The Gift of Asher Lev (21 page)

“I don’t know. They were still there after class ended.”

“No one erased them?”

“No. I liked the drawing you made of the Rebbe. Some of the students said you shouldn’t have drawn it, because now it can’t be erased. Papa?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you put yourself and Avrumel into the drawing of the binding of Isaac?”

She had noticed it. Sharp-eyed, quick-witted Rocheleh. Who else had seen it? “I don’t know. It was a surprise to me.”

Behind her glasses her eyes took on a disbelieving look. “My papa draws things without knowing it?”

“Sometimes. Then the drawing tells me what I’m trying to say.”

“What did my papa want to say with the drawing of Avrohom and the binding of Isaac?”

“I don’t know. I need to think about it.”

“I don’t understand how my papa can make drawings without knowing what they mean.”

“You want to understand everything at the age of eleven? Leave a little for later on. Don’t you have homework?”

She went to her room.

I moved toward the kitchen. Avrumel was sitting at the table with his Shimshon doll. I poured milk into a glass and put it on the table in front of him. He waited until I sat down, and then he began talking to the rag doll. “Shimshon, you want to know what happened today? I’ll tell you what happened today. During recess,
one of the boys in first grade asked me if I was Avrohom Lev, son of Asher Lev, and I said yes, I was. The boy said my papa was a sinner. That’s right, a sinner, and a man who shamed the Master of the Universe in public. My papa! What would you have done, Shimshon? I shoved him. He hit me. We rolled around on the ground until a teacher stopped us. That’s what happened.”

A moment went by. Avrumel picked up the glass of milk, put it to his mouth, wincing as the glass touched his split lip, and drank. He put the glass down. “If that boy talks to me that way again, I will hit him,” he said to Shimshon. He drank some more milk. “No one will talk to me that way about my papa.”

I heard footsteps in the hallway. Devorah came into the kitchen. “Rocheleh told me Avrumel was hurt.”

I told her what had happened. “The sins of the father are being visited upon the son,” I said. “We never had trouble like this in Nice.”

“This is not France,” she said. “This is Brooklyn.” Avrumel finished his glass of milk and got down from his chair, holding tightly to Shimshon.

“Are you all right?” Devorah asked him.

He looked up at her and did not answer.

“Ça va, Avrumel?” I said.

“Ça va, Papa,” he said, and left the kitchen.

“I will call Rav Greenspan about this,” she said.

“We should have gone home Tuesday the way we planned.”

“The Rebbe asked you to stay. Did we have a choice?”

“No,” I said.

My father returned from his office, took a look at Avrumel’s face, was told by Avrumel what had happened, and marched off to the phone in his bedroom. While he was there, my mother came home. Avrumel told the story again in the kitchen, over a second glass of milk and some of my mother’s cinnamon-and-sugar cookies, which he had some difficulty chewing because of the lip. My father returned from the bedroom. Avrumel went over to him. My father lifted him and held him. Avrumel’s hands clasped my father around his neck. Wisps of my father’s white beard flowed across Avrumel’s checks and shoulders, enfolding him. Together, they went out of the kitchen.

“Wherever you go, your art causes trouble, Asher,” said my mother, shaking her head.

“What a troublemaker I married,” Devorah said, and flashed me a smile. “Why can’t you make pretty pictures like Max docs?”

“My mother used to ask me that when I was a child.”

“I remember,” my mother said.

“What did you answer?” Devorah asked.

“I answered that the world is not a pretty place, why should I paint lies?”

From a distant part of the house came the sound of my father singing. His deep, faintly nasal voice drifted through the halls and into the kitchen. He was singing a song I had never heard before, a slow, sweet, melancholy Yiddish tune about a deer that runs away from hunters and is lost in a dark wood. After a long journey the deer comes upon a clearing, where there is an old stone house with a softly glowing white light over the door. An elderly bearded man lives in the house. He has barely enough food for himself, but he takes the deer in, and the deer lives with the man and is happy. And it turns out that the man is the blessed and saintly Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, the first and the greatest of all the tzaddikim.

Drawn by the sound of my father’s voice, Rocheleh came out of her room and into the kitchen. The four of us, in the kitchen, listened to my father singing to Avrumel.

