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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in My Name is Asher Lev, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Divine vs. the Demonic
Art and Religious Faith
Creativity, Self-Expression, and Truth
Family Conflict
Summary
Analysis
Asher continues drawing. Many of the drawings include books and buildings burning, including the Ladover headquarters. Rivkeh takes Asher to the family doctor, but he can find nothing wrong with Asher. Rivkeh takes Asher to another kind of doctor who asks him questions and makes him play games. Asher also draws for him—a picture of a cat he’d seen that had been struck by a car. Rivkeh is subdued after she speaks to the doctor.
Under the weight of all this rapid change, Asher’s art takes on an increasingly dark tone, prompting Rivkeh to take him to a psychologist. Rivkeh’s quiet withdrawal after the appointment suggests that the psychologist apparently gave a negative assessment. More and more, art is Asher’s way of expressing his inner conflict, but that expression isn’t easily interpreted by those around him.
Themes
The next day, at school, a classmate keeps asking Asher what he is doing. Asher doesn’t understand. Soon there are murmurs and stares. Then, a pimply-faced boy shouts in horror, “You defiled a Chumash!” Asher realizes he has drawn a face on his Chumash. It’s a drawing of the Rebbe, and his face is “vaguely menacing.” The teacher asks Asher what he’s done. He looks more sad than angry. He tells Asher that drawing on his Chumash is a desecration of the Name of God.
Just as he’d unconsciously drawn Stalin weeks before, now Asher draws the Rebbe without realizing what he’s doing. Both pictures are an expression of Asher’s fears and frustrations about his family’s summons to Europe. He doesn’t intend to “desecrate” his Bible, but his classmates and teacher don’t know how to interpret the drawing as anything other than a sacrilegious act.
Themes
Asher looks at his drawing of the Rebbe. The face looks threatening and evil. Asher imagines that this is the face the Rebbe had worn “when he decided to hurt me”—when he told Asher’s father to go to Vienna. Asher looks at the photograph of the Rebbe on the classroom wall; the Rebbe looks kind. He’s frightened by the drawing he’s made, especially by the fact that he can’t remember having drawn it.
Asher draws the Rebbe in the way he feels about him, not as he looks in reality. Again, this shows Asher’s childish perception of things—the Rebbe doesn’t really intend to harm Asher, but it feels as if that’s the case. Asher will continue to find that the contrast between inner perception and outward reality is an ongoing issue in his art.
Themes
After school Asher goes to Yudel Krinsky’s store and asks him questions about oil paints. He tells Yudel about the Chumash drawing. Yudel looks horrified. Asher wonders how he could have done such a thing, when the doctors said there is nothing wrong with him. He realizes he doesn’t have enough money to buy all the supplies he would need in order to make an oil painting. He tells Yudel he doesn’t feel well and leaves the store. He walks home looking at the familiar scenes along the parkway and thinking about Vienna: “I don’t know enough about this street to really draw it yet; how can I draw a strange street in a foreign land full of people who hate me?”
Even sympathetic Yudel is alarmed by what Asher has unintentionally done. Asher is feeling mentally and emotionally scattered, clearly shaken by the strange drawing and the horror it’s sparked in others. Underneath all this is his fear of leaving the place he knows and loves to explore through his drawing—something he fears will be interrupted beyond repair if he goes to Vienna.
Themes
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When Asher gets home, it’s almost dark. He didn’t realize how much time had passed. His mother’s face is frightened, and her voice is strained. She tries to get Asher to eat supper, but he goes to bed. All he can think about is how to get enough money to buy the supplies he needs for an oil painting. Rivkeh comes in and tells him that the mashpia called; he wants to speak to Asher the next morning. Asher falls asleep and dreams of his mythic ancestor, “[thundering] with rage.”
When Asher is preoccupied by art, especially while distressed, he becomes oblivious to the passage of time. He channels his distress into thoughts about painting. In his sleep, the distress is channeled into threatening dreams of the mythic ancestor, angry at Asher for his apparent sacrilege.
Themes
The next morning at breakfast, Aryeh is upset about Asher’s drawing and how it looks for his son to be behaving in this way. Asher asks his father to stop calling drawing “foolishness.” Foolishness means that something is harmful and a waste of time. He’s never spoken to his father that way before. Rivkeh tells him he mustn’t be disrespectful. Though his voice is “tremulous with anger,” Aryeh just tells Asher to drink his orange juice.
For Aryeh, Asher’s behavior is deeply offensive, even shameful for his own reputation within the community. For the first time, though, Asher defends himself to his father. He feels that Aryeh, too, is attacking what’s precious to him. This impasse between Asher and Aryeh hints at the deeper one that’s to come.
Themes
When Asher gets to the mashpia’s office, Rav Yosef Cutler warmly asks how he’s doing. They speak only in Yiddish. Asher looks out the window behind the mashpia and wonders how he would paint the rain dripping off the branches. The mashpia is talking to him, but Asher isn’t listening. He feels that his street is crying and is distressed that he can’t paint it. When the mashpia finally regains Asher’s attention, he looks alarmed.
Even while talking with the mashpia, who’s trying his best to be sympathetic, Asher has trouble paying attention to anything except for art. For him, the desire to paint his “crying” street is not an intentional slighting of anyone or anything else, but a frustrated desire to express his own deep grief.
Themes
When Asher is finally listening, the mashpia explains that he’s talking to Asher out of love for his whole family. He was with Asher’s own grandfather the night he was killed. He tells Asher that the Jewish people are one body and soul; when one part hurts, the rest of the body must come to its aid. Asher wonders who is coming to his aid. The mashpia says he understands that a gift like Asher’s can’t always be controlled. But one can’t always give in to such a gift—“One does with a life what is precious not only to one’s own self but to one’s own people.”
Much like Asher’s father, the mashpia uses the sense of Jewish heritage to try to get through to Asher. There’s perhaps a generational difference in play—Asher can respect the experiences of his father’s generation but simply can’t identify with him; he only fully understands his own pain. The mashpia, likewise, can’t fully understand the pressure Asher’s gift exerts on him, no matter how he tries. He wants Asher to understand that sometimes, the needs of the whole must overpower one’s own ambitions.
Themes
The mashpia tells Asher that his gift is causing him to think only of himself and his own feelings. If these were “normal times,” it would be okay, but these aren’t normal times. Asher wonders when times have ever been “normal” for Jews. Does the mashpia mean he’s expected to stifle his gift? If his gift is truly from the Ribbono Shel Olom, then why is it less important than his father’s work?
Fundamentally, the view of the mashpia and of Asher’s father is that Asher’s artistic preoccupation is selfishness. To Asher, this sounds like a demand to suppress his very self. Moreover, he has begun to think of his art as just another expression of his father’s own drive to serve God. Therefore, it feels as though he’s being told not to use his gifts in the service of God.
Themes
The mashpia says that he believes that Asher didn’t know what he was doing when he made the drawing. He regards Asher with a gentle expression and continues talking, but Asher is no longer listening. He’s looking out the window at the street and thinking that if only he could paint the beauty he sees in the world, he would be willing to paint the suffering that exists, too. He asks God to show everyone that art is God’s gift to him. The mashpia interrupts Asher’s thoughts, asking him how he feels about the move to Vienna. Asher says that of course he will go with his family to Vienna in the fall. But he starts to cry, afraid that the gift will leave him when he leaves his street, and he will never get it back. Yet he can’t not go.
Having arrived at this impasse, Asher tunes out once again. It’s clear that he thinks of his art as a means of serving God, as he prays about his desire to portray what he sees around him. But when the mashpia brings up the subject of Vienna, Asher finally breaks down. This is the heart of the impasse for him—he believes he’s being asked to surrender his God-given gift in order to make his family and community happy. Whether or not this is accurate, Asher perceives that he’s in an impossible position.
