Reading my Flatmate's Books Pt. I: The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer

I read the 1986 Penguin reprint.

Isaac Bashevis Singer writes his novels in Yiddish, and later supervises their translation into English – “Yiddish contains vitamins that other languages don’t have” (blurby bit at the beginning).

This novel left me with the desire to read it again in Yiddish, I imagine that it’s a language that possesses the ability to be brief and simple about a thing and yet poetic at the same time. I also wish I could read in French, German, Maori, Samoan… the list goes on, really.

Reading books in translation is like tasting through pictures, like seeing an image of a piece of bread that you know is long consumed or rotted away. You can see the shadow of the thing, the experience is mediated, different and distant from the original.

The story itself is a pretty straightforward forbidden love narrative – boy meets girl under unlikely circumstances, their forbidden love blooms, the community discovers that boy and girl are living a lie and eventually pull them apart. The book reads like a morality tale, the righteous receiving their reward in heaven if not on earth and the evil summarily punished.

Singer writes in many ways an invective against communities and individuals who strictly follow the laws of Jewish custom but lack compassion for their fellow human being.

It was the historical subject matter that was the most fascinating for me, the treatment of Jewish citizens of Poland during the seventeenth century and the political and social situation in which all people in Poland lived. The main character is separated from his community, his wife and children by a Cossack massacre and is sold into slavery, working for five years in the mountains of Poland for a farmer before being ransomed by the elders of his community.

Singer writes of all sorts of terrible and bizarre things happening to people after the Cossack massacre, and I wondered how much slavery was a predictable fate for prisoners.

Also, Jacob’s travels across Poland and then later to Jerusalem highlighted for me what a huge and bewildering world it must have been at the time. So, I’m thinking that I liked this book, I didn’t love it, but I’m more than likely to keep reading my flatmate’s collection of Singer’s works.