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From the Publisher
'A masterpiece' Sunday Times
In a magnificent work of the imagination, Isaac Bashevis Singer brings to life the decline of the prosperous Moskat family, Polish Jews living in Warsaw between the dawn of the twentieth century and the gloom of 1939. On a vast breathtaking background, saints mingle with swindlers, tough Zionists with mystic philosophers, and medieval rabbis rub shoulders with ultra-modern painters. A novel on the grandest scale, The Family Moskat is a work of high entertainment and a deeply moving chronicle of people's disappointments and passions.
'Whatever region his writing inhabits, it is blazing with life and actuality' Ted Hughes, New York Review of Books
'He makes most contemporary practitioners of the art of fiction look like singers with only one song' Guardian
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Customer Reviews
In anybody else's hands, this story of a Warsaw Jewish dynasty from the last days of its "golden era" to the verge of destruction at the hands of the Nazis would struggle to avoid appearing trite, melodramatic and overly ambitious. But Singer's taut and elliptical evocation of historical dangers (we never actually experience the First World War or the Russian Revolution at first hand, and we never get to see the Germans) brilliantly ratchets up the drama and tension without succumbing to melodrama, as we share the characters' experience of history from the inside.
Throughout the novel, pessimism (who could avoid a degree of pessimism in light of what we all know happened to Poland's Jews?) battles for elbow room with the lusty - but by now fading - glories of Warsaw Jewish life. While the action remains resolutely in Poland, only rarely venturing away from the Warsaw region, emigration to Palestine repeatedly features as a double-edged sword of an escape route.
God knows what it would look like if they ever made a movie of it. Or have they made one? I think I prefer not to know.
The characterisation, as usual, is brillant. As the parade of vividly-imagined personalities staggers down through the first part of the 20th century, we marvel at their complexity, and our sympathies waver as Singer nudges them first one way, then another. What does he really want us to make of the pessimistic "philosopher" (and key character) Asa Heshel Bannet? Singer can rarely have realised so difficult a portrayal so convincingly.
As the survivors of the family's tribulations live through the start of the second world war, the breathless and brilliantly handled conclusion still manages to surprise. I won't spoil it.
Read more I.B. Singer, learn more about loads of stuff you never thought related to you. They ain't thrillers or airport novels, but they'll enrich your life.
It is a family saga, set in Poland and taking in all kinds of Jewish people; clever, stupid, wealthy, poor and everything in between. My only reservation is that there are no dates given, not even in the extremely useful family trees. This makes it quite hard to work out what is happening when and how old people are. Those lovers of history will know dates from events, but the rest of us don't.
Certainly a book I would recommend!
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