Books: Special from No Man's Land

THE MANOR by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 442 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

Isaac Bashevis Singer is a most curious relic. He pecks away at his 22-year-old Yiddish typewriter, writing of dubious demons and Polish shtetls (Jewish villages) that disappeared before he was born. Is he, at 63, the greatest living 19th century novelist—author of titles as blatantly old-fashioned as The Family Moskat? Is he a Jewish Hawthorne? No labels quite cling to a writer who was too long regarded as just a quaint retailer of legends. -

Faced with this book, some readers might be dismayed by the thought of yet another Jewish novel. What with The Fixer by Malamud, The Chosen by Potok, and Fathers by Herbert Gold, not to mention a score of nonfiction books on Jewish themes recently, the public may well suspect a conspiracy to corner the literary market. But Singer is different and special. A deceptively frail, birdlike presence, he inhabits with iron realism a no man's land somewhere in the middle of a life of contradictions divided between 31 years spent in his native Poland and 32 years in his adopted home, New York City.

The son of a rabbi, he uses an obsolescent language; yet he has the spiritual restlessness, the wry embarrassment at heroics, the ashy taste for the absurd that are so typical of modern writers. At the same time, the difference between Singer and the Jewish-American authors is the distance between the first and the second generations. However brilliant they may be at times, their Jewish tradition and color have a borrowed air; Singer's are genuine. Their characters, at large in American life, suffer alienation; his characters, alone in their closed world, triumph over isolation.

Tragicomic Figure. The Manor, written between 1953 and 1955 but now appearing for the first time in English, could be the breakthrough book to gain Singer the wider audience he deserves. Like all of his fiction (The Magician of Lublin, Gimpel the Fool), this work is a subtle form of autobiography, projecting the author's own sense of exile. It embraces a quarter of a century of change in the life of a Jewish family near Warsaw in 1863. If the time and plot sound remote, the theme is not. The central character is a kind of petit bourgeois Job who has to endure the special ordeal also known to the modern family man: he is condemned to watch his children depart, with brutal casualness and indifference, from their upbringing.

Calman Jacoby begins as a simple, God-fearing small businessman. As a result of various political and social upheavals, he winds up an industrial entrepreneur. The children, as usual, go modern in their own ways. One of Calman's daughters commits the heresy of an interfaith marriage. A son-in-law, fascinated and undermined by science, moves toward that 20th century religion-substitute, psychiatry. The son-in-law's sister moves to the city and turns into a forerunner of the Career Girl.

A tragicomic figure, Calman looks at it all and blinks: "Who knew what the world was coming to?" The women smoke cigarettes, the men falsify accounts. Fear of God is replaced by fear of bureaucrats. The old fixed values are suddenly gone. At the end, Calman stops the world and gets off. He hides himself in a private makeshift synagogue—a mirage of an island in the sea of change.