The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer

It is, of course, highly ironic that the man who has excelled at escaping should That he had already experienced as a sensualist, he had himself immured in a house without doors and with only one small window opening on the wide world. He is even ready, like Heine, to accept baptism as the entrance ticket to Western civilization.īy a series of misadventures, however, which includes an abortive attempt at crime and the suicide of the girl he has been working with in his act, he is brought back to the faith of his fathers. Is an escape- artist with the talents of a Houdini, caught in a cultural backwater and dreaming of conquering the big capitals of western Europe.

The hero himself, Yasha Mazur ''the magician of Lublin,'' Thief'' and ''The God of Vengeance.'' Stunt performers, thieves, merry widows, a pimp-these are the figures in the foreground. The surface texture of ''The Magician'' (which I find its most fascinating and admirable accomplishment) is concerned with that picaresque underworld in nineteenth-century Poland which has served Sholem Asch in ''Mottke the ''Satan in Goray,'' an earlier novelette of his, seemed at times perilously close to coming to pieces in a series of separate tales. He is gifted with the hypnotic power of the born storyteller his forte is In ''Gimpel,'' the passing image of a cow flying over the rooftops could have originated equally in a picture by Chagall or in a fairy tale. His imagination is as romantic as Marc Chagall's and he is as intrigued as the painter is by the possibility of the suspension of the laws of space, time and gravitation. Singer's mastery is in the depiction of the grotesque side of humanity.

Hard and bright in the best modern manner, and, fortunately, a good deal of his original power survives in English. His prose, at least in the Yiddish original, is stripped,

All of Singer's work is characterized by a surprising nimbleness of wit. The Fool'' in particular has won the admiration of a sizable circle of discriminating readers. Saac Bashevis Singer's earlier works in translation from the Yiddish have made him an enviable reputation in this country. Yasha Escaped Into a Prison By MILTON HINDUS

The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer