My Name is Asher Lev: Chapter 5 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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”