The Slave

Isaac Bashevis Singer - The Slave
Part One - Wanda

Part Two - Sarah

Part Three - The Return

The slave is about a man named Jacob, who faces multiple hardships in his life due to his Jewish faith. Four years after the Chmielnicki massacres of the seventeenth century, Jacob, a slave and a cowherd in a Polish mountain village, falls in love with a Gentile woman Wanda, his masters daughter. He finds he can't live without her and after much inner turmoil, they decide to run away together to a distant jewish community. The couple always seem to hold over them an aura of ill-fatedness, but in the end when they both die they are able to remain together. "Lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided" (Singer, 311).

The title remains duplicit in meaning by refererring to Jacob not only as a slave to Jan Bzick, but a slave to his faith, religion, and God as well.