A review by littlemiao
The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer

challenging dark sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character

5.0

This is the first novel-length story I have read by Isaac Bashevis Singer. It takes place in the aftermath of the Khmelnytsky pogroms in the 1600s. The protagonist, Jacob, taken as a slave by a Christian to do menial labor in a small mountain village in the wilderness of Eastern Europe, tries desperately to live the life of an observant Jew, while he falls in love with a Polish widow, Wanda. He is faced with a dilemma, how to pursue his love for Wanda across the unbridgeable divide of Jew and Christian? For at that time, it was illegal for Christian women to convert to Judaism, and Jewish communities would not accept converts for fear of reprisals. It goes without saying that the writing is beautiful. It evokes a time always teetering on the brink of the next pogrom, filled with “powers, some good, some evil, some cruel, some merciful, but each with its own nature and its own task to perform.” Sadistic humans, hypocritical humans, and the unseen threats of evil spirits lurk constantly in the backdrop. Jacob has no respite from suffering, both from the murderous actions of the Christians and the obligations and expectations of his fellow Jews. The story is heavy with sorrow, unfulfilled longing, and haunting imagery.
 
Some images that stayed with me: After years of cut off from Jewish community, Jacob decides to stave off his fading memories of the Torah by scratching all the commandments onto a rock behind his hut. “He mined within himself as men dig for treasure in the earth. It was slow work; he scratched sentences, fragments of sentences, single words into the stone. The Torah had not disappeared. It lay hidden in the nooks and crannies of his brain.”
 
Jacob’s difficulties continue when he is finally ransomed back. He grapples with the question of theodicy, why evil things happen to innocents; his answers which once seemed adequate now seem “almost blasphemous:” “free will could not exist without evil nor mercy without sorrow.” He is unable to stay in his hometown, which years after the pogrom is still being rebuilt. “Jacob felt a stab in his heart every time he saw the past visibly resurrected. No doubt the living must go on living, but this very affirmation betrayed the dead. A song he had heard a wedding jester sing came to his mind: ‘What is life but a dance across graves?’” How does one live in the aftermath of such destruction and personal loss? A question Jewish readers will be aware is still painfully relevant.
 
“…Yet Jacob found no sadness anywhere but within himself. The summer night throbbed with joy; from all sides came music. Warm winds bore the smells of grain, fruit, and pine trees to him. Itself a cabalistic book, the night was crowded with sacred names and symbols—mystery upon mystery. In the distance where sky and earth merged, lightning flashed, but no thunder followed. The stars looked like letters of the alphabet, vowel points, notes of music. Sparks flickered above the bare furrows. The world was a parchment scrawled with words and song…”
 
True to the Jewish tradition, this is a book of questions, not of answers. It is bitter with sorrow, but the hints of sweetness that come through are all the more powerful for that. 
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