The Estate
(Isaac Bashevis Singer)
Set in the Warsaw Ghetto, young Ezriel Babad muses on the plight of his neighbours while he studies. He believes that there is no justice, for looking at them, he muses that the harder they work the less they seem to advance in life. Through the influence of a capitalist convert and his father-in-law , Ezriel becomes a doctor. But this book shows how, in order to succeed, Ezriel must lose the things which, at first, he does not recognise as being of value, the consistent ethics of the religion he has abandoned. As he progresses spiritually and culturally further from his roots, the shackles of the past appear to fall away, only to be replaced by others. His probingsinto the nature of madess and neurosis force him to question his own sanity and lead him to conclude that the very people and spirituality he questioned appear untouched by the melancholia of the outside world. Straddling the two worlds of rationalism and spirituality, Ezriel is at home in neither.
For Singer, Ezriel represents the price that must be paid for intellectual freedom and the subsequent abandonment of faith. The more he becomes sucked into the gentile world of the senses, the more he becomes estranged from the Jewish world of the spirit.
In The Estate Singer conveys the period of political and industrial transition taking place in Poland up to the end of the nineteenth century. He shows how Polish Jewry was entering a period of decline which would end with the rumblings of the holocaust.Ezriel's alienation are rendered totally believable because of Singer's masterly insight into the inner sanctum of the individual psyche.He draws constantly upon his own family and upon his own youthful precocity within that family where the burden of his own mortality often forced him to contemplate suicide.
A masterful writer!
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