The Slave, by Isaac Bashevis singer

a timeless parable

Abstract

Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jewish writer born in Poland in 1904, lived a large part of his life in the USA, where he published all his works originally in Yiddish, the lingua franca of Eastern European Jews, and where he died in 1991. Despite having dedicated himself to Jewish themes, the importance of his works transcends the Jewish reading public. The universal value of his work was recognized by the Swedish Academy, which awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. It can be said that Singer, through the particular, achieved the universal. In The Slave Singer uses as a backdrop the historical event known as the “Chmelnitsky rebellion” (1648 to 1654), when the Jewish people were victims of one of the worst massacres in their entire history up to that time. This massacre was comparable to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in the year 586 BCE and the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Chmelnitsky’s massacre was only surpassed in the 20^th century by the tragedy of the Shoah. In this article, we aim, through the analysis of the literary narrative of the actions and reactions of the characters following the massacre, to show how the normalization of their relationships with their neighbors may be viewed as a paradigm for dealing with this kind of social catastrophe, something tragically recurrent in the history of humanity.