The Magician of Lublin
SynopsisPlot
Yasha Mazur is a Houdini-like performer whose skill has made him famous throughout eastern Poland. Half Jewish, half Gentile, a freethinker who slips easily between worlds, Yasha has an observant Jewish wife, a Gentile assistant who travels with him, and a mistress in every town. For Yasha is an escape artist not only onstage but in life, a man who lives under the spell of his own hypnotic effect on women. Now, though, his exploits are catching up with him, and he is tempted to make one final escape―from his wife and his homeland and the last tendrils of his father's religion.
Story
About this book
Yasha Mazur is a stage magician and escape artist whose performances have made him a well-known figure across eastern Poland. He is half Jewish, half Gentile, and moves between religious and secular worlds with the same ease he brings to his act. He keeps an observant Jewish wife at home, travels with a Gentile assistant, and maintains a mistress in more than one town along his circuit.
Singer places him among Jewish communities and small cities in Poland, where religious tradition and modern skepticism press against each other. Yasha is a freethinker who has drifted from his father's faith without fully leaving it. As his tangled private life begins to close in, he weighs one decisive escape: away from his wife, his homeland, and the last threads of the religion he was raised in.
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in Yiddish and was later widely read in English translation; he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. This is one of his shorter novels, and its central tensions turn on desire, obligation, and the hypnotic hold Yasha has over the women in his life.
