Book Boulevard

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Isaac Bashevis Singer - THE SLAVE

Posted by Dmitry on December 31, 2004 at 18:38:13:
What a book! Unbelievable.
I haven't read Singer since college and forgot his juicy, sometimes wildly humorous, sometimes terrifying way of writing.
..A Jew named Jacob is taken captive by the Bogdan Chmielnicki-led Cossacks in the great massacre of the Jews in Poland and Ukraine in the 1640s when 300,000 Jews were killed in most horrible ways. His two young children and wife are murdered by the Cossacks, he himself is sold as a slave to a Polish farmer. Slowly, he falls in love with his master's widowed daughter Wanda. After years of captivity, he is bought out by the fellow surviving Jews of his shtetl...
The language of the book has many Jewish overtones, turns, stops, and u-turns; no wonder Singer wrote all his books in Yiddish.
His prose is reminiscent of Babel, but none of Babel's novellas reach the depth of Singer's novel, and Sholom-Aleihem, to which he was an equal in many ways.