The Slave
The main protagonist of the love story is Jacob who lived in Josefov, a Jewish town in Poland in the 17th century.
Cossacks had murdered his wife and three children and Jacob was captured and sold as a slave to Jan Bzik, a peasant from a remote village in the Carpathian Mountains.
During his four years of slavery, he strives to maintain his Judaism by observing as many Jewish rituals as possible and by maintaining high ethical standards for himself. He has many struggles to retain faith.
As a slave, Jacob falls in love with Bzik's daughter, Wanda.
Jews from Josefov come to ransom him by paying off Wanda's father and he returns to Josefov. Jacob decides to return to Wanda's village, take Wanda as his wife, and help her convert to Judaism.
This novel talks about many kinds of slavery with which we can identify even today.
“He approached her as the groom approaches the bride.”Isaac Bashevis Singer (יצחק באַשעװיס זינגער; November 11, 1903 – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-American writer.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1903 in Leoncin village near Warsaw, capital of Congress Poland in the Russian Empire.
Singer’s father was a rabbi.
The Polish form of his birth name was Icek Hersz Zynger.
In 1935, Singer emigrated from Poland to the United States.
Singer settled in New York City, where he took up work as a journalist and columnist for The Jewish Daily Forward (פֿאָרװערטס), a Yiddish-language newspaper.
He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish.
Singer published at least 18 novels, 14 children's books, several memoirs, essays, and articles.
The first collection of Singer's short stories in English, Gimpel the Fool, was published in 1957. Selections from Singer's "Varshavsky-stories" in the Daily Forward were later published in anthologies such as My Father's Court (1966). Later collections include A Crown of Feathers (1973), with notable masterpieces in between, such as The Spinoza of Market Street (1961) and A Friend of Kafka (1970).
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