Themes
The mashpia gives Asher a drink of water and an empty notebook. He asks Asher to make some drawings for him and leaves the office. Asher doesn’t feel like drawing; he just wants to go home and go to bed. But he begins drawing in the notebook, scenes from his family, street, and neighborhood. He draws until he has to dig at the pencil for more lead. But when he leaves the office, he hates the notebook—the drawings “were lies, stagnant creations done to someone else’s demand.” Asher finds himself walking to a museum. He spends the whole day there.
The mashpia attempts to find common ground with Asher, seeming to understand that he would express himself better by drawing than through speech. However, Asher has an instinct—just as he did as a little boy, when asked to draw by his mother—that drawing to fulfill someone else’s expectations isn’t real art. His desire for real art is so strong that he walks out of school in search of some.
Themes
When Asher gets home, Mrs. Rackover tells him she had just called the police. Rivkeh has gone to bed, sick with fear. Aryeh is on a trip to Washington. Asher doesn’t respond; he’s thinking about the fact that, out of all the drawings he’d made earlier that day, not one of them was of his father. His mother comes in, wearing her nightgown; she looks frenzied and frail. Asher tells her that he liked Robert Henri and Hopper the best of the artists he saw in the museum that day. She asks why Asher didn’t call; he just disappeared from school in the middle of the day. Asher isn’t listening. He gets into bed and falls asleep.
This time, Asher’s disappearance has crossed a line; in her terror, his mother has regressed to the time around Yaakov’s death. But Asher, clearly in distress himself, doesn’t grasp the gravity of the situation or his complicity in it. He’s still shaken by the events of the past days, and his only solace is in the new art he saw that day.
Themes
The next morning, Aryeh is home, looking tired. He tells Asher he must never do that again. He must come straight home from school, and cannot even go to Yudel Krinsky’s store. He asks Asher if he understood what the mashpia told him. He says that he would understand if Asher were a genius in mathematics, writing, or Gemorra. But “drawing is foolishness, and I will not let it interfere with our lives.” Asher says he understands.
Wearily, Aryeh tries to make Asher understand the situation—but it’s another instance of mutual incomprehension. Aryeh could make sense of a talent for traditional academic subjects or Gemorra (rabbinical commentary), but drawing doesn’t fit into his world; it’s not a legitimate preoccupation. But for Asher, anything else is a interference in drawing. He doesn’t know how to make room for both.
Themes
The next day at school, some of the boys, including the pimply-faced boy, ask Asher if they should let him, “this goy, this destroyer of Jewish books,” into the classroom. Asher pushes past them without responding. After school, he goes to Yudel Krinsky’s store. He steals five tubes of oil paint and other supplies. He doesn’t tell his mother why he is home late, and she doesn’t ask.
At school, Asher begins to face bullying because, by drawing on a sacred book, he’s marked himself in their eyes as a non-Jew, an enemy. The distress caused by this apparently drives Asher to steal from his own friend. It’s clear that Asher is struggling to make sense of whether he’s on the demonic, as his father suggests, or that of the divine. Finding no answer and no appropriate outlet for his frustrations, he is propelled to commit uncharacteristic acts.
Themes
Over the next week, students, especially the pimply-faced boy, continue to bully Asher as a “desecrater.” One day, after this happens, Asher goes to the museum for the rest of the afternoon. Mrs. Rackover and his mother say nothing to him about it. When Asher knows that his father will be home from traveling, he comes straight home. One day it looks as though the desk drawer containing his oil paints has been hurriedly searched. It’s spring, and Asher draws the trees on his street, filled with “the fearful awareness that I would soon lose it and have nothing I loved that I could draw.” Sometimes Asher hears his parents laughing together as Aryeh helps Rivkeh study Russian. Whenever his father leaves town, Asher goes to the museum after school.
Still tormented both externally and internally, Asher continues to disobey his parents, although it’s only his father that he really fears. There’s a sense of disjunction between his parents’ hopeful anticipation of the upcoming move and his own distress and sense of loss. Love and drawing are closely connected for Asher—he draws those people and things he cares about, in order to express his love for them. Thus he fears that the move to Vienna would, in a real way, cut him off from what he loves.
