Probing a Vanished Past

...In the end...

...and Liba...

...It is governed by a fine appreciation that, as Katherine Whitehorne once observed, sex is damned dangerous...

...Tevye and even Job...

...Perhaps feeling no particular debts of piety in their direction, he is delightfully uninhibited in pointing up their vulgarity and meanness, as well as persuasive and compassionate in detailing their individual styles of suffering...

...In Singer's best works (The Magician of Lublin, The Slave) or in many of his short stories, there is always this extraordinary tension between a man's mystical aspirations and the overwhelming call of his animal nature...

...The setting is 19th-century...

...We follow his swift and virtually unopposed translation into a man of substance and power, finding it too easy to agree with his mild, rueful and unstartling recognition that he was happier when less ambitious and less successful...

...reviewers have likened Caiman Jacoby to Lear...

...Thus the backbone of the novel becomes Caiman's relation to his daughters, and the story's success rests on the credibility and depth of Caiman Jacoby as a character...

...Principally, instead of portraying man as a social animal, drowning in essentially private relationships and hang-ups...

...Curiously for a Yiddish writer...

...The subsidiary Jewish characters, on the other hand, are rather slackly sketched, and treated with none of that ironic distance which was almost standard equipment with the greatest Yiddish novelists...

...would have been as automatic to them as breathing...

...Time, in the world he has carved out, remains a homely, consecutive experience, conveying more of the past than the most kaleidoscopic arrangement of fragmentary memory, hallucination, accident and wishful thinking...

...of writing for anyone but his small Yiddish-reading audience, and he does not seem demoralized by the knowledge that the actual words praised by the major critics are his only through the courtesy of his translators, in whom he has been singularly fortunate...

...Dr...

...but ever since the sainted Juan de Capistrano effectively put an end to the unnatural and impious manner in which some Polish kings were tolerating their Jewish subjects...

...The story regains its verve, however, when it deals with the Jampol-skis...

...Singer has neglected to develop a better, more original way of maintaining the narrative tension essential in the long traditional novel about the lives and deaths of a host of characters...

...Yet the novel's central character...

...the decent, bewildered upstart Jewish capitalist, displaces Jampolski as the power (solely economic and incredibly diffident) in the city of Jampol...

...Caiman Jacoby...

...The Windows of Heaven" Isaac Bash i: vis Singer seems to have achieved his current critical acclaim (and hestscllerdom) absent-mindedly, which is particularly pleasing to one who mourns the inevitable extinction of Yiddish literature in anything but translation...

...Singer in this instance seems more at ease with his gentile characters, with the Count, his pitiable daughter Felicia, his son Lucian (the revolutionary as a slob), and his belated son-in-law...

...Although the reader cares for him from the very beginning, there are long stretches in the middle where one's patience with Caiman's intelligent self-awareness and numb docility dissipates...

...Unfortunately, The Manor—written 15 years ago and readied for English-language publication by two translators and three editors—is far from the best example of Singer's remarkable gifts...

...Still, it may be precisely what Caiman Jacoby lacks, for despite all the momentous things he achieves and endures, he remains a shadowy figure...

...His characters are people he fully expects you to care about...

...Jampolski occupies himself mostly with tormenting the sickly women of his own household...

...Caiman's style, his worldly success and personal mildness are far too untypical of the Polish Jew's abrasive and...

...He shows remarkably lew signs, even now...

...But Caiman Jacoby is both too simple and too straightforward a character to lean perceptibly to either extreme...

...These are parallels best left undrawn, I think...

...Zawacki...

...When Clara turns out to be akin to those medieval female demons Singer has conjured up so brilliantly in the past...

...It is as though Singer realized that, by idealizing Caiman, he had deprived him of the ruthlessness and cunning he would have needed to stand up to Jampolski in a naked struggle for power...

...Singer's subject matter continues to be exotic, even bizarre, but never lapses into quaint-ness...

...Brutalized to the point where his own family cannot stand him, the Count, curiously, is not too disturbed to tind that most of his possessions are being leased and profitably worked by a Jew...

...Although he leaves us in no doubt as to why Poland's Jews, for more than live centuries, neither wanted to nor could have integrated with their peasant neighbors (except in an uneasy day-to-day coexistence), he displays every bit as much understanding and warmth toward the Jampolskis as toward Caiman's equally doomed family...

...But while the shlemiehl-heroes of many first-rate Jewish-American novels leave you with a suspicion that all their problems would vanish if ever they could latch on to a good analyst or a good lay, you know that if a Singer hero ever found himself with nothing worse to worry about than a soured marriage or a crazy parent, he would be so far ahead of the game there would be no novel worth writing...

