THE GIFT OF ASHER LEV

In this sequel to My Name is Asher Lev (1972), the author of The Chosen (1967) and Davita's Harp (1985)—as well as other fictional probes of the rich complexities of Jewish Orthodoxy—brings his protagonist artist back to the Hasidic community in Brooklyn from France. Asher had been "banished" 20 years before, and now once again he must exist between two apparently exclusive worlds: there is the sacred "world of Torah," and there is also the secular, solitary, and visionary world of the artist. Renowned painter Asher Lev, his wife Devorah (still psychically a captive of a Holocaust-crippled childhood), and a young son and daughter are in Brooklyn to participate in the mourning period for a revered uncle. Asher's father—the 89-year-old Rebbe, prime deputy for the leader of the Ladover Hasidic community—and Asher's mother are no nearer than ever to understanding Asher's deliberate turn to the "pagan" world of art. (Yet in the deceased uncle's study Asher finds a stunning collection of secular art and, from the uncle's fine and courageous mind, a gift of faith.) Through the days and nights—in the heart of the Ladovers in the States and in France—with the warm love of family, the pulsing of ritual loyalties and taboos, ripples of terror (as old fears and hatreds surface), Asher finds his "nerve ends still connected" to the community. Then, pressed between sacred and profane worlds, Asher joins in a dialectic with the riddling shades of such as Picasso, a famous sculptor, his dead uncle—and the Rebbe, both in his tiny person, or on the phone, and, at the close, after a miracle journey "in a single stride," in France. Just as magical—and disturbing—is the appearance in Asher's work of his little son's face, in the Sacrifice of Isaac. At the end, there is a linkage of worlds in a kind of redemptive sacrificial act in the gift of a son. Potok's style stiffens periodically into clumps of clichÉd settings ("in the distance a dog barked") or pokey dialogue. But, then again, there is that restless, eager journeying in the dark—and then the sudden shimmerings of possibility—in odysseys of the soul that gives Potok's spiritually searching novels their saving strength.