The Manor and The Estate
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Originally published in Yiddish between 1953-1955 as a single work, Isaac Bashevis Singer's The Manor and The Estate now appears as a single-volume English edition.
Recounting the tales of Polish Jews in the second half of the nineteenth century — a time of rapid industrial growth and radical social change — the novel depicts the Jewish community moving from the ghetto to prominence within Polish society.
As Singer writes in his author's note, "All the spiritual and intellectual ideas that triumphed in the modern era had their roots in the world of that time - socialism and nationalism, Zionism and assimilationism, nihilism and anarchism, suffragettism, atheism, the weakening of the family bond, free love, and even the beginnings of Fascism."
Telling the story of Calman Jacoby, who stands between the old and the new, the book portrays the difficulties encountered by traditional Jews coming to terms with the changes brought on by modernity.
About the Author
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) was a Yiddish-language novelist and storyteller who chronicled Jewish life in Eastern Europe and America with humor, mysticism, and moral depth. Born in Poland to a rabbinic family, he emigrated to New York in 1935 and wrote for the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) for decades. His novels, memoirs, and short stories give voice to the shtetl, the Hasidic court, and the world lost to the Holocaust. His characters, whether rabbis, skeptics, dybbuks, or ordinary people wrestling with faith and desire, embody the tensions between tradition and modernity at the heart of Jewish experience.
Singer received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature for his “impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.” He won two National Book Awards (1970 and 1974) and Newbery Honors in 1968 and 1969. His Jewish literary honors include the Louis Lamed Prize (1950 and 1956) and Israel’s S.Y. Agnon Gold Medal (1975). The Jewish Book Council selected his novel The Slave for its Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Fiction Award, the council’s top prize for English-language fiction of Jewish interest, in recognition of 1962 publications. A master of the short story, he is remembered for classics such as “Gimpel the Fool,” translated into English by Saul Bellow.