The many lights in Chaim Potok's "Book of Lights" shine with allegorical splendor.

In his descriptions of tenement fires in a decaying Brooklyn neighborhood, the flash of the first atomic bombs at Alamogordo and Hiroshima, and the "light that is God" of mystical Jewish texts, Potok writes of luminous truths and darkly threatening evils….

Like his previously acclaimed novels, "The Book of Lights" is the story of an American Jew's search for identity and faith in the 1950s….

A story that draws much of its meaning from ancient Hebrew writings could be perplexing, if not boring, for the non-Jewish reader. But Potok cares too much for the ideas he's setting forth to lose them in abstract reasoning. We're caught up with Loran's questions because they're the questions we all have to answer. His quest isn't exclusively Jewish—it's a quest for the things of the spirit.

In a...