The Same Jacob

THE SLAVE (311 pp.)--Isaac Bashevis Singer--Farrar,Straus&Cudahy($4.95}.

Novelists who persist, in a secular age, in chronicling man's war and peace with God are quite likely to be artists, or at least men whose obsessions speak with the force of art; the hacks are more likely to follow the fashion, which is to whimper at Meaninglessness. The late Nikos Kazantzakis (The Last Temptation of Christ; St. Francis) was such a God-obsessed artist, and so, in a slighter and less intense way, is Isaac Singer, 57, a Pole (now a U.S. citizen) who lives in Manhattan and writes in Yiddish. His subjects are usually lowly Polish Jews, important only to themselves, God and the Devil; the mark of his skill is that he makes them--and makes God and the Devil--important to secular readers.

Tolerance & Temptation. The title figure of The Slave is a 17th century Polish Jew named Jacob. Marauding Cossacks have swept through his village, massacred most of the men, and carried the rest off to be sold as slaves. At the book's outset, Jacob has spent four years as a slave of the Gazdas, a Polish mountaineer people who practice a debased kind of paganism lightly colored by Christianity. Although a Talmudic scholar and a skilled woodcarver. Jacob has learned to tend the Gazdas' cattle, and he is tolerated because he is good at it. But he observes his dietary laws, refuses to fornicate with village sluts, and speaks of God as if God existed. For these eccentricities he is treated with contempt that threatens always to become murderous hatred.

Jacob's sore temptation is Wanda, the daughter of his master. She is intelligent and well formed. But by both Jewish and Christian custom of the times, marriage of Jew and Gentile must be punished at least by ostracism, probably by death. Jacob is ransomed and eventually wanders to Lublin, but finds no comfort among the city's Jews, who seem to have forgotten the Cossack massacres. They have grown fat. "All this flesh was dressed in velvet, silk and sables. They were so heavy they wheezed; their eyes shone greedily. They spoke an only half comprehensible language of innuendoes, winks and whispered asides.'' Sickened by man and unable to love God, Jacob returns secretly to the Gazda village to find Wanda. They make their way to a Jewish squatters' community, where Wanda escapes detection as a Gentile by pretending to be mute, and Jacob, the scholar, shortly becomes a community leader.

Spreading Graves. By this point the reader sees that Novelist Singer, beginning his account amid cow dung and human bestiality, has subtly led his tale away from the kind of reality that is composed of what is probable and what is worldly. As the novel continues, it is legend. Wanda dies in childbirth, and her screams reveal her as a Gentile. Jacob is arrested, but escapes and travels with his infant son to Palestine. In his old age, Jacob returns to the village where Wanda died. He finds that her bones, buried in unconsecrated ground, have been surrounded by spreading graves; the dead have accepted the convert.

The core of the book is a chapter in which Jacob muses on his resemblance to the Biblical Jacob, whose wife, also the daughter of an idolater, died and left him a son. He thinks "perhaps four thousand years would again pass; somewhere, at another river, another Jacob would walk mourning another Rachel. Or who knew, perhaps it was always the same Jacob and the same Rachel."

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