SOURCE: "Satan in Goray and Ironic Restitution," in Yiddish, Vol. 6, Nos. 2-3, Summer-Fall, 1985, pp. 87-102.

In the following essay, Isenberg discusses the progressive themes of catastrophe, ambiguity, and restitution in Satan in Goray. Isenberg concludes that in this novel restitution is not redemptive, as "restitution can only be an ironic impossibility because Singer's subject is the inevitability of living after the tradition."

Satan in Goray explores the reflection, in a remote Polish town, of the rise and degeneration of the messianic movement centering on Sabbatai Zevi, a Jew from Smyrna, whose revelation of his messianic role in May 1665 triggered the major messianic explosion in modern Jewish history. The novel's action covers something over a year, beginning in October 1666, but it has its wellsprings in the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648–49, a Cossack-led peasant war in which some 100,000 Polish Jews perished. The importance of these atrocities as an initiating event is...