BOOKS
463
forbidden alike by Jewish and Polish law. The heroine, Wanda, is set
apart from her brutish family and neighbors, first by her innate refine–
ment and later
by
her love for Jacob, and then from the Jewish com–
munity in which she can live as Jacob's bride only by pretending to be
mute. The novel recapitulates Singer's familiar themes-but at a certain
remove, because the hero and heroine -both transcend these conflicts.
The way in which Jacob succumbs to but finally rejects the Sabbatian
temptation, for instance, is only scantily described.
It
cannot
be
denied that Singer has sacrificed a certain exotic
intensity and sensuousness in the measured affirmations of
The Slave .
The sensuous charge of Singer's fiction does seem to have some inextric–
able connection with his vision of a universe in which the negative or
demonic pole is the stronger. Let's assume, however, that the modern
educated sensibility still has some appetite left for the climaxes of true
love and noble death, alongside its appetite for the demonic and
fantastic. This being the case,
The Slave
should not only renew our
sense of the possibility of still writing good novels but also renew our
capacities for emotional catharsis as distinct from the endless exacerba–
tion of the emotions which most modem fiction provides.
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Susan Sontag
THE AMERICAN MYTH AND
THE EUROPEAN MIND
American Studies in Europe
1776-1960
By Sigmund Skard
$4.50
GREEK ART
A Study of the Formal Evolu–
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By Rhys
Carpenter. Illus.
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RICHARD, MYRTLE AND I
The Novel by Stephen Hudson,
in a new edition, edited with a
critical essay by
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E. M. Boll
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INDIAN SCULPTURE
In the Philadelphia Museum of
Art
By
Stella
K
ramrisch. Illus.
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