It is Avrumel who will be "the gift of Asher Lev."Īnother strand of the plot concerns Asher's wife, Devorah, who is plagued by bitter memories of her parents' deaths in the Holocaust and of her own early childhood, spent in hiding with her cousin Max and his parents. Slowly, Asher realizes that the Rebbe and Aryeh both hope that Asher's five-year-old son, Avrumel, will become the ultimate successor to the Rebbeship. What will happen to the Ladover community if the Rebbe dies before the Messiah comes? The logical candidate for next Rebbe would be Asher's father, Aryeh Lev, who has been one of the Rebbe's chief lieutenants for decades, but Asher realizes that the Rebbe is reluctant to pass the mantle of authority to Aryeh unless Aryeh has a successor-who cannot be Aryeh's only child, the iconoclast painter. Meanwhile, Asher's parents and the rest of the Ladover community worry because the aging Ladover Rebbe has no children and has appointed no successor. But one of his cousins bitterly resents the art collection and hampers Asher's efforts to use it for charity in his uncle's name. Asher is dazzled and makes some tentative efforts to reconcile the Ladover Hasidic community to modern art-for example, by sketching a portrait of his uncle for his grieving father and by teaching a lesson in art appreciation at the school where his daughter has temporarily enrolled. Soon after the funeral, he learns that his uncle had secretly been collecting art for many years and has amassed a valuable collection, of which Asher is to be the trustee.
When his beloved Uncle Yitzchok dies, Asher is abruptly summoned back to Brooklyn. The brilliant, schismatic Hasidic painter Asher Lev is now a middle-aged man, residing with his wife and children in the south of France. It is a sequel to Potok's novel My Name Is Asher Lev (1972).
The Gift of Asher Lev is a novel by Chaim Potok, published in 1990.
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