Slave. Shosha

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) was one of the most prominent Yiddish writers, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature. In his work he addressed various epochs in the life of Eastern European Jewry, but a certain range of thematic interests remains unchanged, because it is due to the experience of the twentieth century: in particular, the obsession with ideologies and demons; the justification of God, who allows what cannot be justified; ethical coexistence with others, including animals, and the choice not to cause harm.

This publication introduces the reader to novels that give an idea of the breadth of the genre repertoire of Singer's work. The Slave (1962) is a historical novel depicting the ordeal of the Jew Jacob, who finds himself enslaved by peasants in the Carpathians after the pogroms during the war of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, in which his family died. Shosha (1978) is partly an autobiographical work about a writer in Warsaw in the interwar period at the crossroads between the traditional culture of his closed community and international modernism.