Book Review: "Satan in Goray" by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer is probably best known for winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and writing novels such as "Love and Exile", "The Penitent", "The Family Moskat" and "Enemies: A Love Story". But there is another book that I have read by him in my attempt to read his entire bibliography - that novel is called "Satan in Goray". I have to say that this book is like none that I have ever read by him before and has seriously surprised me through its incredibly influential use of religion. Normally the Jewish identity is not as religious as we see it in this novel and honestly, it is a great turn for the author who now, writes a novel about religious hypocrisy and moral panic.

The novel is about a town in which there are predictions of the apocalypse spreading around the Jewish community and the second coming has since been prophesised. The prophet who states this is called Rechele and she is trying to convince people that she has heard the word of God in order to make people obey the new order of things. This strange wave of panic and hysteria washes over the entire town in a way that I have never seen happen in a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. When people start questioning Rechele if she is telling the truth about the second coming, they have a lot to discover about whether it is the work of the Lord or the work of the Devil. I don't think that they are going to be very pleasantly surprised if you ask me.

The language of the novel is something to be admired. I love Isaac Bashevis Singer's ability to write such intense and gripping descriptions of complex emotions of characters. When we see this moral panic, this almost cult-like prophecy grip the town, there are many descriptions of religion but, as we move through the book the image of corpses keeps cropping up. It is a dark image and often closely associated with what is going to happen to people after they die (or in this case, they believe they are going to witness the second coming). Isaac Bashevis Singer shows us their faults through many of these dark and often uncomfortable images of death which litter the book and its phoney wisdom.

"Rechele was well aware that the room was crowded with evil things. The brooms and mops stirred; long shadows swept along the walls like apparitions from another world. Now and again the old woman raised her upper lip in a horrifying smile. She thrust out her waxen hand from under the feather bed, clutched at the air, and then clenched her fingers as though she had caught something. The old woman died in the early morning on the day before Yom Kippur."

The mixture between the description being filled with religious prophecy, made out to be this incredible work of God and then being so dark and quite terrifying to imagine is something that Isaac Bashevis Singer is very good at. It reads almost Biblical to me.

This is only one of the instances within the text in which someone dies and there is a long description of either bodies dying, corpses having died or funerals taking place. As if all of this dying is done in the name of God for the main character and yet, in the end you have to work out as the reader, whether it was all worth the effort for her prophecy. It is a question that Isaac Bashevis Singer loves to leave the reader with: 'is it worth it?' The answer is something you will have to discover for yourself and we could possibly sit here and argue about it until the cows come home. We would still never figure it out.