Though less of a blockbuster than his famous debut, The Chosen (1967), Chaim Potok’s third novel made the bestseller lists for a solid six months, and was the first fiction situated so resolutely in the world of Hasidism to make such a splash in the U.S. While The Chosen dramatizes the schism between modern Orthodoxy and Hasidism in the relationship between two boys, Asher Lev’s childhood takes place deep within the folds of Ladover Hasidism; Lev’s father is one of the Ladover Rebbe’s right-hand men, and he grows up in Brooklyn, almost literally in the shadow of the movement’s headquarters.

Asher Lev’s problem is his gift: he has an uncanny ability to draw. Not yet a bar mitzvah, with no training or instruction, he produces his first oil painting and remarks that “it was as if I had been painting in oils all my life.” According to Asher’s father, though, “painting is for goyim,” and the fact that great artists depict suffering Christs and nude women is further proof that they come from the sitra achra, the Other Side, the secular world that some Hasidic Jewish communities shun. Asher’s father’s rejection of art is more personal than religious, for he himself is a worldly speaker of many languages, reader of the New York Times, and holder of a graduate degree from NYU; he has been trained, at the behest of the Rebbe, so that he can negotiate with governments for the release of Ladover Jews from the Soviet Union, and he is later dispatched to found Ladover yeshivas throughout Western Europe. (What with its Crown Heights headquarters, international reach, and budding presence on college campuses, Potok’s fictional Ladover sect is clearly modeled on the well-known and still thriving Chabad-Lubavitch movement.) The Rebbe himself, more sensitive to Asher’s needs than the boy’s father, recognizes the seriousness of his vocation, and arranges for the budding genius to study with a famous, secular Jewish artist who “transformed forever the nature of sculpting as Picasso had transformed forever the nature of painting.”

Of course, Asher’s father turns out to be right: a much-feted young painter is bound to stray beyond the boundaries of tznius, or religious modesty. At Asher’s breakthrough gallery shows, he exhibits canvases that scandalize the Ladover community. For most artists—and American Jewish writers, too—the answer would be to reject the religious community and seek out temptations in the wider world, but Asher remains frum, never shearing his sidelocks or throwing away his yarmulke. If he strays into shmaltz (i.e., sentimentality), at least Potok’s is a richly informed and intensely Jewish sentimentality, one with much to recommend it. A moody evocation of the Cold War years in a cloistered American Jewish community, the novel explores the age-old conflict of the artist against tradition—a theme understandably close to the heart of Potok, an ordained Conservative rabbi and one of the most popular American Jewish writers of all time.