Eulogy Explained (3)

The third thing I said was that Asher was a very talented person. His major talent was in drawing and painting. During the seven-day mourning period, a friend from elementary school spoke to us about how Asher drew constantly in class. His teachers let him draw, because if he kept busy with that, he wasn't disruptive. School came easily to him, and he was bored by the lessons. He used to sit in the back of the room and draw comic books, which he actually sold to other pupils (typical of Asher, by the way).
Another visitor, a retired art teacher, remembered how Asher stood out in the classes she gave at the Israel Museum. He would come early, stay late, work well and hard, and help out. This is a perfect example of Asher's attitude toward teachers. He didn't take her classes seriously because they were official classes given in the Youth Wing of the museum, or because she had the title of teacher, or because she was his parents' age. He took her classes seriously because she was a good artist and a good teacher. It's a tribute to him that some fifteen years after he studied with her, despite the hundreds of pupils she saw during her career, she still remembered Asher.
When Asher was about three, we took him to an exhibition of colorful paintings by Ruth Tsarfati, a famous illustrator of children's books. He was so delighted by the bright colors and images that he truly danced with joy. I've never seen a child respond so immediately to visual art.
Later on he became interested in movies, and he was a gifted film critic, responding to films with precocious insight and sensitivity. In ninth grade he started studying cinema in the High School of the Arts in Jerusalem, and he was happy during his first year there, when the film program was small.
For a while Asher also played drums. When he was very little, we took him to an ultra-orthodox wedding that we were invited to, where the musical entertainment was limited to a male singer who accompanied himself on a drum set, because some extremely pious Jews avoid playing musical instruments in Jerusalem, a sign of continued mourning for the destruction of the Temple. The next morning, Asher took all the big pots and their lids out of the cupboard and made himself a drum set.
He was also talented with food. During high school he started to work in a hole in the wall cafe, making grilled cheese sandwiches and brewing coffee, and within a short time the owner was letting him manage the place. Later he invested some of the money my parents left him in a coffee shop and set the whole thing up, designing the place, figuring out and designing the menu, hiring the cook, and everything else. The food was delicious, and all our friends ate there and enjoyed it. Asher was studying animation at Bezalel, so he didn't have time to run the place. If he had, it would have been a commercial success, too. But the other owners were kind of feckless, and the place declined and closed. Meanwhile Asher realized that he didn't have the patience to be an animator.
Later Asher attended the Sam Spiegel film school for a year but couldn't take their approach. He worked at various jobs for another year and studied painting and drawing to put together a portfolio to apply to Bezalel, this time in Visual Communication. His work was excellent, and he invested himself in it. He definitely had the ability to become a painter, but he didn't fancy himself an "Artist."
While he was studying at Bezalel, he was working in restaurants, first as a barman in a coffee shop, then in the kitchens of two restaurants. All of his art projects that year were centered on food, including a playground made of cold cuts and a video involving his mother sewing together chicken skins over an illuminated globe, and at the end of the year he realized that he would rather learn to be a gourmet cook than learn to be a commercial artist. So off he went to New York to work in restaurants and study cuisine.
He was as talented at cooking as he was in the visual arts.