Volume 14, Number 9 · May 7, 1970
Ghosts
By V.S. Pritchett
The Estate
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 416 pp., $6.95
The Magician of Lublin
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 246 pp., $1.65 (paper)
The Slave
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 311 pp., $1.95 (paper)
A Beggar in Jerusalem
by Elie Wiesel
Random House, 224 pp., $5.95
The distinctive quality in the fiction by Eastern European Yiddish writers—to judge from translations—is nimbleness in the mixing of realism and fable. Style we have to take on trust. These writers are close to an oral folk tradition that has vanished from Western literature, and to a segregated underworld where history and the lives of people become myth. In this sense the ghetto has been a book, in which myth is fortified by religion (especially by its status as The Law) that has kept the people together in their tragedies and their comedies. Religion itself is a tale, and is rich in everyday conundrums, for the ways of God are tricky. In one of Isaac Singer's Yiddish tales, a rabbi discovers that his pupil is cynically plagiarizing his writings. Shall he accuse or not accuse? The question is inexhaustible:
Review, 2931 words
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