My Name is Asher Lev: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

The mashpia calls Asher into his office and explains that the Rebbe wants to meet with him, as he meets with all yeshiva students who are about to become bnai mitzvah. Asher starts meeting with the mashpia daily to review Torah and Hasidus. Asher doesn’t understand much of the material, but he enjoys the time spent with the mashpia. Before Asher’s meeting, Aryeh is “tense and apprehensive,” and he tells Asher, “Remember with whom you will be speaking.” Rivkeh looks proud.

When Asher reaches the Rebbe’s waiting room, he sees Rav Mendel Dorochoff, the Rebbe’s gabbai, or chief of staff. He also sees “a tall, heavy-shouldered man in a dark winter coat and baggy brown trousers,” with a “walrus mustache” and flowing white hair. He wears a beret and is writing on a pad. While Asher sits and waits, he realizes that the man is actually drawing.

Finally, Mendel Dorochoff ushers Asher into the Rebbe’s office. The Rebbe, wearing an ordinary dark hat, “seemed more a presence than a man.” He greets Asher softly in Yiddish. Asher is nervous but manages to reply to the Rebbe’s questions. The Rebbe blesses Asher in the name of his grandfather. He tells Asher that one man isn’t superior to another because of his vocation; “a life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.” Not everyone understands this, he adds; even those who love Asher don’t all understand this. He reminds Asher that honoring his father is one of the Ten Commandments. Asher feels bewildered as he bids the Rebbe good night.

When Asher leaves the Rebbe’s office, the man in the beret quickly gets up and goes inside. On Asher’s chair, the man has left a pencil drawing of Asher’s face, signing it “Jacob Kahn.” Asher sits down and quickly draws a sketch of Jacob Kahn’s face, signs it, and leaves it on the chair the man had occupied. Asher goes outside and sits on the porch and looks at the parkway. When Jacob Kahn comes out, he introduces himself to Asher with a slight Russian accent. Kahn asks Asher if he has any idea what he’s getting into.

Kahn sighs. He tells Asher that they’re all crazy. Asher’s father will become his enemy. But the Rebbe is clever. He tells Asher that he doesn’t have time for him now, as he’s finishing a sculpture, but Asher must call him in the middle of March. Then he explains to Asher that he’s not what Asher would consider to be “a Torah Jew,” although his father was a follower of the Rebbe’s father.

Kahn tells Asher that between now and March, he must go to the Museum of Modern Art and study Picasso’s Guernica. Then they will meet, talk, and work. He then asks Asher a blunt question. He asks Asher if he knows that he’s entering the world of the goyim; not only that, but Christian goyim. The Rebbe asked him to make this clear to Asher.

When Asher gets home and tells his parents what happened, Aryeh is pained. Rivkeh “wavered apprehensively between my father’s pain and my dazed joy.” Aryeh bitterly tells Rivkeh that he’s not “reconciled” to the Rebbe’s decision. He says that when a son wanders from his father in this way, there can only be trouble. He tells Asher that there’s something inside Asher that he doesn’t understand: “I don’t know what you are. I am ashamed of my own son.”

Aryeh is pained all through Asher’s bar mitzvah celebration. But neither he nor anyone else dares to question the Rebbe’s decision. Aryeh feels that, somehow, “the line of inheritance had been perverted” by the demonic, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. So he feels pain and shame during Asher’s joyful bar mitzvah and as he flies back to Europe.

At the end of January, Rivkeh takes Asher to the Museum of Modern Art so that he can study Guernica. She also buys him a large reproduction of the painting. Asher studies the reproduction during the week and visits the museum each weekend. In March, he calls Jacob Kahn.