Jewish artists have long felt a conflict between Jewish tradition and the individual talent. Susskind von Trimberg, the medieval Jewish troubadour, thought of going back to the ghetto if his gentile patron went bankrupt. Heinrich Heine, a heretic if ever there was one, wished to die facing Jerusalem. Marc Chagall, best known of Jewish painters, borrowed much of his imagery from Christian peasants.

Chaim Potok has concentrated in his novels on the pull between secular self-fulfillment and communal Jewish values. In The Chosen, for example, a teenager destined to replace his father as the head of a Hasidic dynasty finds himself impelled to study psychology instead of Torah. In My Name Is Asher Lev, and now in The Gift of Asher Lev, Mr. Potok has sought to make the conflict more dramatic. His main character is a painter, that is, one who speaks through the graven images that the very Orthodox consider prohibited by the Second Commandment.

In the earlier work, a child in a Hasidic household is overpowered by the desire to paint. Some indulge him, but his father, a narrow man devoted to the welfare of the Ladover, a group closely resembling the Lubavitcher, attempts to staunch the boy's genius. The Rebbe, as the community's spiritual leader, wisely recognizes Asher's calling and rescues him. When Asher begins to exhibit nudes and crucifixions, however, the Rebbe exiles him to Paris for the good of the Brooklyn community. Art for most of these Hasidic Jews is "foolishness" or worse—a gift from the other Side. Moreover, it is just after World War II: Hasidism is endangered in Russia, and the Holocaust's shadow is everywhere. The most pressing issue is collective survival.

In the sequel, taking place in the 1980's, conditions are more relaxed. The Rebbe employs television for reaching larger audiences, his followers prosper internationally. In the meantime, Asher Lev has become famous, but his passion for painting has worn thin. He's living with his family on the Côte d'Azur, and he's run out of inspiration. As the novel opens, he is recalled to Brooklyn for his beloved uncle's funeral. From the outset, the questions are: How can the artist and the community be reconciled, and what can each give the other?

Unfortunately, The Gift of Asher Lev offers simplistic answers. Asher, feeling trapped, wants to escape immediately after the week of mourning. But his wife, Devorah, and their children prefer Ladover heimischkeit—warmth and bustle-to artistic isolation in the south of France. The Rebbe intercedes, and the condolence call lengthens. What's more, wealthy Uncle Yitzchok, a secret art lover, has willed his nephew a world-class art collection. Asher remains in Brooklyn to claim it.

Asher is revitalized by his renewed contact with his people. To regain his artistic freedom, however, he must leave his family, including his little boy, with the Ladover as a sacrificial gift demanded by the Rebbe. Asher's father, successor to the aged leader, wants little Avrumel to succeed him in turn as Rebbe. Asher's father will teach the child pious Ladover ways. The child will teach the philistine grandfather, and thus the community, something about art. How neatly it all works out.

For Mr. Potok is conducting a guided tour of reality—something that perhaps accounts for his widespread popularity. The Hasidim are colorful in their long coats and kerchiefs. Anyone who has read Arthur Frommer's travel books can recognize St-Paul-de-Vence, the Rue des Rosiers, the allusions to Cézanne, Picasso. The predictable prevails in the obvious motif of Abraham and Isaac, and in the prose: a presentiment is "precise, stark, lucid"; the synagogue air is "stale, warm, faintly malodorous." Despite the synagogue air, the characters have been sanitized. Most are Good. A few merely lack understanding, though Cousin Yonkel is the devil incarnate. No Alexander Portnoys here! Asher Lev is relentlessly solemn, Devorah, a survivor, relentlessly benign. Asher has depicted his mother somehow crucified on a Venetian blind, she suffers from angst. His brave little daughter suffers from asthma.

No one suffers from serious doubt, and this allows the reader a complacent superiority to the novel's poor benighted folk. Unlike the protagonist of Chaim Grade's masterpiece, "The Yeshiva," Asher never considers abandoning orthodoxy. He wonders why there's no brucha, or blessing, for pagan beauty, but not whether to adhere to a sect that perceives beauty as pagan. He complains about the Jewish edict that forbids him to pray at Chagall's grave in a Christian cemetery, but does not consider defying it. While Asher decides to vote his own choice in a Presidential election, rather than obeying the Rebbe, and has cut off his earlocks, too, his only real deviance is his painting. Even this is perceived not as a choice but an affliction. Mr. Potok does not wrestle with the angel of autonomy. Though the novel begins with a trip back home, for all the distance Asher Lev has come, he might as well have stayed on Brooklyn's Eastern Parkway.