The next day Rav Greenspan called an assembly of the entire school, boys and girls. He announced that hospitality to guests is a commandment from the Torah. It was practiced by Avrohom our Father, and it would be practiced as well by all the students of the Ladover yeshiva. There were guests in the school from France, and they were to be treated as Avrohom our Father treated the three angels. That was the wish of the Rebbe, he said, who had called him on the telephone that morning. Did anyone have any questions?

There were no questions.

Rocheleh and Avrumel told Devorah and me about the assembly when they returned from school. Avrumel said that the boy with whom he had fought had come to school with purple marks around his left eye. In the rolling around on the asphalt, Avrumel’s shoe
had connected with the boy’s eye. “I didn’t mean to hit him,” Avrumel said. “It just happened.” The chance blow to the eye was not without its ensuing satisfactions. Avrumel was now regarded by many in his class as someone to be reckoned with, and there were even those who now looked upon him with a mixture of awe and caution. The fist—or, in this instance, the shoe—is not always decried by Ladover Hasidim.

I asked Rocheleh if the drawings I had made the day before were still on the blackboard. She said they had been erased before she got to school.

Later, I said to Devorah, “Why do you suppose they handled the fight that way?”

“What way?”

“An assembly. It could’ve been done in five minutes just with the two boys. Why the whole school?”

“I don’t know.”

“It strikes me as a little strange. The whole school called out for a little incident like that.”

“The Rebbe telephoned.”

“That’s what I mean. Why did the Rebbe get involved with something as trivial as that?”

“Your father must have told him about it.”

“I’m sure he did. Why? I was in school fights all the time. My father never interfered, not once. And to go to the Rebbe. Why didn’t my father call Rav Greenspan?”

“What’s troubling you, my husband?”

“I don’t know, Dev. I’m ready to go home.”

“In a week or so. Do you want the children to go back with the taste of fighting in their mouths? For the sake of peace. Another week or so. All right, my husband? For the sake of good memories and peace.”

Zemiros and riddles filled the air of our Shabbos table that Friday night. Avrumel climbed onto my father’s lap and fell asleep. He slept there, snoring lightly, as we chanted the Grace After Meals. His lip was healing, and his bruised cheek had turned a dull purple with dry under-the-skin blood. Devorah put him to bed and returned
to the kitchen. Rocheleh, wearing one of my mother’s aprons over her light-blue dress, helped Devorah and my mother with the dishes. My father asked me if I would like to study with him for a while, and we went into the living room and studied together one of the works written by the Rebbe’s great-grandfather, reading the passages aloud and explaining them to each other. We studied the passage about one who is able to engage in the study of Torah and instead occupies himself with frivolous matters; such a one suffers severe penalties. In like manner, “he who occupies himself with the sciences of the nations of the world is included among those who waste their time with profane matters, insofar as the sin of neglecting the Torah is concerned…. Moreover, the uncleanness of the science of the nations is greater than that of profane speech….” We spent a good deal of time trying to understand the reasons for that. We studied that the sciences are forbidden because they lead to the defilement of the intellectual faculties in the divine soul, and then we came upon a passage that stated the study of science was permissible if “he employs these sciences as a useful instrument, as a means of a more affluent livelihood to be able to serve God, or knows how to apply them in the service of God and His Torah. This is the reason why Maimonides and Nachmonides, of blessed memory, and their adherents engaged in them.” We studied that “all lusts and boasting and anger and similar passions are in the heart, and from the heart they spread throughout the whole body, rising also to the brain and the head…. But the abode of the divine soul is in the brains that are in the head, and from there it extends to all the limbs….” We studied about “the completely righteous man” in whom the evil inclination has been converted to goodness, who utterly despises the pleasures of this world and finds no enjoyment in the mere gratification of the physical appetites instead of seeking the service of God, because the physical appetites originate from the sitra achra, and whatever is of the sitra achra is hated by the perfectly righteous man. We read the words of the great sage Rabbi Simeon ben Yochai: “I have seen superior men, and their numbers are few. The reason for their title of ‘superior men’ is that they convert evil and make it ascend to holiness….”

