The Magician of Lublin.

     The main character’s spiritual unrest is reflected in the fact that most of the novel he is physically out on the road, traveling between Lublin and Warsaw, and within the city walls of Warsaw out on the streets, his wandering symptomatic for his state of indecision. The magician denies his Jewishness, yet, twice seeks shelter in a synagogue, so in fact turns back to his heritage. The first time he seeks refuge from the elements, in this nightly storm that bursts loose on his way, with Magda, to Warsaw, they end up in the prayer-house. As an old man sat reciting from a thick prayer book Yasha realizes that he doesn’t know what he is doing. “Have I already forgotten so much of my heritage?” he wonders (79). He also feels that although “it was all strangely foreign to him, yet it was also familiar” (80). The inherent warning is completely lost on him but he cannot resist taking with him, on his way out, a torn holy book. When they finally arrive at Yasha’s Warsaw apartment and install themselves, his troubles worsen by the day. Yet, almost all of his troubles originate from within himself for he firmly belongs within the tradition of the Yiddish “schlemiel”. He is not able to take a decision; all of his troubles originate with him. On top of that, he even allows for Zeftel to come to Warsaw, which she promptly does. So now all women in his life, save his wife, are within reach. Zeftel has, however, run into the hands of a criminal couple, brother and sister, who press poor and desperate women like her to go to Buenos Aires, where they will be set to work as prostitutes. Yasha, ever prone to connect with those dubious figures, exemplifying the characteristic Jewish interest in other minority groups, in this novel, thieves, low-lives, prostitutes, maybe even goyim in general, even breaks his head over this. Eventually Zeftel goes anyway, marries Herman, the brother, and becomes a famous madam of a brothel. “In Lublin they said that if Yasha had chosen crime, no one’s house would be safe” (9).

     As a virtuoso artist, Yasha is driven by a compulsion to prove his omnipotence. In his desperate search for money, since Emilia, the non-Jewish woman whom he idealizes and thinks he loves (though he loves her daughter Halina as well), wants to go to Italy for Halina’s health, he resorts to crime. Yasha has always kept notes of names and houses of people who have money, should he ever need to come by money through crime. From Emilia’s servant he has learnt that an old miser keeps a lot of money in a safe in his house. On his way there, finally having ‘almost’ taken the decision to run off with Emilia, the streets of Warsaw loose their concreteness. The physical world melts into the surrealistic world of the gambler, one who again stakes his entire existence on one more throw of the dice. His unsuccessful attempt – his first failure ever – to open the safe and his injury by a leap from a balcony are directly followed by a chase by the police. The pain forces him, only half-consciously, to acknowledge the limits of the possible. Again the streets are a chaos of sound, smell and movement, all in a blur. Then he recalls his desperate visit to the synagogue and his instinctive Jewish impulse leads him into the synagogue where he can once more participate in the ordering of creation. “Yasha stepped up onto the sidewalk and saw the courtyard of a synagogue. The gate stood open. An elderly Jew entered, prayer-shawl bag under his arm. Yasha darted inside. Here they will not search”, he thought (170). The synagogue, as mentioned above, is an island of order in the sea of his disordering activities. His worries recede before the act of constitutive prayer. “The men put on their prayer shawls and their phylacteries, they affixed the thongs and cloaked their heads, and he watched with astonishment as if he, Yasha, were a Gentile who had never witnessed this before”(173). Yasha becomes both observer and participant and has to rediscover his communal self. Again the words of the benedictions sound “strangely alien yet strangely familiar”; Yasha discovers not only the echoes in his heart of these traditional prayers but loses most of his modern skepticism. “He translated the Hebrew words and considered each one. Is it truly so? He questioned himself. Is God really that good?”(173) Remembering his father, the meanings of the words return:"... He continued his prayers, translating the Hebrew words to himself, 'Blessed be He who spake and the world existed, blessed be He who was the maker of the world in the beginning. Blessed be He who speaketh and doeth. Blessed be He who decreeth and performeth. Blessed be He who hat mercy upon the earth and payeth a good reward to them that fear Him.'" Then Yasha has a change of heart: "Aghast at the extent of his degradations and, what was perhaps worse, his lack of insight," he acknowledges how close he had been "from the final plunge into the bottomless pit," and discovers compassionate forces in what had led him to the house of study and worship: "He chanted 'Hear O Israel' and cupped his eyes with his hand. He recited the Eighteen Benedictions, contemplating every word. The long-forgotten childhood devotion returned now, a faith that demanded no proof, an awe of God, a sense of remorse over one's transgressions" (177).

