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Symbols
The living room window in the Lev family’s apartment symbolizes the pain and longing of physical, emotional, an ideological separation among family members. Aryeh prays before the window when his wife, Rivkeh, is ill and he feels emotionally distant from her. Asher looks out the window to watch his father leave on trips. Most significantly, Rivkeh waits there whenever she longs for Asher or Aryeh’s return from school, work, or travel. Although standing at the window will not reunite Aryeh, Rivkeh, or Asher with each other any sooner, the act itself takes on a sort of religious, prayer-like devotion as they wait. It’s Rivkeh’s stance at the window that Asher specifically adopts in his Brooklyn Crucifixion paintings, symbolizing Rivkeh’s anguish as she longs for her loved ones’ safe homecoming. At the end of the novel, both Rivkeh and Aryeh stand at the window, watching as Asher leaves them and Brooklyn behind for good. His parents’ somber position at the window ultimately represents the irreparable emotional and physical separation between Asher and them, after Asher has scandalized his family and his community with his provocative art exhibition.
Window Quotes in My Name is Asher Lev
The My Name is Asher Lev quotes below all refer to the symbol of Window. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 13
Quotes
Trapped between two realms of meaning, she had straddled both realms, quietly feeding and nourishing them both, and herself as well. I could only dimly perceive such an awesome act of will. But I could begin to feel her torment now as she waited by our living-room window for both her husband and her son. What did she think of as she stood by the window? Of the phone call that had informed my father of her brother’s death? Would she wait now in dread all the rest of her life, now for me, now for my father, now for us both—as she had once waited for me to return from a museum, as she had once waited for my father to return in a snowstorm? And I could understand her torment now; I could see her waiting endlessly with the fear that someone she loved would be brought to her dead. I could feel her anguish.
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Window Symbol Timeline in My Name is Asher Lev
The timeline below shows where the symbol Window appears in My Name is Asher Lev. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...“Have a safe journey,” Rivkeh would always tell him. Asher would watch him out the window—tall, neatly dressed, and walking with a slight of limp from childhood polio.
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...night, Asher hears his father singing the melody again while standing at their living room window. He vividly remembers the sight of his father, quietly, fervently singing in his pajamas in...
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...by the sound of his father softly chanting Psalms in front of the living room window.
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...he’s “wasting time.” Asher wakes up and sees his father praying in front of the window. He vows to himself that through his drawing, he will “bring life to all the...
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...the fear like a presence.” He goes to the living room and stares out the window. Aryeh finds him. Asher asks why God is doing this to his mama. Aryeh hugs...
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Chapter 2
...can’t sleep. When this happens, he goes into the living room and looks out the window at the parkway. One night he sees a man “with a beard and an ordinary...
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...to Boston. That night, Asher finds his mother in the living room, looking out the window at the snow. When the phone rings, she answers, trembling. “I warned you,” she says...
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...Russian history test. But as it starts to snow heavily, Rivkeh frets, staring out the window and asking Yaakov to be an interceder for her with the Ribbono Shel Olom. Aryeh...
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...time to walk home. When he reaches his street, he sees his mother at the window. When she meets him at the door, she screams at him. She asks Asher, “What...
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Chapter 3
...through the trees […] thunder in his voice.” Asher wakes up and looks out the window at the parkway. He sees a man “with a dark beard, a dark coat, and...
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Chapter 6
...room to use as her desk. She wants to be able to look out the window, she says. She is now working toward a master’s degree in Russian affairs. She talks...
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...peacefully sleeping in order to balance out the drawings of her standing unseeing at the window—moments when he knows that he is the cause of her unhappiness.
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...night, he finishes his first oil painting, of his mother looking out the living room window. “It was as if I had been painting in oils all my life.”
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...month, Rivkeh is sick with worry. Asher finds her chanting Psalms in front of the window in the middle of the night. He hears her begging Yaakov for intercession. Finally, a...
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Chapter 9
...he goes back to his street and spends awhile looking up at the living room window. Finally he walks to his Uncle Yitzchok’s house.
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Chapter 12
...still seeing Jacob Kahn. Asher says that he hasn’t recently. When he looks out the window of his parents’ apartment, the street seems “colder” than ever.
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...Rebbe again. Rivkeh tells Asher that she thought she’d grown used to this: “How many windows have I waited at? But I’m not used to it at all.” Asher chooses this...
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Chapter 13
...him to resume his own journeys. He thinks about his mother’s endless waiting at the window.
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...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....
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...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...
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Chapter 14
...he loves. Asher goes home and sees his mother looking down at him through the window. She embraces him, weeping. She tells him about the work she and Aryeh are doing...
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...what they will see at the gallery. He watches sunlight shining on them from the window and then dresses for the exhibition.
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...the street, he turns around and sees his parents watching him through the living room window.
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