The Slave

The Slave is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning Polish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer. First published in 1962 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, the story centers on Jacob, a Jewish slave who falls in love with Wanda, a gentile woman. This propels Jacob on a crisis of faith, as he feels torn between the forces of good and evil.

Jacob lives in the Jewish community of Josefov in Poland. During the Khmelnytsky Uprisings, which take place between 1648 and 1657, the Cossacks mount a rebellion within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, committing mass atrocities against the civilian population. Jews are one of their primary targets. Cossacks murder Jacob's wife and three children before selling him into slavery.

A pagan peasant purchases Jacob to work on his farm. His enslavement is a brutal experience, but Jacob remains faithful to God and to Judaism; he practices as many Jewish rites and rituals and commemorates as many high holy days as he is able to while in captivity. He also commits himself to maintain high ethics and leading an overall devout life.



Then, Jacob falls in love with Wanda, a young gentile woman and the daughter of his master. He yearns for her, despite Jewish law strictly forbidding any type of intimacy—even a casual touch—between a man and woman before marriage. It is also a violation of Jewish law for a Jew to marry or live with a gentile—and not only is Wanda a gentile, but she is a pagan as well. She attempts to get Jacob to marry her, but barring that, she tries to seduce him into committing "sinful acts" together.

Jacob knows that consummating his relationship with Wanda is a cardinal sin, and he feels her beauty, her sexuality, her very presence in his life are temptations straight from the devil. Driven to the brink by desire, Jacob finally relents, and he and Wanda have sex.

Shortly thereafter, a group of Jews who survived the massacre at Josefov track Jacob down and pay off Wanda's father in exchange for his freedom. Jacob returns to his hometown, and while he escapes slavery, he is not able to escape his memories of Wanda. Soon, his thoughts about her again consume his life.



One night, he dreams of her. In the dream, a visibly pregnant Wanda begs to know why Jacob abandoned her, leaving her to raise his child with pagans. Jacob wakes, startled, and returns to Wanda. Once back in the pagan village, they marry, and she converts to Judaism with Jacob's guidance.

The newlyweds move to the town of Pilitz. There, Jacob becomes a teacher, while Wanda changes her name to Sarah and pretends to be a deaf-mute so her accent doesn't betray the fact that she is a pagan gentile. Jacob continues teaching Sarah about Judaism, and she becomes a devoted student, fervently adopting this belief system as her own.

For months, Sarah continues to present herself as deaf and mute, even though it becomes increasingly more painful. She hears the women in town talk about her when she passes by, believing she can't hear them. She becomes the source of scandalous gossip.



However, when Sarah gives birth, she cries out in pain, effectively shattering the illusion of her muteness. Hearing her speak, the townspeople learn her heritage. Devastated by the revelation of her secret and depleted by the process of childbirth, Sarah dies, but the son she bears—whom Jacob names Benjamin—survives. After her death, the Jews of Pilitz refuse to honor Sarah with a Jewish burial; instead, they bury her with the donkeys on the outskirts of the Jewish cemetery.

Jacob brings the infant Benjamin to Israel, where the two begin a new life together. Benjamin grows up in the holy land and eventually becomes a lecturer at a yeshiva in Jerusalem.

Two decades later, Jacob goes back to Pilitz to find Sarah's grave. In his absence, Pilitz has become a city of substantial size, and the Jewish cemetery has expanded. The mass gravesite for donkeys—Sarah's burial spot—is now part of the larger cemetery, so she ended up in a Jewish burial place after all.



During his visit to Pilitz, Jacob weakens and falls ill. In short order, he dies, and the townspeople bury him in the Jewish cemetery. As they dig his grave, they discover Sarah's bones miraculously buried at the exact gravesite they had chosen for Jacob; Sarah's bones were thought lost among the donkeys'. This seems like an undeniable message from God, so they bury Jacob and Sarah side by side—together, as it was always intended to be.

In 2004, Yevgeny Arye and Yelena Laskina adapted The Slave into a stage play. It premiered at the Lincoln Center Festival, which features the best of performing arts from around the world.