The Yiddish Hawthorne

...The body was sin in Satan in Goray...

...Its theme is universalism, the discovery by Jacob that even the most debased of the Polish peasants are fellow humans, created in God's image, and the humbling of his stiffnecked Jewish pride...

...This is Singer's joke...

...I cannot imagine anyone since Hawthorne writing such a tale as "The Gentleman from Cracow" in Gimpel the Fool, in which a generous stranger who corrupts and destroys the little town of Frampol is revealed to be Ketev Mriri, Chief of the Devils...

...Eventually Goray becomes "an accursed town," Gedaliya turns apostate like his master Sabbatai Zevi, and the end of the novel is the pious moral of the pamphlet on which it concludes: "Let none attempt to force the Lord...

...Yet through Wanda he discovers universal humanity and feels compassion for the cowherds...

...Magda calls him a "dirty Jew" and says she is leaving...

...Now Singer has published his third and most Hawthomian romance, The Slave (translated by the author and Cecil Hemley, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 311 pp., $4.95...

...In his captivity, Jacob occupied himself with trying to recollect the 248 commandments and 365 prohibitions of the Law and incise them on a rock...

...Singer has been in this country since 1935, on the staff of the Jewish Daily Forward, but America and the 20th century do not exist in his work, except once as a fantastic vision in "The Little Shoemakers" in Gimpel the Fool, when a half-crazed old Jew arrives in New York and takes it to be the pyramids of Egypt...

...he finds Zeftel in bed with a man...

...Yasha, who can "walk a tightrope, skate on a wire, climb walls, open any lock," who can sign his name and shell peas with his toes, is a Jewish Faust, and the book is a parable of the Enlightenment...

...This universalist theme is implied rather than stated, but the other Old Testament revolution, the prophetic emphasis on ethics rather than ritual, is openly preached in The Slave...

...They complete each other, and in a miracle at the end, Jacob and Sarah are buried in a common grave with a common tombstone reading "In their death they were not divided...

...Goray is the world, and his parable is of its vulnerability to sin, the devil in the flesh...

...Three stories in Gimpel the Fool and two in The Spinoza of Market Street are narrated by demons, and the satanic forces are everywhere in the other stories and in the novels...

...the pious scholar Jacob hungers for the fresh air of the fields...

...Like the universalizing tracts of the Old Testament, Jonah and Ruth, The Slave announces a widening of the limited covenant of the Law...

...A description of a cowherds' drunken party as Jacob sees it is truly Swiftian in its bestiality...

...I do not read Yiddish, I am not familiar with much Yiddish literature, and I have not read Singer's first novel, The Family Moskat...

...Singer writes what Hawthorne called "romances" rather than novels, and moral fables and allegories rather than short stories...

...Their son becomes a prodigy and a teacher in Jerusalem...

...Jacob fell into slavery, having been rich and lucky before the pogroms, a scholar supported by his wife's family...

...His inflamed and swollen foot, risen like dough, is the punishment, and the yeast working in it is God's grace...

...You must have some sort of covenant with God since he punished you directly on the spot," Emilia told Yasha when she heard the story of his unsuccessful burglary...

...Singer's style, like that of Hawthorne and Melville, is often rhetorical and flamboyant, but there is not an ounce of fat on his prose...

...I do not know how many reviewers have made that comparison before, since my sins are not great enough to require me to keep up with the reviewers, but the comparison is inevitable...

...Beyond that, Jacob discovers his fellowship with "all living things: Jews, gentiles, animals, even the flies and gnats...

...Like Don Juan, "he lusted after women, yet hated them as a drunkard hates alcohol...

...Yasha lives his whole life "as if walking the tightrope": married to a pious Jewish wife, Esther...

...The Slave is best seen against a background of the other two romances...

...Jacob first sees the peasants as subhuman, eaters of field mice, indulgers in abominations, shameless in debauchery and soulless...

...In one terrible day, all of Yasha's fife goes to pieces...

...The Magician of Lublin, which I think Singer's finest work, is not about the closed shtetl world, but about an infidel Jew, Yasha Mazur, out among the nations in 19th century Poland...

...all are God's chosen...

...Goray is a "town that lay in the midst of the hills at the end of the world," a town that "had always been isolated from the world...

...Singer's latest parable, then, is the transcendence of law by love...

...The second half of The Slave, Jacob living in Pilitz with Dumb Sarah, is less effective than the first, Jacob in slavery, which is as great as anything Singer ever wrote...

...He discovers "his religion: its essence was the relation between man and his fellows...

...The highest value is human attachment rather than asceticism, ethics rather than observance...

