["The Slave"] is a tempestuous love-story set against a background that has engaged the imagination of [its] Yiddish author deeply—the aftermath of the Chielnicki Massacres in Poland in 1649. As in his previous novel "Satan in Goray," he seems interested in extracting myth, legend and parable from a mass of actual facts—in composing a story stripped down to almost Biblical simplicity while trying not to violate the contemporary reader's expectations of fiction too radically.

The hero, Jacob, though he is only 29 when the story opens, is positively patriarchal in his dignity and moral character. The heroine is a Polish peasant girl, Wanda, the daughter of Jacob's master. After her clandestine conversion to Judaism, Wanda assumes the matriarchal name of Sarah and becomes Jacob's second wife. (His first wife and children had perished in the Cossack invasion which had resulted in his enslavement.) Since such a conversion is equally against the Christian and Jewish laws of the period, much of the novel is connected with the complications resulting from it….

Singer's vision has always been of a world, perhaps like that in Ecclesiastes, in which there is nothing new under the sun. In "The Slave," even more than in his earlier books, it is an eternal landscape that he draws and archetypal figures that move across it….

The author is fascinated by the unchanging quality of Jewish experience in particular. The warnings of the Prophets are never out of date. A philosopher has said that those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, and the writer knows that the moral laws of the universe are as inexorable as the physical ones. For Jacob, ritual observances and spiritual sensitivity and rectitude are indissoluble. For other characters—notably the villainous Gershon—they are worlds apart. The book as a whole shares the prophetic emphasis upon the primacy of ethics in religion rather than the priestly one upon ceremonial ordinances.

Mr. Singer is a first-rate writer, but I do not find "The Slave" his best book. Despite the simplicity he has striven for, he seems to me to have overburdened his characters and episodes with too much allegorical suggestiveness. On the positive side, there is a lovely lyricism in some of the descriptive passages which makes them partake of the quality of expressionist paintings….