My Name is Asher Lev: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

When Asher calls Jacob Kahn, Kahn grills him about his study of Guernica. Then Kahn gives his address and invites Asher to come that Sunday afternoon. He also tells Asher to look up the story of the massacre of the innocents in the New Testament, “the Bible of the goyim,” and read it before Sunday. He should also study Reni’s or Poussin’s painting of the Massacre of the Innocents.

The next day Asher goes to the library and reads the New Testament passage. He also studies Reni’s and Poussin’s paintings. At home, he looks at the reproduction of Guernica. By now, he knows the painting by heart. He feels unsettled and “vaguely unclean” after having read from the Christian Bible. He doesn’t understand what the Bible passage and the paintings have to do with one another. He thinks of his father and the mashpia.

When Rivkeh gets home, she brings Asher a book that a professor at her university gave her. It’s about Robert Henri. Rivkeh remembers that Asher had mentioned liking his work. The professor also told Rivkeh that Jacob Kahn is one of the world’s greatest living artists. He’d worked with Picasso in Paris before World War I. Everyone seems astonished that Asher is studying with him.

Asher leafs through the book, The Art Spirit. The author recommends that one study with a kindred spirit in order to learn how to become an artist. He also says that an artist must be well acquainted with himself and a “rebel” who has “freed himself from his family, his nation, his race.” The next morning, Asher tells his mother that he doesn’t think he wants to free himself in that way.

On Saturday night, Jacob Kahn calls. He tells Asher to bring his Guernica drawings and any others he wants. Rivkeh wants to accompany him into Manhattan the first time, but Asher refuses. He stays up late thinking about everything he’s studied over the past week. After school the next day, he takes his sketchbooks onto the subway. He notices that the farther he travels from Brooklyn, the more other passengers stare at him with his dangling earlocks.

Asher finds Jacob Kahn’s building and signs in. The doorman takes Asher up to the fifth floor, commenting that Asher doesn’t look like “one of them artist fellers.” Asher hesitates outside Kahn’s apartment for a long time, hearing voices within. At last he rings, and Kahn answers. He greets Asher warmly and introduces him to a woman, Anna Schaeffer, a “matronly” older woman. When Asher hesitates to shake Anna’s hand, Kahn steps between them and joins their hands himself, saying, “to the future.”

Anna’s eyes are fixed on Asher’s sidecurls. She tells Jacob that he is “tricky and nasty” for not having told her. Jacob tells Anna that Asher is “a prodigy in payos.” When Jacob leaves the room, Anna leads Asher through a maze of sculptures and easels so she can look at his face in the light. She tells Asher that she has been wondering “which of the three”—Modigliani, Soutine, or Pascin—he might become. Each of these three artists was Jewish.

Anna continues to regard Asher with interest, asking him questions about his religious beliefs and practices. Asher struggles to articulate his beliefs to her. When he mentions that he believes it’s the task of humanity “to make life holy,” Anna interrupts, “Asher Lev, you are entering the wrong world.” She tells him that if he wishes to make the world holy, he should stay in Brooklyn; this world will “destroy” him.

Anna tells Asher that Jacob has seldom taken students, not since Hitler, when the students became unkind. She tells Asher that Jacob is “like a monk”; there are “many things he does not understand.” She is “possessive” and worries about her painters. Then Anna asks to see Asher’s drawings. While she looks at them, Asher walks around the room and admires Jacob’s work. Eventually, Anna joins him and says that Asher is “bluntly put, magnificent.” She is shocked that he is only 13 years old, but adds, “Why not? […] Picasso was nine.”

Jacob returns then with a drink for Anna and asks if they’ve become acquainted. Anna tells Jacob, “Whenever you tell me, Jacob. Anytime you feel he is ready.” Jacob tells her it will take five years. “Millions of people can draw. Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.”

After Jacob Kahn reviews Asher’s drawings, he looks sad. He tells Asher that he could paint portraits or greeting cards; why does he need this? “Do you begin to understand what you are going to be doing to yourself?” he asks. “You are entering a religion called painting” whose values, concepts, and way of life “are goyisch and pagan.” There’s never been a great painter who was also a religious Jew. He doesn’t mind frightening Asher, he tells Anna, because he doesn’t want to waste his time, and he would rather that Asher remain in Brooklyn as a “nice Jewish boy.” Anna takes Jacob aside to talk for a moment.

While Asher waits, he studies Kahn’s paintings and observes that none of them include representational forms; their subject, rather, is “color and texture,” which Asher finds “sensuous […] raw, elemental.” Then he picks up a dry canvas and some oil paints and begins making a painting of Jacob Kahn and his own face on a canvas. Then he stumbles backward into Kahn, who’s watching. Kahn tells him that Anna has scolded him for being blunt and that he doesn’t know what else to tell Asher, who “[sees] better at thirteen than I did at eighteen.” Perhaps when Asher is 18, he will see better than Jacob did at 25. Anna speaks up to point out that at 25, Jacob had survived two pogroms. Jacob says, “The eye inside a man is not improved by pogroms.”

Jacob goes on to tell Asher that there’s not too much else he can teach him about seeing. He will teach him some tricks, and then Asher “will throw the tricks away and invent your own.” He adds that Asher draws with “too much love,” which will lead to sentimentalism, which is “death to art.” He tells Asher that he will give him five years of his time, at which point he should be ready for Anna.

For the sake of honesty, Jacob adds that he isn’t really doing this for the Rebbe’s sake. He’s doing it because he is selfish, for the pleasure of “[sculpting] you and [bringing] out of you what is already inside you,” much as Michelangelo worked with the marble that became David. At 72, he doesn’t have time to spend on anything less. When Anna bids Asher goodbye, she says that one day his art will make him famous and her rich. When she offers her hand, Asher shakes it unhesitatingly.

After he sees Anna out, Jacob returns and tells him that Anna found him in Paris when he was starving. But he doesn’t think Asher will ever starve. Then he tells Asher that he has a gift and also a responsibility. He asks Asher if he feels he has a responsibility to anyone. Asher says that he feels responsible to his people, because all Jews have a responsibility for one another. This seems to make Kahn angry. He says that as an artist, Asher is only responsible to himself and to the truth as he sees it; anything else will be “propaganda.” He is only responsible to art. He thinks Asher already understands this; if he didn’t, he would not have done what he did to his family. If he feels guilty, he should only use the guilt to make better art.

Kahn and Asher spend the rest of the day talking about art and watching each other make drawings of their respective streets. When they are finished, Kahn invites Asher to come every Sunday afternoon. Asher prays the afternoon service outside before taking the subway home.

When Asher gets home, his mother is at an emergency meeting with the Rebbe. When she gets home, she tells Asher that Aryeh won’t be home for Pesach and that nobody knows where he is. Asher is sure that his father must be in Russia. That night, Asher has horrifying dreams about his father being in danger in Russia. Everyone at school and in the neighborhood is kind and gentle to Asher as he waits for word of his father. In the meantime, Asher studies Michelangelo’s David and returns to Jacob Kahn’s once again.