["The Slave"] is a tempestuous love-story set against a background that has engaged the imagination of [its] Yiddish author deeply—the aftermath of the Chielnicki Massacres in Poland in 1649. As in his previous novel "Satan in Goray," he seems interested in extracting myth, legend and parable from a mass of actual facts—in composing a story stripped down to almost Biblical simplicity while trying not to violate the contemporary reader's expectations of fiction too radically.

The hero, Jacob, though he is only 29 when the story opens, is positively patriarchal in his dignity and moral character. The heroine is a Polish peasant girl, Wanda, the daughter of Jacob's master. After her clandestine conversion to Judaism, Wanda assumes the matriarchal name of Sarah and becomes Jacob's second wife. (His first wife and children had perished in the Cossack invasion which had resulted in his enslavement.) Since such a conversion is...