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father throughout the world. The acquisition of new sites, the renovation of old buildings and the construction of new ones, the purchase of Torah scrolls and Ladover texts; scholarships, emergency funds, travel expenses, deficits; the maintenance of dining rooms, dormitories, medical facilities, gymnasiums—all nourished from the endlessly flowing fountain of funds whose source was my late uncle’s expanding watch and jewelry business. One of my cousins told me that my uncle had been considering further expansion into New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania before he died.
    His family lived in the house next door to my parents’ house: a three-story, Tudor-style sprawl, with a large front lawn, a deep expanse of grass in the rear, bordering hedges, flower beds, and a towering ailanthus along the rim of the back terrace. I had lived in that house for a time; had painted in it when my parents had been away together in Europe, traveling for the Rebbe. Most of the paintings I had made in that house were now in museums or private collections.
    The limousine turned the corner and moved slowly along theorderly residential street. A hushed crowd stood in front of my uncle’s house, spilling down from the porch and out onto the wide front lawn. The limousine came to a stop at the curb.
    The driver stepped out quickly, opened the rear door, and helped my parents out onto the sidewalk. I climbed out on the street side. The afternoon sun shone through the bare trees and into my eyes, and I thought fleetingly of clear bright sunlight and terraced hills and the Cubist houses of the valley and the distant silvery radiance of the sea.
    I stood with my parents on the sidewalk near my late Uncle Yitzchok’s house. Behind us, the limousine pulled slowly away from the curb and drove off.
    “Asher, come,” my father said.
    His strong fingers were on my elbow.
    We moved toward the dense silent crowd: mostly young men, dark-garbed, freshly bearded, standing about: the new generation that had grown up while I was in Europe. My uncle’s death had touched them deeply; they stood there with somber eyes, mournful faces, sagging shoulders: the body language of sorrow. They parted silently before my father, as if a hidden signal had been given. I walked in the wake of the looks of awe and reverence directed at my father. From somewhere in the silent crowd I heard a voice say, “That’s Asher Lev.” I saw my mother’s brief embarrassed response—she shut her eyes and shook her head—and felt the immediate momentary tightening of my father’s grip on my arm. We walked up the cement path and the stone steps to the porch. A young man suddenly appeared before us with a basin, a pitcher of water, and a towel. We washed and dried our hands and went on through the front door into the house.
    The silent crowd in the entrance hall parted for my father. “Coats on the second floor, first room to the left of the stairs,” someone said in a near-whisper. I took my parents’ coats, and they continued on through the crowd into the living room. I climbed the stairs.
    The house gleamed with the opulence of its owners: thickly carpeted floors and stairs; richly textured wallpaper with floral designs; expensively framed prints by contemporary Jewish artists on the walls of the second-floor hallway: Agam, Nachshon, Bezem,Bergner, Ardon, Bak, Rubin, Ticho, Moreh. How curious, all that art. The only art on the walls of this house during all the years of my growing up in this neighborhood had been calendar reproductions of medieval Hebrew manuscripts, pictures of the Rebbe, and my own work.
    The room to the left of the stairs was small but tastefully furnished. Coats lay everywhere: on the bed, chairs, desk. This room had once been mine, but when I lived in it the furniture was plainer, more in keeping with my uncle’s then modest earnings. How I had worked! The cascades of color and form; the images that had possessed me: I would gaze at them inside