SETTING #3

In Asher Lev much of Asher’s childhood is spent in his room. He is there when he is sleeping, drawing, or if he is wanted out of the way. As a child he found the room with plenty of space. This was his world; he had all that he needed. There was his bed to sleep in, a desk to study and draw at, and a dresser to keep his clothes. The reader never really gets an accurate account of the size of the room most of the story because he is viewing in through a child's eyes. When Asher returns later from his time in Europe he truly discovers how small it was, just a closet as his Uncle had put it. Asher’s room in the beginning was just another part of the apartment. It was a room of high traffic because his mother, when she wasn’t sick, and his father came in often. Almost every night his father would come and talk to Asher at nig Ãht and listen to him say his Krais Shema. Later however, after Asher had begun studying art, and there were pictures on the walls, his father would not enter the room. His father saw the room no longer as part of a Jewish house, but a room of some goy. It seemed sacreligous to enter. After Asher truly became a painter his father only entered the room once, but that was only after Asher’s studio was in his Uncle’s house and he no longer painted in his room. Asher spent a number of nights in that room. Staring at the walls before he fell asleep. The one crack in the wall seemed to be significant to him. It was an impurity in his own world, the only place he seemed to have control of. But he did not have control of it at night, as his ancient ancestor enters, maybe through that crack and scolded him for being a disappointment and not keeping the tradition alive. Through the woods that ancestor would come, and Asher would wake up in a cold sweat.