However the visual arts seem somewhat out of his reach and the creative impulse is articulated by Jacob in the declaratives of the Hemingway era: 'I will teach you how to handle rage in color and line. When Potok is writing of Crown Heights - the enclosed Hasidic structure of circumscribed piety, hierarchical certainties, and the close weave of obligations and dependencies - his work has a moving acuity. But his tormented mother is a weary voyager between the two, and it is Asher's knowledge of her suffering - a clearer vision of his own identity and an understanding of the many masks of atonement - that produce the masterpieces, two Crucifixions, which bring him both fame and exile.

When it becomes obvious Asher cannot assume a preordained role, the Rebbe gives him a cautious blessing and Asher studies painting with Jacob Kahn, an elderly artist, while Asher's father deepens the silence which divides them. But Asher, while haunted by his mythic ancestor calling him to follow his father, is also driven by his own compulsion to draw and paint. He helps to establish schools, consolidate communities in Europe and to rescue Jews from Soviet oppression. Asher's father exists, as did his fathers before him, within the rituals of prayer and sacrifice and does 'good deeds' as the Brooklyn-based emissary of a Landovian Rebbe. This features the agonizing young years of Asher Lev caught between the imperatives of his Hasid family's dynastic destiny and the forbidden visions of the goyische world of art.

Potok my name is asher lev