My Name is Asher Lev: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

That summer, Asher goes with Jacob Kahn and his wife, Tanya, to Provincetown, Massachusetts. In the mornings, he stands on the beach and prays. He prepares his own kosher food in his room. In the mornings, he and Kahn set up easels at the edge of the sand dunes and paint.

Asher begins to understand Kahn’s approach to painting. Kahn believes that trying to convert three-dimensional objects onto a two-dimensional canvas results in a falsehood. Therefore, it’s necessary to either represent objects two-dimensionally or else paint using only color, texture, and form. Asher cannot yet paint this way himself. Kahn tells Asher that he is “too religious to be an Abstract Expressionist.” Asher is too much a mix of the emotional, sensual, and rational—the latter coming from his Ladover background. Kahn tells Asher that a person doesn’t need to give up his background in order to become a great painter, and that in fact, painting should reflect or comment upon a painter’s background in some way.

Jacob Kahn also teaches Asher how to swim in the ocean. It reminds Asher painfully of his summers in the Berkshires with his mother. In the afternoons, they paint. In the evenings, they often walk through the art galleries in town. One evening, an artist introduces himself and rambles about the art world’s impending shift to Tokyo. After the man leaves, Jacob tells Asher, “Every trade has them […] they are called whores.”

As they stand on the beach later that night, Jacob tells Asher that he must not become a “whore.” He says that Asher is already on the way to becoming one—he observes that Asher has started tucking his earlocks behind his ears. He tells Asher that Asher did this out of shame, because earlocks didn’t fit his idea of an artist. He tells Asher that an artist is an individual before anything else. He is glad to have spoken bluntly and upset Asher in a matter as important as this.

Asher feels ashamed. After this, he wears his earlocks loose once again. He also remains Sabbath-observant, refraining from painting and spending his time reading the Torah and Hasidic works. He fasts on Tisha b’Av. That day, Jacob invites him on a walk. He tells Asher that he has never understood fasting, despite many discussions with the Rebbe about it. He says it is good that Asher has not abandoned the things that are meaningful to him. Jacob himself has little that is meaningful to him besides his art. He sculpts his self-portrait in the sand and remarks that he hopes to live past 80. He tells Asher that sometimes Asher reminds him upsettingly of his own past.

The next day, Jacob doesn’t get out of bed. Tanya calmly says that her husband is “in a mood,” and she won’t let Asher see him. She tells Asher that the Nazis melted down a decade’s worth of Jacob’s sculptures. The next day, several local artists come to see Jacob. Even Anna Shaeffer comes. She assures Asher that although Jacob’s spells are unpleasant, he always comes out of them within a few days. Tanya adds that one must “[learn] to live with [the] fear” that he will not. That evening, Jacob emerges from his room and begins painting again. He and Asher don’t discuss his mood. He tells Asher that he will make it past 80, if only he can stop thinking about the past.

One day as Jacob and Asher visit a Cubist exhibit in Boston, Jacob shares some memories of Picasso. He says that Picasso was “frightening” in his genius, able to “use up a lifetime of ideas of an ordinary good painter in a few weeks.” People would hide their work so that Picasso wouldn’t see their ideas. Jacob says that “there is something demonic about such a gift […] or divine.”

A few days later, Jacob drops off Asher at the Provincetown docks for a day of sketching. Later Asher sketches sharks in the town aquarium. People gather and gawk. Asher signs one of his drawings and gives it to a little boy. He walks through town and sketches old women and wrinkled fishermen “with whom [he] felt a strange kinship.” He gives away some of his sketches. When he rejoins Jacob later that day, he tells Jacob, “I am going to be a great artist.” “You have been an artist for a long time, Asher Lev,” Jacob replies. Not long after, the summer comes to an end.