Isaac Bashevis Singer, Satan in Goray

For reasons of the season, and then inspired by this review by Adam Kirsch in The Nation, I decided finally to start on a large, intimidating oeuvre I’ve long been eyeing. I took up Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first novel, Satan in Goray, serialized and then published as a book in Yiddish in the mid-1930s and in Jacob Sloan’s English translation in 1955. The “season,” Matthew Schmitz reproves us in The American Conservative, is an ersatz and anodyne festival for the rootless urbanite, a microdose of Gothic Americana to console us in our pod life, as false and poisonous a confection as “pumpkin spice.”