     This epiphany begins his process of recovery. He, who lives in and for the crowd, now begins to see that he has only lived for the moment of intoxication, whether it was alcoholic or sexual. Yasha, the individual with hardly any connections to any group, feels that the Jewish ritual may ground him and provide him at least with a memory of community: “Yes, that were other worlds, Yasha had always felt. I must be a Jew! He said to himself. A Jew like all the others!”(179) The seed of Teshuvah is planted, but Yasha is a hard nut to crack. Finally, a good circus contract arrives; Magda scolds him in a terrible – anti Semitic – way (199), and he feels compelled to see Emilia. On his way over to her he visits a barber shop where two moralistic stories are told by the barber. The first one carries the proverbial warning of: “if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen”; the attentive reader will clearly understand the connotations but Yasha doesn’t. The second story is about a man who recklessly loses his life by trying to show off, make an impression, but Yasha is also deaf to this warning and only responds with an absent-minded: “Yes, people are mad” (202). Because of his injured foot Yasha takes a droshky to Emilia, saying to himself for the umpteenth time: “I must decide everything today. … But he passed street after street without reaching a decision.” (203) Even when he is at Emilia’s he is not sure what his decision is going to be, but she reminds him of their plans to buy a beautiful house in Italy, his promise to convert to Christianity, her condition for them to be able to marry, and finally he is forced to admit that he has no money. Their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of a policeman warning her for a possible burglary because they have found Yasha’s notebook with addresses which he had lost at the scene of his attempted crime. In his state of conflicting emotions and panic over what his notebook may possibly reveal about his identity and address, he feels forced to confess to her that it was he who burgled the old miser. In doing this he realizes that: “He needed to cut himself loose from everything.” “He understood his objective now (in going there), to put a finish to the whole affair” (220). Emilia reaches a concluding catharsis before he does, in saying: “You must have some sort of covenant with God since he punished you directly on the spot” (223). With these realizations Emilia is suddenly no longer the ideal beautiful, even surreal, beauty he thinks he knows; she transforms into a woman whose face shows her age and fatigue. The police-visit has left Yasha afraid of being arrested wherever he shows his face and consequently he fears going back to his apartment. When he finally does, he finds his animals all killed and Magda, hanging from the ceiling by a rope, dead. This time the magician is really struck numb and neighbours help him deal with the situation. He cannot stay in the apartment out of feelings of guilt over Magda, so he ends up in a sleazy bar where he first orders tea but eventually drinks a pint of vodka. Contrary to his previous visits to such places he suddenly feels out of place and when he, desperately clinging to his old womanizing self, decides to see Zeftel, since ‘she loves him’, he thinks, and finds her in a bed with Herman, sparsely dressed and asleep, obviously after having performed their dastardly deeds, he undergoes “some sort of transformation. He knew that he would never again be the Yasha he had been” (257). The last tumultuous twenty-four hours had put a seal on his previous existence. “He had seen the hand of God.”(258)

     In the epilogue of this wonderful novel three years have gone by. We learn that the magician of Lublin has, for more than a year, been living in a small brick structure in the courtyard; his wife, Esther, thinks of it as a prison. His retreat into self-imposed confinement has the sole purpose of depriving himself of all external temptations, he eschews all intimacy with women, even his own wife, and obviously he does not trust himself. Yasha has been warned by the Rabbi that “the world has been created for the exercise of free will and the sons of Adam must constantly choose between good and evil. Why seal one’s self in stone?” (261) To fully become a ‘mensch’ one must interact with one’s fellow human beings, the way to God is through man, and this only seems the easy way out. Yasha discusses matters of faith and the Torah with the Rabbi on a foot of equality; everyone is amazed how much this “charlatan” has absorbed in a year and a half. He even has grown a beard and side locks and has the outward appearance of a Jew; in all aspects Yasha has returned to Judaism (teshuvah). There is however one more step he has to take, to properly make ‘Tikun Olam’. This proves to be his worst struggle yet, people start to come to him, seeking his advice, to which he pleads that “he was no rabbi,… only an ordinary man, and, in addition, a sinner” (270). When he turns to the village Rabbi for advice, he is commanded “to receive those who came for two hours each day”. The Rabbi wrote: “He to whom Jews come in audience is a rabbi” (271). Yasha the penitent realizes one more important lesson: temptations may come from the outside world, but even if they do not, there are the temptations from within. These have to be fought everyday, every hour. He also realizes that the only true omnipotence lies with God. The last pages of the novel are taken up by a letter from Emilia, who has read about Yasha, or Rabbi Jacob, as he is called nowadays, in a Warsaw paper. The basic message of the letter is that she still thinks of him everyday, feels she is the sinner (and he is atoning for her) and she thinks he is inflicting too harsh a punishment upon himself. She adds that he has committed no crime and has always shown “a good and gentle nature” (287). I think his initial reaction shows a glimpse of the old Yasha even after his reform: “So Emilia was alive!” (285) In what way should the reader interpret this little remark? Why should she be dead? Only because he, Yasha, the magician, has left her? Or was he just afraid that her poor circumstances may have caused her early demise?

