Yoshe Kalb

by Israel J. Singer and Isaac Bashevis Singer, I.J.; Singer

Book Overview

A married, aristocratic young Russian Jew wanders in atonement for sin after falling in love with the wife of his father-in-law, an Austrian rabbi.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805208607
• ISBN13: 9780805208603
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Schocken Books Inc
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Magical and Vivid

I.J. Singer was a writer that had complete command over his work, and had an intimate detailed knowledge of the world he wrote about, and Yoshe Kalb vividly illustrates this. Singer works the line between realism and fantasy with aplomb, and keeps the two distinct in a way that less powerful and masterful writers would fail to do; the truism passed around about I.B Singer, his younger brother and Nobel Prize winner, and I.J. Singer, is that I.J is the more "realistic" writer, while I.B. brokered in fantasy and myth. Yoshe Kalb proves this wrong. The end of this novel shows that I.J. was conversant with Chassidic myth and fantasy, and knew how to translate this into a novel of incredible social realism and verisimilitude.

Unbelievable

This book is a welcome counterpoint to the Buber portrayal of Chasidim as saints or the Sholem Aleichem "Fiddler on the Roof" portrayal of European Jewry as a beautiful dead culture. In Yoshe Kalb, you run into the kind of corrupt Chasidim that you're sadly more likely to run into today. It's a brilliant portrayal of the often corrupt world of Chasidic dynasties where the leader knows little to nothing, the gabbai fights with the community and the women are stuck gossipping.Nahum marries into an Hasidic dynasty due to the dynastic leader's eagerness to get married. A sensitive soul, he withdraws from the community except for an overwhelming lust that he feels for the chief rabbi's wife. Inadvertantly he sets in motion a chain of events that will destroy two dynasties and ends in one of the strangest trials in literature. If you have only read Isaac Bashevis Singer, I urge you to seek out Israel Singer whereever you can find him.