Satan in Goray

The pogrom that swept through Poland was interpreted as a sign of the Coming of the Lord. In the little town of Goray, laid waste by murder and famine, grief becomes joy as good news arrives of the second coming of the Messiah. Once the town’s pious rabbi is usurped, the townspeople are free to look forward to the End of Days, when they will wear golden jackets and dine on marzipan candy. But such perilously high hopes pave the way to hysteria, and a panic which could threaten the very existence of Goray.

A gripping parable of reason versus revelation, hysteria in the face of apocalypse, Whatever religion his writing inhabits, it is blazing with life and actuality, Singer set scenes with such vividness that there is almost a smell to his books, the smell of poverty and guttering candles and decaying lives and decaying souls, His storytelling powers are so immense, so natural. He has more creative confidence than any living writer, A remarkably confident debut... Singer was a great writer who managed to make that small world take on universal significance

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1904, in Poland, the son of a rabbi. Fleeing fascism in 1935, he emigrated to America, penniless and knowing little English. 'I think that the whole of human history is one big Holocaust,' he said in 1987, when asked why there was no direct mention of the Holocaust in his fiction. 'It is not only Jewish history. We can call human history the history of the human Holocaust'. Singer's fiction - novels such as The Family Moskat (1950) and The Magician of Lublin (1960), and story collections such as Gimpel the Fool (1957) and The Spinoza of Market Street (1961) - became admired internationally and he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1978. He died in 1998.