Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Slave (#1962Club)

'a slavery that would last as long as he lived'

We first meet Jacob as a literal slave in the Polish hill country near Krakow. His wife and children had been killed in the Cossack Khmelnytsky massacres (1648-1657) in southeastern Poland; Jacob himself had been sold into slavery, technically illegal in Poland at the time, but who was going to say no? He couldn't run away, and didn't know where to run to anyway. He's a learned man, in his late 20s, but now he's a cowherd.

And he falls in love with Wanda, his owner's daughter. She herself is a widow at twenty-five, and she's equally in love with him. But what can they do? He won't convert, and she can't, legally. Jacob's a pious man as well, in his way, and he doesn't know that his wife is dead, though he suspects. After some resistance on his part, they do sleep together, and well, the sex is good. But he feels bad about it.

Then well-to-do Jews recovering in his hometown of Josefov learn of his plight and ransom him. He becomes a teacher, learns his wife actually is dead, and eventually, dreaming that Wanda is about to bear his child, goes to find her and carries her away. Still, where can they live? No Jewish community would accept Wanda; a Christian married to a Jew could bring down new pogroms. 

But Wanda does convert, becomes Sarah, and they are married under Jewish law. They move to a city where they're both unknown. Though Wanda's learned Yiddish, she's speaks with an accent, and she decides to pretend to be a mute so that they don't hear her Yiddish. Their new town assumes she's deaf as well. This, as you can imagine, is a formula for disaster.

The gentiles are terrible, but the Jews little better:

'They wanted to be kind to God and not to man; but what did God need of man and his favors?'

Why do these things happen? 1962 isn't so long after the fall of Nazi Germany. 

'The question that recurred more often than any other was why did the good suffer and the evil prosper?'

And what does a Jew, a good man but not necessarily a saint, do in terrible times? Various possibilities that were in the air occur in the novel: Jacob considers taking up arms, but doesn't; how much should he resist:

'Nowhere is it written that a man must consent to his own destruction.'

He's drawn to Sabbatai Zevi, the purported Jewish Messiah, of the time; he even goes to the Holy Land. Does Sabbataeanism have the answer? The novel covers some of the same ground as Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob. Another book of Jacob.

The novel follows Jacob and Wanda to their deaths. The novel ends by quoting their epitaph:

'Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.'

Anyway, a pretty interesting read, a romance with big themes, though I don't think anybody now would consider this one of Singer's major works. Still, it did get its own Wikipedia article, though the article has several errors in the plot summary. But via that, I did read this article in Forward, in which Dylan says he prefers Singer to Kerouac (well, I would, too) and of this novel, "Now Isaac Singer, he wrote a story called 'The Slave.' It must have stayed in my head months afterward." One Nobel Laureate on another. 😉

I've always liked Singer, and went through a serious Singer phase in the 80s, and I've had this in mind since reading Scholem's Sabbatai Sevi, Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob, and Singer's own Satan in Goray relatively recently. But I read it now since it came out in 1962, and this is the week of Simon and Kaggsy's 1962 Club.

But how about that cover? Isn't it delightfully lurid? Wouldn't you just want to read it for that?

Translated from the Yiddish by the author and Cecil Hemley.