Yet one feels that, unlike many of the Yiddish writers who treat more familiar and up-to-date subjects, Singer commands a distinctively “modern” sensibility. Offhand this may be surprising, for Singer’s subjects are decidedly remote: in Satan in Goray, the orgiastic consequences of the false messianism of 17th-century East European Jews in his book of stories Gimpel the Fool, a range of demonic, apocalyptic, and perversely sacred moments of shtetl life and now in his new novel The Magician of Lublin, a portrait of a Jewish acrobat-magician-Don Juan in late 19th-century Poland who exhausts himself in sensuality and ends his life as a penitent ascetic. Though his brilliant stories and novels are crowded with grotesque happenings, though they often seem to comprise an alien sub-world of imps, devils, whores, spirits in seizure, charlatans, and false messiahs, the contemporary reader-for whom the determination not to be shocked has become a point of honor-is likely to feel closer to Singer than to any, or most, of the other Yiddish writers. Isaac Bashevis Singer is the only living Yiddish writer whose translated work has caught the imagination of the American literary public. Demonic Fiction of a Yiddish “Modernist” 1
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