The Slave as a Modern Critique

Bohdan Khmelnytsky (left) with Tuhai Bey (right) at Lviv, by Jan Matejko (1885)

Even after hearing the constant praises of Isaac Bashevis Singer sung, The Slave surpassed my expectations. An extremely moving period narrative centering around timeless themes, all integrated together without relying upon the overplayed tropes that often emerge from the archetypes of forbidden love and the fugitive/outcast. Singer had a real mastery over the creative powers of logos.

Through Singer's words, I became enmeshed in the worldview of a seventeenth century Yiddish Jew in Poland. So often narratives attempting to evoke a certain time and place fall victim to the lens of the present, but Singer seems to have ably avoided doing so while nevertheless keeping the story relevant to the modern reader. In fact, his choice of using Poland under the siege of Muscovites, Swedes, and Cossacks as a setting, with the Chmielnicki massacres being a major contextual pivot point, seems particularly deliberate in allowing the formation of parallels to modern day society. The history of European Jews is fraught with massacres, purges, burnings, pillaging, extortion, and so on. Yet, the catastrophic slaughter of Jews at the hands of the Cossacks remains one of the darker spots in an already bloody tapestry. Just as the gentiles and Jews do not live up to Jacob's ideals, neither do the Jews or gentiles of today live up to Singer's ideals. The hypocrisy of the Jews in Josefov and Pilitz, in spite of the "catastrophe," seems a very poignant critique of modern behavior and corruption, even with the horrors of the Holocaust still within living memory.