Themes
That week, a Washington-New York airliner crashes in the East River on approach to LaGuardia. Even after the flight number is announced—and it’s not Aryeh’s flight—Rivkeh’s eyes look “dead.” Asher begins to understand the toll his father’s journeys take on his mother. When Rivkeh says, “Have a safe journey, Aryeh,” Asher used to just hear “a simple formula for departure. Now I began to hear the muted tonalities within the words.”
Perhaps because he’s been dealing with his own anxiety—and he’s always been sensitive to his mother’s pain—Asher begins to understand something of the pain and fear Rivkeh endures each time Aryeh goes away. Like Asher, Rivkeh lives in constant fear of losing what she loves most.
Themes
That night, Asher asks Rivkeh why she lets Aryeh travel so much. She doesn’t understand: “It’s your father’s life, Asher. How can I ask him to stop?” After Aryeh gets home, he and Rivkeh are jubilant, talking and laughing as the three of them walk along the parkway together. But that evening, Aryeh is subdued and sullen, singing the Shabbos hymns with an intensity that recalls the time of Rivkeh’s illness. When Asher asks his mother what happened to change his father’s mood, she doesn’t respond.
Asher seems to think that his mother can ask his father to stop traveling for her own sake, much as he’s being asked to give up his art for their sake. Meanwhile, his parents’ hopeful anticipation is inexplicably disrupted, adding further confusion and stress to Asher’s situation.
Themes
At synagogue the next day, Asher prays intently, but he soon feels eyes upon him. He sees the Rebbe looking at him under the fringe of his tallis. After the service, Aryeh is silent. That night, while his parents are at Uncle Yitzchok’s, Asher takes out the oil paints he’d stolen, but he is filled with horror: “The gift had caused me to steal. I hated the gift.” He falls asleep hating the way the gift is causing everyone in his life to suffer.
Even in the midst of everything that’s happening, Asher’s piety hasn’t faltered, showing that in his mind, there’s no intentional conflict between his faith and his art. But the conflict is there nonetheless, as he recognizes the way it’s causing pain to his family, but doesn’t know how to resolve it.
Themes
The next week, Asher returns the oil paints while Yudel Krinsky isn’t looking. He talks to the mashpia again about his reluctance to go to Vienna. Someone asks Asher if he wants to have a private talk with the Rebbe, but he screams that he hates the Rebbe. He remembers “subdued conversations between my parents, the distant whispering of people in the synagogue, and the way my classmates shied away from me in school.”
Various people try to intervene in the family’s impasse, and Asher’s intransigence is beginning to be noticed and judged by the broader community. He still scapegoats the Rebbe for bringing this difficulty on his family, not knowing how else to make sense of it.
Themes
That summer in the Berkshires, Rivkeh explains to Asher the choices the Rebbe has given Aryeh: Aryeh can stay in America, he can go to Europe with Rivkeh and leave Asher in Uncle Yitzchok’s care, or he can leave Rivkeh and Asher in America and go to Europe by himself. Asher’s teachers, the mashpia, and the Rebbe believe that Asher cannot go to Vienna. Rivkeh explains that she and Aryeh do not believe they can give Yitzchok this responsibility. Asher listens but does not understand. He feels fatigued and draws little that summer.
Asher finally finds out what has upset his father so much—the consensus is that he’s in no fit state to move to Europe, so one way or another, his father’s dream is compromised. Asher once again descends into a fog of depression at the seemingly irresolvable pain he’s causing everyone.
Themes
But Asher begins to understand the situation when Aryeh leaves for Vienna in October. Aryeh tells Asher, “Only be well. Everything will be all right, my son. We are doing the work of the Master of the Universe.” Rivkeh cries and says over and over, “Have a safe journey, my husband.”
Asher’s emotional breakdown has driven his family apart. Even in their distress and inability to understand, however, Asher’s parents don’t force him to move; they’re doing their best to help Asher while keeping Aryeh’s dream alive. Rivkeh bears the brunt of this, left behind and living in fear for Aryeh.
Themes
