Summary of The Magician of Lublin
Yasha, the protagonist of Isaac Singer’s novel “The Magician of Lublin”, is a half-Jewish, half-gentile stage-performing magician and escape artist who travels across eastern Poland in the 1880s. He is a notorious womanizer and freethinker, striving to break free from the constraints of marriage, religion, and poverty. Ultimately, he returns to his wife and Jewish faith, choosing to live as a penitent hermit in his hometown Lublin, uninterested in escaping anymore.
Reasons to read The Magician of Lublin
“The Magician of Lublin” is a compelling tale about a man caught between the modern world of gentiles and the traditional Jewish communities in late 19th century Poland. Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Polish-American writer, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. He won the U.S. National Book Award twice: in 1970 for his childhood memoir “A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing up in Warsaw”, and in 1974 for his collection of short stories “A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories”. Other highly acclaimed works of Singer include “The Family Moskat” and “The Golem”. Singer wrote most of his novels in Yiddish and later translated them to English.
Setting: Lublin & Warsaw (Poland)
Original title: קונצנמאכער פון לובלין
Der Kuntsnmakher fun Lublin
Year of publication: 1960
Nr of pages: 192
