- Person
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Lived
- 1903–1991
- Field
- Yiddish literature
- From
- Polish-American
The story
In the early 1930s Isaac Bashevis Singer was a young Yiddish writer in Warsaw, working in the shadow of his famous older brother, the novelist Israel Joshua Singer. In 1932 he became co-editor of Globus, a Yiddish literary magazine he had founded with his lifelong friend, the poet Aaron Zeitlin. Between January and September 1933 Globus serialised his first novel, Satan in Goray, which was published as a book in 1935, the year he left for America.
The novel is set in the years after 1648, when the Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Chmielnicki brought massacres of Jews that are remembered as one of the greatest Jewish catastrophes. In the Polish village of Goray, whose name echoes the real town of Goraj, the survivors are desperate for redemption, and news of the distant false messiah Shabbatai Zvi splits the community into traditionalists and believers. When word comes that Shabbatai Zvi has converted to Islam, some take it as a sign that redemption comes through embracing evil. The strange rites end with a young woman possessed by a dybbuk, which is finally driven out. The last chapter imitates the style of a seventeenth-century Yiddish chronicle.
Wikipedia notes that, with its stark picture of innocence crushed by circumstance, the novel seems to foreshadow the danger to come. The Swedish Academy, presenting Singer's Nobel Prize, observed that it appeared just as the Nazi catastrophe was threatening, and that its theme of the false messiah and the mass hysteria around him was one Singer returned to again and again. The scholar Ken Frieden sees in it the beginning of Singer's fascination with demons.
Satan in Goray reached Hebrew readers in 1953 and English readers in 1955, in a translation by Jacob Sloan made with Singer's help. The novelist Meyer Levin praised it as folk material transformed into literature.
Singer later returned to the aftermath of 1648 in The Slave (1962), a love story between a Jewish man and a gentile woman that won the Jewish Book Council award in 1963. NobelPrize.org notes that his works often draw on Jewish folklore and legend and describe Polish Jews across several generations before the Holocaust.
Why it matters
Satan in Goray brought a dramatic chapter of Jewish history to life and began one of the great careers in Yiddish literature.
About Isaac Bashevis Singer
Yiddish storyteller of Gimpel the Fool, The Magician of Lublin and Enemies, A Love Story, who kept a vanished Polish-Jewish world alive and won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature.
More about Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote 14 books for childrenIsaac Bashevis Singer wrote 14 children's books, including the acclaimed Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, some illustrated by Maurice Sendak.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer championed compassion for animalsIsaac Bashevis Singer was a prominent vegetarian for the last 35 years of his life, arguing that justice must extend to animals.
- Singer used his Nobel lecture to honour YiddishIn his 1978 Nobel lecture, Isaac Bashevis Singer paid tribute to Yiddish as a language of exile that had no words for weapons and still held treasures for the world.
Sources
- Isaac Bashevis Singer Wikipedia
- Isaac Bashevis Singer – Facts NobelPrize.org
- Satan in Goray Wikipedia
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