...Though Singer shows remarkable self-confidence in declining to exploit the obvious melodrama of this situation, he at the same time denies himself whatever symbolic force the manor might have wielded as a metaphor of Poland's old order falling belatedly into step with revolutionary and industrial modern Europe...

...The hero of a Singer novel comes ready-equipped not only with several millennia of his own history, and all its voracious emotional and ritual demands, but also with the scars left by more than a thousand years of the crimes and follies of Christian Europe...

...his feckless son...

...Singer has lived in America long enough to leave one intrigued at the ways he differs from other Jewish-American novelists who have retained their imaginative access to the immigrant experience...

...Count Jampolski...

...Even when he contracts his disastrous second marriage to Clara, the sensual and shrewd young widowed daughter of his business competitor, it is not so much that he is betrayed by unseemly stirrings below the naval as that he allows her, with his eyes wide open, to maneuver him into it...

...To me, the "tragic Haw" as a prerequisite of tragedy has always seemed of very limited relevance to our own time...

...Caiman is also vastly more understanding, or at least more passive, toward his daughters' various styles of rebellion than one might feel entitled to expect...

...the Jew's daughter...

...The manor of the title belongs to Count Jampolski, a patriotic Polish nobleman who returns from exile in Siberia...

...When Caiman begins to realize he is utterly out of his depth in the role of small-town Polish tycoon, and disaster is poised to fall upon him from all directions, the author mildly comments: "The more-Caiman thought about it, the more he came to believe that he was the captive and not the master of his fortune...

...Nevertheless, nearly all the daughters disappoint him, and end up miserably disappointed themselves...

...Having creditably turned his back on the obvious dramatic story-line...

...his relation with Jacoby is through the unhappy marriage between Lucian...

...This proves not to be quite enough...

...The victims of the many hellish marriages Singer describes in this book with delicious gusto and variety, though, apparently feel that their new state is at least a small improvement over the drab hell of being single...

...if you like, arrogant strug-ble to stay alive—not only today, or in 1943...

...The Manor is full of marvellous characters and scenes...

...It almost seems that, in the world of Singer's fiction, a happy marriage is a phenomenon of such rarity, it would be sheer sinful folly to dream of it...

...he-has kept the old Central European sense of man as the pitifully minor participant in a process governed by irresistible historic, religious, economic and political forces—against which he'll be doing well just to keep his head above water...

...Singer achieves a superb economy and tension in sketching the nightmare of Caiman's second wedding, a sequence rising, in the bridal chamber, to a powerful image: "He closed his eyes...

...Caiman shows neither surprise nor any particular resentment...

...Nor does he really use the fate of the manor to illustrate the irreparable violence these revolutionary currents also did to the equally unadaptable rhythms of traditional Jewish life, with its economic de-pendance upon far too small and vulnerable a range of industries and crafts...

...At times Singer appears downright bored with these characters, filling their scenes with idle conversation, summarizing events that should have been dramatized, and having them tell each other in exhaustive detail about ritual observances that, from an early age...

...One would have expected him to put up a ferocious battle for his manor and lands...

...Some sympathetic, but possibly overeager...

...His approach does not so much constitute pious or philosophic resignation as it reveals existence on a fictional plane where options simply do not exist...

...Lust for Clara had faded away, and only fear remained...

...And elsewhere, "Fate-might be playing a trick on him...

...He has no contributory Haw that would make him acceptable as an embodiment of Poland's vanished Jewish community, or at least as something more than the shuttlecock of historic, social or sexual forces beyond his amiable and limited comprehension...

...If only Caiman Jacoby were a less passive character (and had a firmer editorial line been taken with some of the underdeveloped subplots), this rather than Singer's more dazzling but also more idiosyncratic works might have proved to be a modest monument to that Central European world now totally obliterated...

...Russian-ruled Poland—a place that Alfred Jarry, in libit Roi, wittily (and with technical accuracy) described as "no place at all...

...a man of spasmodic animal vitality, is obviously capable of great action and great mischief...

...nearly always in the traditional context of love, marriage, rape or domestic possession, is neither puritan nor permissive...

...It is not that on Singer's stage Man is absurd, commitment futile, the Universe mindlessly malevolent, and God would rather not get involved...

...raising him up, as the saving went, before knocking him down...

...Considering what tyrants lathers, including Jewish lathers, were apt to be in that milieu...

...As a matter of fact, what makes Singer unique among bestselling authors, and even more among Yiddish writers, is that his attitude toward sex...