The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer

In fact, Yasha Mazur, the title character, is a magician in the sense that Harry Houdini was a magician: he is an acrobat, a contortionist, and an escape artist, who performs at theaters around Poland while he dreams of making it big in Western Europe. Take the title, which sounds like it could be a Hasidic folk-tale about a wonder-working rabbi. But its re-publication is still very welcome, because the novel is one of the clearest examples of the ways this modern urban intellectual writer makes use of the materials of the Jewish past. The Magician of Lublin may not exactly be “a lost classic,” as the cover of the new paperback claims-it went through several editions in the 1960s and 1970s, and was even made into a movie in 1979, starring Alan Arkin. The Nobel Committee’s official biography of Singer, who won the literature prize in 1978, sums up this view perfectly: he wrote about “the world and life of East European Jewry, such as it was lived in cities and villages, in poverty and persecution, and imbued with sincere piety and rites combined with blind faith and superstition.” One commenter recommending Singer’s stories in a web forum puts the basic idea more naively: “If I could have chosen a grandfather, I would have chosen this man for the stories alone.” That the world he wrote about, and the Yiddish language in which he wrote, were practically extinguished in the decade after he came to the United States in 1935, only increases the sense that he was a messenger from another world. A large part of Singer’s popularity is certainly owed to the way he lends himself to being read as a folklorist, writing about dybbuks and holy fools in an age-old Jewish landscape. The reputation of Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose novel The Magician of Lublin has just been reissued on its fiftieth anniversary, is one a major example of this kind of confusion.

A few weeks ago, writing about Antony Polonsky’s history of Eastern European Jewry in the late nineteenth century, I remarked on the way that American Jewish nostalgia and guilt towards the vanished “old world” makes it difficult for us to see that world as it really was.

The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer