The Rabbi of Goray, at odds with his own household, is dismayed by the state of Polish Jews: tired of the clear waters of righteous deeds and Awe before God, they care only for fasting and asceticism, the Kabbalah, visions and marvels. His Jews lead double lives, half in the blemished, sullen, frustrating actual world, and half in the consoling Realm of Imagination they call Erez Yisro'el, the Land of Israel. As in all his books set in old Jewish Eastern Europe, the main themes are the beauty and radiance of Judaism, and the unfathomable mystery of human perversity and self-destructiveness. I love its abrupt, poetic, aphoristic style, although Singer himself came to consider it too showy and later wrote more plainly.
"Satan in Goray" was his first novel: it has all the freshness of early work but is in not in any respect less than masterly. He won the Nobel Prize in 1978, yet he is anything but elitist: his novels are compelling reading and accessible to anyone who enjoys standard historical fiction. He chose to write in Yiddish, then to all appearances a vanishing language, since so many of its speakers were murdered by the Nazis, while the new state of Israel adopted a form of Hebrew.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was one of the greatest and wisest writers of the 20th century. The Heavens Over Your Head Shall Be Brass
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