     I hope to have shown that the main protagonist in The Magician of Lublin is a Jew who has seriously strayed, after a lifetime of expansive exploits and boundless lust, but eventually becomes a true ‘mensch’; his reform so extreme that he even becomes a Rabbi to his people. In The Slave, by the same author, Jacob, a deeply religious man who has remained spiritually free despite physical enslavement, also finds himself passionately involved with a non-Jewish woman. The two novels differ in historical and geographical setting. Nonetheless, they are similar in a functional way. Both present the reader with a man who finds himself in an alien environment where he does not belong. This is also the case for Sy Levin in Malamud’s A New Life and for Henry Levin in Malamud’s “Lady of the Lake”, as well as the protagonist in Singer’s “The Yearning Heifer” who seems out of place. I think this can definitively be seen as an autobiographical element in these two Singer novels; he also felt out of place, living in America as a Polish Jew. Where Yasha capitalizes on his skills as a showman and a womanizer, losing his bearings in the process and becoming a prisoner of his self-imposed situation, Jacob has no control over his situation: he is simply captured. Both men discover what it means to be in love with a non-Jewish woman and what it means to be attracted to the non-Jewish world. Jacob, the slave, finds a true soul-mate in Wanda, who converts to Judaism and becomes known as Sarah. Despite the lures of the non-Jewish world, or at least, of non-Jewish women, both Jacob and Yasha are deeply and consummately religious Jews. Jacob's strife is sexual, not spiritual; even in captivity, he is intent on maintaining his faith, and he attempts to carve all of the Torah's 613 mitsves (commandments) on a rock in order not to violate these laws. Yasha's conflicts are more abstract, and his ultimate solution is more extreme. Yet he, too, retains his essential Jewishness, although he feels he must isolate himself from all other stimuli to be really able to focus on it. The Yiddish title of another Singer novel, Shosha, is ‘neshome ekspedisya’, which translates as ‘soul expedition’. The most common entry in every average dictionary for the word ‘expedition’ reads: “a journey or excursion undertaken for a specific purpose”.  The purpose, as mentioned above, is to become a ‘mensch’, which means to struggle between being spiritually alive and spiritually dead. In “choosing life” and finding God “through the other” these characters let their inherited Jewish ethos prevail. I think Gabriner is right in concluding that “Leviticus 19:18, loving your neighbour, is the only means by which the ideal of Deuteronomy 30:19, ‘choosing life’ can be attained”. (2) In The Magician of Lublin Yasha’s mildly forced interaction with ‘other’ people is the final step in the process of ‘teshuvah’ by performing ‘tikun olam’.

     It is suggested that a parallel can be drawn between the alienation Jacob and Yasha feel in their respective essentially unfamiliar environments and Singer’s own private feelings to this matter. The same can be attributed to the lure these non-Jewish women present to them; maybe this lure reflects a sentiment Singer may have felt towards his own wife, Alma, who came from a completely assimilated, non-Yiddish-speaking family.

Malamud’s Sy Levin and Levin Freeman also are fascinated with non-Jewish women, although Freeman only supposes she is non-Jewish, in which he is grossly mistaken. Judaism, for Singer, meant the orthodoxy he had known at home; his father was a rabbi. Yet, he was married to a woman who could neither understand his language nor could she fully comprehend his religious struggles. In that sense we are reminded of the totally honest and sincere Emilia, who wishes Yasha’s conversion to Christianity, completely ignorant of his struggle with being a Jew, which is completely juxtaposed to Wanda’s conversion to Judaism. Magda’s suicide was explained by Singer in 1983 as a result of her anti-Semitic comment to Yasha: “You dirty Jew!” (199) A comment, she must have realized, he would never forgive her. This harsh view also characterizes the way the Jewish people view themselves and which is also evident from the harsh measures Yasha takes with his self-imprisonment. The man who was his own best trick, who held the key to all hearts while his own was full of confusion, who knows who he should be only to be lost again, no longer exists. The magician who "was always a stranger, amongst the Jews as well as Gentiles”, who contrary to other people who “had their God, their saints, their leaders” while “he had only his doubt" has come home (23). The Magician of Lublin, clearly and not surprisingly, has to be categorized as a type “A” text. All the above shows that it is identifiably Jewish on the surface level as well as the thematic level.

Works cited:

Hadda, Janet. Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life. Oxford University Press, New York, 1997.

Hadda, Janet. Passionate Women, Passive Men: Suicide in Yiddish Literature. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988. page 213.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis. The Magician of Lublin. Fawcett Crest Books, New York, 1960.