He has become a painter of international stature. Defiant in their fundamentalism, they come down to the Modern Age best understood as ecstasy-specialists of a sort, the whirling dervishes of Judaism.Īsher Lev is a Hasid, but with a difference. The Hasidim are historical fossils of a sort, flash-frozen remnants of a wave of 18th-Century Eastern European reaction to Enlightenment Orthodoxy and rationalism, who substituted a riddling, sensual reading of Scripture for the more formal “scientific” interpretation of their co-religionists. In his latest novel, “The Gift of Asher Lev,” Potok sheds light on the shuttered world of the Hasidim-those bearded and hatted figures seen striding down the streets of New York and certain European cities. Though the cast and settings vary continuously, the central struggle of the books remains that of faith under siege by appetite and desire, of religious devotion at odds with the deracinating allure of American life. That subject is more often a variation on the conflict between an Orthodox Jewish upbringing and the pagan, sensual pleasures brought to bear by the secular world. In addition, his books are always carefully researched and invariably impart a wealth of learning on his chosen subject. The style, though occasionally cumbersome, has at least the virtue of directness and clarity. His novels are invariably well-crafted, composed with a feeling for the weights and measures of narrative, and boast a DeMilleian flair for monumental themes. The popular success of Potok’s books is not hard to understand. It is an oeuvre that totals seven works of fiction, and if its author has never received quite the critical attention showered upon his more glamorous literary peers, he has known the compensatory pleasures of having claimed a unique subject matter and of cultivating a huge and highly loyal following. Slightly off to the side of the more musical Modernism of American-Jewish authors Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Phillip Roth, lies the oeuvre of Chaim Potok.

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