Summary

When Asher calls Kahn to make an appointment, the artist gives him more homework. He tells him to study another painting and to read a chapter and verse from the Book of Matthew in the Christian Bible. Asher is disturbed by the reading, wherein King Herod orders his soldiers to kill all the children in Bethlehem who are two years old or younger, believing that a child has \ been born who will become King of the Jews.

Rivkeh gives Asher a book about the artist Robert Henri, which he reads right away. In the book, certain passages resonate with Asher, including one that says, “…every great artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriotism, without home...