My Name Is Asher Lev (37 page)

Yes, I said. Yes. My own play of forms for the pain.

Later that afternoon, I called Anna Schaeffer at the gallery. It was another mob scene, she cried exultantly. I would have to see it to believe it.

I told her I was returning to Europe.

There was a long silence. I could hear the noise of the crowd through the telephone.

“Will you stay to the end of the show?” she asked.

“I’m leaving tomorrow, Anna.”

“Where will you go?”

“I don’t know. Back to Paris. I may go to Russia.”

She was very quiet.

“I need new faces. And there’s the Hermitage in Leningrad and the Matisses in Moscow.”

“Yes,” she said. Then she said, “You will let me know where you can be reached.”

“Yes.”

“Goodbye, Asher Lev. When you get to Paris, you should wear the beret.”

I said nothing.

“Goodbye, Asher Lev. Good luck.”

I went into the kitchen and told my parents. My father stared at me and said nothing. My mother began to cry.

I called and made a reservation on a flight to Paris for the next night. I remember nothing else about that day. I came awake in the night and heard my parents talking softly in the kitchen. I lay in my bed and wondered what they were saying.

I woke in the morning and prayed. My parents were not home. I made myself breakfast. I wandered about the apartment
and walked the streets. I had lunch alone in the apartment and supper with my parents. I packed my bags. We stood at the door. My mother was crying. My father stood next to her, tall, heavy-shouldered, his eyes dark—and moist, I thought. He said nothing, but he shook my hand. “Please write,” my mother said. “You’ll write?” She looked tiny and fragile. “Have a safe journey, my Asher,” she kept saying. “Have a safe journey.”

I came out of the apartment house. It was cold and dark. I looked up. My parents stood framed in the living-room window. I hailed a cab and climbed inside. It pulled slowly away from the curb. I turned in the seat and looked out the rear window of the cab. My parents were still watching me through our living-room window.

BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS
by Dai Sijie

In this enchanting tale about the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening, two hapless city boys are exiled to a remote mountain village for re-education during China’s infamous Cultural Revolution. There they meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, the two friends find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.

Fiction/Literature/0-385-72220-6

LIKE NEVER BEFORE
by Ehud Havazelet

David Birnbaum is a man at the crossroads—of youth and old age, of Orthodox Judaism and assimilation, of the well-worn past and an uncertain future. He is also at the dramatic center of this sensitive, often funny chronicle of three generations of a family straining to hold together in the face of changing cultures and shifting fortunes. Throughout this extraordinary book, David struggles with the mixed loyalties he has felt since childhood that continue to haunt his present and future. Poignant and truthful,
Like Never Before
captures the hopes and conflicts of a Jewish family.

Fiction/Short Stories/0-385-49725-3

LITTLE BOYS COME FROM THE STARS
by Emmanuel Dongala

This touching novel tells the story of Matapari, a precocious teen from an unnamed African country. Though his father is a reclusive scholar, his mother a pious Catholic, and his uncle an opportunist determined to gain political power in their post-colonial nation, Matapari remains an unsullied child who wears Reeboks, reads Japanese comics, and watches
Rambo.
But when his family becomes the nucleus of the revolution for democracy, Matapari proves to be the ideal narrator for this story of violent upheaval and bloody corruption—a voice whose ironic innocence makes bearable and even humorous the awful realities of the world it describes.

Fiction/Literature/0-385-72122-6

THE FAMISHED ROAD
by Ben Okri

The narrator, Azaro, is an
abiku
, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro’s loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus’s story.

Fiction/Literature/0-385-42513-9

GABRIEL’S STORY
by David Anthony Durham

When Gabriel Lynch moves with his mother and brother from a brownstone in Baltimore to a dirt-floor hovel on a homestead in Kansas, he is not pleased. He does not dislike his new stepfather, a former slave, but he has no desire to submit to a life of drudgery and toil on the untamed prairie. So he joins up with a motley crew headed for Texas, only to be sucked into an ever-westward wandering replete with a mindless violence he can neither abet nor avoid—a terrifying trek he penitently fears may never allow for a safe return.

Fiction/Literature/0-385-72033-5

SISTER OF MY HEART
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Anju is the daughter of an upper-caste Calcutta family. Her cousin Sudha is the daughter of the black sheep of the family. Sudha is startlingly beautiful; Anju is not. Despite this, Sudha and Anju have been sisters of the heart since the day they were born. But when Sudha learns a dark secret, their connection is broken. For the first time in their lives, the girls know what it is to feel suspicion and distrust. When tragedy strikes, however, they discover that they have only each other to turn to.

Fiction/Literature/0-385-48951-X

ANCHOR BOOKS
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FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2003

Copyright © 1972, renewed 2000 by Chaim Potok

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Potok, Chaim.
My name is Asher Lev/Chaim Potok—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-42234-7
1. Jewish families—Fiction. 2. Young men—Fiction.
3. Artists—Fiction. 4. Jews—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.
5. Crown Heights (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PZ4.P86 My PS3566.o69
813′.5′4
70171131

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