, a melody I had heard only rarely from him—when his mother died; when my mother became ill—yet whose haunting tune remained fixed in remembrance, a poignant testimony of pain and faith and hope. Avrumel watched him for a long moment, awed, his mouth open; and then suddenly he was down off his chair and on my father’s lap, and my father held him gently as he sang. His voice had deepened with the years and had lost some of its quaver. His eyes closed, his upper body swaying back and forth on the chair, he sang softly, slowly. “… Ant hu malka, melech melech malchayoh …” He took in a tremulous breath. “Ovad gevurtaich vetimhayoh …” From the corners of his closed eyes, like glistening beads, tears fell slowly across the ridges of his cheeks, breaking into minute rivulets along the creased skin and vanishing inside the thicket of white beard. Avrumel stared at the tears and then reached up and brushed at them with his little fingers. I turned my head away and remembered how, in childhood, I had heard him sing that melody for the first time when his mother died, and I had later drawn him singing it; again and again, drawing my father singing his father’s melody.

Later, as we were clearing the table, I found myself alone in the kitchen for a moment with my mother, and I asked her where my father had picked up the idea of playing riddle games with children; he had never done that with me.

“He saw your Uncle Yitzchok, of blessed memory, doing it with Nahum’s children. Isn’t it a fine idea?”

I agreed that it was a fine idea.

The food, the wine, the singing, and the late hour had a wondrous narcotizing effect upon Rocheleh and Avrumel, who were yawning halfway through the Grace After Meals and asleep soon afterward. I sat with Devorah and my parents in the living room, and we talked about Uncle Yitzchok. My father told stories about his cheerfulness, his goodheartedness, his devotion to the Rebbe and the movement, his optimism about the future. Uncle Yitzchok was certain the redemption would come soon. Wonders and miracles awaited us. The Messiah was coming, speedily, at any moment. For Uncle Yitzchok, the future of the Ladover movement was joyous and golden. For me right now, it looked like a good idea to use the immediate future for sleep. And, indeed, my father was soon asleep in his armchair, his skullcap slightly askew. My mother woke him, and they went off to their room.

Devorah and I sat alone in the living room. “It feels good here,” she said, after a moment.

I was quiet.

“The children love it here. There is community here.”

I said nothing.

“Hello. Are you there? Is anybody there?”

“A crazy artist is here,” I said.

“And here sits his wife, trying to talk to him.”

“I went for a walk today and saw where I grew up.”

“Ah, yes? And how did you feel about it?”

“I felt so-so. Somewhere between nothing and forlorn. I felt ready to go home.”

“Poor Asher. You don’t like Crown Heights?”

“No. And Crown Heights doesn’t especially like me.”

“I don’t like Paris.”

“I love Paris. But I didn’t grow up there. I didn’t lose my parents there. I didn’t spend age four to six in a sealed apartment there. So what do I know? Right?”

“Yes. Correct. What do you know about Paris?”

“Exactly what you know about Crown Heights. So let’s go back to Saint-Paul. We both agree about Saint-Paul. Yes?”

“How did we survive our childhoods, my husband?”

“We were helped by a merciful God.”

“Yes? I wish He had been a little more merciful. I wish He had been a little more merciful toward my father and my mother, toward my aunts and uncles, toward my—”

“Dev.”

“Just a little more merciful.”

“We should go to bed.”

“She sang beautifully, our Rocheleh. Didn’t she sing beautifully?”

“Yes.”

“My father sang beautifully. He was a tenor. I never told you? Yes. Once he taught me a Christian song. In case I would ever have to hide in the countryside with the peasants, I would be able to fool the Nazi soldiers. ‘Je me croyais au Paradis,’ she sang softly, ‘entre les bras de Jésus Christ.’ Would you ever believe that my father taught me that? A Ladover Hasid. He learned it from a farmer he did business with. I heard him tell my mother he would go to his death proudly as a Jew, but he wanted his children to survive the war and build a future. Well, he died. Isn’t it a lovely Christian song? How old was I when he taught it to me? Three or four. More than forty-five years ago. I still remember it. A kind of goyishe Krias Shema. My father told me to memorize it because my life might depend on it. But I never had to use it. Oh, yes, God is merciful.”

I went over to where she was sitting and helped her to her feet. I walked with her to our room and helped her out of her clothes and into her nightgown. She seemed dazed, half asleep, and kept singing the French song about the arms of Jesus. Then she came suddenly fully awake and stared about her, startled, and remained awake long enough to wash up and brush her teeth. She climbed into my bed and dropped off into sleep as if drugged.

The desk light was on. An automatic timer would soon turn it off, for we do not tamper with electricity on Shabbos. I got into my pajamas and washed up and sat at the desk reviewing the Torah portion of the week, as I did always on Friday night. After a while the desk light went off. By the dim glow of the night light I climbed into Devorah’s bed and was quickly asleep.

She woke me in the middle of the night. Through sleep I felt my blanket and sheet being pulled back and, half awake, I felt her slip
into the bed beside me and, fully awake, I felt all her warmth and nakedness and the ferocity with which she clung to me. I loved her so much, my Devorah; her arms tight around my neck and her legs against my thighs. “Hold me, Asher. Tight, tight. Yes! Tell me God has a plan. Tell me. Come into me, my husband. Oh, my Asher. Oh, my husband. Oh!”