...After he is ransomed, Law and commentary come to seem hair-splitting and sterile, and Jacob sees the Jews around him as devoutly obeying every ritual injunction but mistreating their fellow men...

...Satan in Goray is an account of the Sabbatai Zevi messianic hallucination as it overwhelms the little shtetl of Goray in the 17th century...

...Except for a lady who lives in my house, Singer seems to be the only writer in America who believes in the real existence of Satan...

...He is a performer: a magician, hypnotist and acrobat...

...Singer's subject is shtetl (Jewish village) life in Poland, sometimes in the 17th and sometimes in the late 19th century, and he brings it into being so powerfully that reading his books one soon comes to believe that our world is a fantastic vision...

...Or perhaps he doesn't...

...As a result, he becomes Reb Jacob the Penitent, an anchorite saint who bricks himself up in a cell, where he fasts, prays and gives audiences through the window...

...Singer's most characteristic style is one of sophisticated ironic juxtaposition, as in a sentence from Satan in Goray: "To divert the bride and raise her spirits, the women enthusiastically praised her beauty, stroked her hair, and quickened her with spoonfuls of moldy citrus preserve...

...The books that I know— Satan in Goray, Gimpel the Fool and Other Stones, The Magician of Lublin, The Spinoza of Market Street, and The Slave—seem to me incredible in mid-20th century America...

...The consequent excesses range from simple adultery to sodomy with goats, and one diabolist even goes so far as to shave off his beard and earlocks with a razor...

...Eventually Jacob eats no flesh, "neither meat nor fish nor anything else from a living creature, not even cheese or eggs...

...The idea of feeding on God's creatures now repelled him," and he decides that "Jews treated animals as Cossacks treated Jews...

...The rise at the end is comparable...

...finally he returns home to discover that Magda has strangled his trained animals and hanged herself...

...In a few of the stories, particularly the finest of them all, "The Black Wedding" in The Spinoza of Market Street, the Evil One is obviously a metaphor for repressed sexuality, and Singer uses his mythology as a psychopathology with the insight of Euripides...

...From the time of the Cossack pogroms in 1648 until 1666, Goray had been without a shochet (ritual slaughterer), and thus no Jew in it had tasted meat for 18 years...

...The peasant Wanda lusts for sacred learning...

...It is a work of power and brilliance, creating its almostentirely-Jewish world with easy mastery, from the coarse jokes of the women's bathhouse to the mad messianic rhetoric of the missionary who comes to spread darkness in Goray...

...At other times Satan and his forces seem as tangible as Moshe the Chimney Sweep...

...Jacob is Yasha reborn, but where Yasha suffered like Job, to glorify God, Jacob suffers like Moses, to prepare him to free those held in bondage...

...His characters sometimes bandy proverbs wittily, like West Africans, and like them he is sometimes folksy and proverbial...

...Writing old-fashioned romances in an obsolescent tongue, Singer redeems the time...

...It is the story of Jacob, a pious scholar of Josefov in the 17th century, sold as a slave to a Polish peasant, and of his love for the peasant's daughter Wanda, who passes as a mute to live with him as a Jewish wife, "Dumb Sarah...

...Emilia tells him "You stem from offal and you are offal" and turns him away...

...He tries an easy robbery and fails at it, damaging his foot so that he cannot perform...

...When Reb Gedaliya settles down to be the new shochet, the Goray Jews feast on meat, and soon other pleasures of the flesh follow...

...He becomes un-Jewishly fond of the cows he tends for the peasant and of his dog...

...Jacob becomes a saint from whom venomous serpents turn away, and he is believed to be one of the Thirty-Six Righteous who sustain the world...

...Yasha has tasted the bitterness of the world and "seen the hand of God...

...having simultaneous affairs with Zeftel, the Jewish wife of a thief, and Magda, the Polish girl who assists in his act, both of whom are in love with him...

...meanwhile himself in love with Emilia, a highborn Polish lady...

...The miraculous end is hard to take, and some of the characters are unconvincing...

...Conversion now is into the world, into the embrace of the nations...

...then he fell into sin with Wanda, convinced that "I am forfeiting the world to come...

...As it denies Satan in Goray, The Slave reverses The Magician of Lublin...

...in The Slave it comes close to being salvation...

...Culture and nature are both necessary...

...Yasha's covenant is the covenant of the Law, and when he is knocked off his tightrope he flees to its security and reinforces it with bricks...

...Gedaliya preaches a religion of serving God through joy, and argues that since it is the end of days all the the prohibitions of the Law have been repealed...

...Nevertheless, The Slave towers over everything else being written today...

...Now we have The Slave, the most ambitious of Singer's romances so far...