My Name is Asher Lev: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

That summer, Asher lives in a hotel room in Florence. He eats his meals in the home of a Jewish woman in her 70s with whom his father connected him. During the day, he wanders the city, exploring its history and studying art in the churches and galleries. “Florence was a gift,” as Jacob Kahn had told him it would be. Watching evening descend on Florence is a “loveliness” unmatched again in his life: “hours in a Renaissance city lived by a man born in a Brooklyn street.”

Asher has a profound emotional response when he sees Michelangelo’s Pietá for the first time, “like the echoing blasts of the shofar.” He returns to the cathedral over the next few days to draw the sculpture. Then he walks to the Accademia to draw the David, observing the ways it rebelled against artistic tradition. As he alternates between these works of art, he begins to dream of his mythic ancestor once again, “but he was less thunderous than he had ever been.”

A Russian Ladover man gives Asher an envelope to convey to a man in Rome. As Asher takes the train to Rome, he draws the Pietá from memory and is horrified to notice that the figure of Mary resembles Rivkeh. When Asher connects with the Jewish man in Rome, the man offers to give Asher a tour of the yeshiva his father built there. On his last day in the city, Asher calls him. As they drive to the yeshiva, Asher is surprised to learn how rapidly it has grown in just five years. “Your father did it,” Asher’s companion tells him. “It was creation out of nothing.”

The night Asher arrives in Paris, he dreams again of his mythic ancestor, “thundering his rage.” As he eats breakfast the next morning, he draws the Pietá on the tablecloth and reflects that, “The dread was gone […] I would have to let it lead me now or there would be deeper and deeper layers of the wearying darkness.”

When Asher gets back to the hotel, there’s a message from Avraham Cutler, the head of the Paris yeshiva and the son of Asher’s old mashpia. On the way to the yeshiva, Asher asks if they can stop in Montmartre so that he can see Picasso’s old studio. The building is dilapidated. Before he leaves, Asher draws his mother’s profile in the dust of the adjacent square. He isn’t sure why he feels the need to do it.

When they get to the yeshiva, Avraham Cutler tells Asher that six years ago, there was nothing here, but now there are 169 students. Asher is welcome to stay and eat at the yeshiva whenever he likes. At dinner, Asher is repeatedly introduced as the son of Reb Aryeh Lev. Avraham asks Asher where he learned his French. When Asher tells him, Avraham smiles and says, “The Rebbe is a very wise man.”

Over the next week, Asher exchanges letters with his parents, explaining that he wants to stay longer in Europe. They don’t understand, but they respect his wishes. Asher rents a furnished apartment and converts one room into a studio. Avraham Cutler helps him carry canvases and easels up the stairs to the fifth-floor apartment.

Over the coming weeks, Asher paints in the apartment, eats meals in the yeshiva’s dining room, and attends its synagogue. Freed from “memories and roots,” Asher begins to reconnect with old, buried memories. After spending years painting his visible street, now he must “paint the street that could not be seen.”

Asher thinks of his mythic ancestor. As a child, he was told stories about the Russian nobleman whom his ancestor had enriched—“a despotic goy, a degenerate.” Asher wonders if his ancestor, by enriching him, was complicit in the nobleman’s debaucheries. Were the mythic ancestor’s subsequent journeys an act of atonement—an attempt to reshape the “demonic […] into meaning”? Asher senses that this is true. He begins to paint his ancestor, “a weary Jew traveling to balance the world.”

Asher also thinks about his reclusive grandfather. Had the mythic ancestor’s wanderings been passed down to him? Asher paints him, too—his studies, his journeys, and even his gruesome death. He thinks about his father during his mother’s illness, especially his torment at being unable to travel. He wonders if that same impulse to travel was passed down across the centuries by the imbalance created during his mythic ancestor’s life. Asher wonders if his need to create art rather than “give meaning […] to people and events” had “interrupted an act of eternal atonement.”

Asher begins to understand something more of his mother’s anguish over the years. She had stood “between two different ways of giving meaning to the world” and tried to keep both alive. She had encouraged Asher’s drawing, kept herself alive by resuming her brother Yaakov’s work, and kept Aryeh alive by allowing him to resume his own journeys. He thinks about his mother’s endless waiting at the window.

Asher wanders Paris that winter and cannot paint. At last, early in the spring, the idea begins to emerge—an idea he’d repeatedly been “choking […] and hoping it would die […] No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment. But if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way.” He makes preliminary drawings and, after Passover, begins the painting. He draws the central vertical strip of the Brooklyn apartment window and the slanted horizontal of its Venetian blind. He draws his mother behind those lines. Afterward, he feels “vaguely unclean, as if I had betrayed a friend.”

The next day, Asher looks at the painting again and finds it fraudulent. It doesn’t “reflect fully the anguish and torment” he had wanted to convey. He remembers his mother once saying, “Can you understand what it means for something to be incomplete?” He finally understands. Dreading what he must do, Asher prays at the yeshiva, sleeps, and prays again. He knows that his feeling of “incompleteness” would matter little to anyone else. Only Jacob Kahn would have been likely to detect it. But leaving the painting incomplete “would have made me a whore” and made it easier for Asher to leave future work incomplete.

Asher prepares a second canvas. Again, he draws the horizontal and vertical from the Brooklyn apartment window. This time, however, he draws his mother with her arms tied to the horizontal with the cords of the blind and her legs tied to the vertical. He draws his father on the right, dressed for travel. He draws himself on the left, outfitted for painting. He divides his mother’s head into “balanced segments, one looking at me, one looking at my father, one looking upward.” He paints this “for the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other’s throats.” He paints this way because “there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition” that would allow him to convey such torment.

One day in summer, the painting is complete. Asher knows it is a good painting. He prays at the yeshiva and walks through Paris, realizing he wants to paint Brooklyn once again. He spends the summer feverishly painting his memories of his old street. Meanwhile, Avraham Cutler introduces Asher to a family, and he befriends a girl in that family. He chooses to write no more about their interactions that summer.

That fall, Anna Schaeffer comes to Paris and marvels at Asher’s crucifixion paintings. She sends Asher on a long walk, and when he returns, the paintings are gone. He weeps. A show is scheduled for February in New York. The two big paintings will be titled Brooklyn Crucifixion I and Brooklyn Crucifixion II. Asher spends the winter wandering Paris and spending time with the girl he met, then finally flies to New York with a feeling of “dread and oncoming horror.”