My father looked up from the book and gazed off into space, his
dark eyes glittering. He combed his long beard with his fingers and swayed slightly back and forth in his armchair and began to sing a Ladover melody. The words and music gently filled the living room, caressing the still air. The curtains were open, and I saw the lawn and the trees, tall and ghostly in the streetlights. A squirrel raced crookedly across the lawn, leaped upon the trunk of a sycamore, and vanished into its dark labyrinthine branches. I sat and listened to my father sing and closed my eyes and let the melody move against me, and it seemed to me at that moment that all was possible, that the world still held open the luminous doors of reconciliation, and I promised myself I would at least advance to the threshold and peer in and see what awaited me inside. I sat very still, listening to my father sing.

The next morning in the synagogue Avrumel sat with my father, huddled inside the cool white world of his large tallis. The Rebbe did not appear. My Cousin Yonkel was his usual surly self and barely acknowledged my presence. It was a warm spring day washed with brilliant sunlight and canopied by a clean blue sky. We walked home beneath budding trees. Rocheleh said the blue color overhead reminded her of the sky over our home in Saint-Paul. Avrumel, his bruises nearly healed, was walking with my parents. Devorah asked Rocheleh if she was homesick. No, she said. She liked it here. There were girls her age everywhere, her teachers were very good. “But I don’t like the weather,” she said. “It’s like the weather of Paris.”

“Without the beauty of Paris,” I said.

“There is beauty here, Papa,” she said. “Making new friends is beautiful. Being close to the Rebbe is beautiful.”

Devorah smiled deeply.

“Yes,” I said. “You’re right. They are both beautiful.”

Later that day, some of my parents’ friends came over to the house, and we sat on the terrace, talking. The warm afternoon air, bathed in sunlight, carried faint hints of coming summer days. My mother, helped by Devorah, served cakes and juice. I listened and on occasion joined the talk, drifting in and out of the waves of conversation. It felt oddly comforting to be here, enfolded, accepted. One of those present was a computer engineer; another, a mathematician. Near me sat a professor of philosophy and a professor
of classics. All either lived within walking distance of the synagogue or were spending the Shabbos with relatives or friends in the neighborhood. They were all followers of the Rebbe. We talked about Hasidus and Torah and the Ba’al Shem Tov and the Rebbe. The Ba’al Shem Tov asked: Why was evil, or the appearance of evil, created? So that after surmounting the most difficult of barriers man can enjoy all the more his coming into the presence of the Master of the Universe. We told stories about other Hasidic Rebbes. Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk claimed he was not a miracle worker, only the Ba’al Shem Tov could make miracles, could issue a decree and God would fulfill it; but he, Menachem Mendel, would pray for his Hasidim that they have children, good health, and a means of making a living. Someone told about Nachman of Bratslav, who believed in the virtues of solitude. A man should spend at least one hour each day alone in a room or a field, engaged in secret dialogue with the Master of the Universe. And a man should think only of what he has to do for God that day, and it will not be too burdensome for him. All a man has in the world is the now, the day and the hour where he is, because tomorrow is an entirely different world. Someone else told about Aaron Rokeach of Belz, who found it difficult to rebuke his people, always discovered good in them, no matter what they did, and who would not permit his synagogue to use electricity because the same current provided light for the nearby Catholic church.

The professor of philosophy, a man in his early sixties, trim and silver-haired, with keen blue eyes and a lively demeanor, asked me what I thought about Chagall being buried in a Catholic cemetery in Saint-Paul. I told him I thought it was shameful and scandalous; for the first time in two thousand years, Jews produced a world-class artist, one who helped shape the modern period—and he’s buried in a Gentile cemetery because his assimilated family wanted him nearby and felt that the Jewish cemetery in Nice was too far away, or was too Jewish. I could not go to the cemetery in Saint-Paul and recite a chapter of Psalms over the grave, because entry into such a cemetery is forbidden to a religious Jew. I could see the cemetery from where I lived, and every time I looked at it I thought of Chagall buried there. It was an anguish. I saw my father watching me as I talked; his face wore a troubled look, as if he
thought I might end up that way, too, if I continued my life as an artist.