"My name is Asher Lev, the Asher Lev, about whom you have read in newspapers and magazines, about whom you talk so much at your dinner affairs and cocktail parties. The notorious and legendary Lev of the Brooklyn crucifixion."

With those words, Chaim Potack begins his novel entitled My Name is Asher Lev. It's about a young boy whose extraordinary talent leads him away from his family and his faith into a painful maturity and a perilous success. Asher Lev longs to be a painter, and he pursues this longing in the face of his father's disapproval. He even paints what he calls the Brooklyn crucifixion -- a painting of the crucifixion of Christ.

An explanation of that, on the very first page of the novel, Asher Lev says, "I am an observant Jew. Yes, of course, observant Jews do not paint cruc…