Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Manor orbits two Polish rebellions (1830 and 1863).
Author’s Note to the Original Edition
The Manor was written between 1953 and 1955. As with many of my stories and all my novels (with the exception of Satan in Goray, which I wrote while still in Warsaw), it was first serialized in The Jewish Daily Forward. Although The Manor was published many years after The Family Moskat, it portrays an earlier period—the epoch between the Polish insurrection of 1863 and the end of the nineteenth century. It was the era of gas lamps, the time when the Poles had finally become resigned to their loss of independence and turned to a kind of national positivism. Poland now began to emerge as an industrial country; railroads were built, factories were opened, and the cities grew rapidly. The Jews, who until 1863 for the most part still lived in a ghetto atmosphere, now began to play an important role in Polish industry, commerce, the arts and sciences. 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.
The Estate, a sequel to and the conclusion of The Manor, ends in the last years of the nineteenth century—an epoch when humanism undertook to practice what it had preached for generations. What happened in the village of Jampol, and what was discussed by a small group of self-educated youths in furnished rooms in Warsaw, became the basis of the social upheavals and the terrible disillusions of our present time.
Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Manor. Avon Books, 1979.
If you look at his sentence above describing “All the spiritual and intellectual ideas”, you may start to see what we describe as the long fuse of history. When we are in the present, a lot of the issues from the past emerge again in the future. Reality is such that there is no permanent yesterday.
The novel is also haunted by another kind of deep change, the rise of the world market or globalization.
The novel’s protagonist, Jacoby, acquires a hill, which allows him to begin his fortune with a quarry:
The peasants complained that the Jew was contaminating the Polish countryside, putrefying the air, but the authorities ignored them. Poland, after the insurrection, was full of activity, as if awakened from a long slumber. Workshops sprang up, mines were dug, forests cut down, and railroads built. Polish products, textiles, leather goods, brushes, sieves, sheepskin coats, glassware appeared on the world market. As soon as the Jews were granted permission to reside freely in the cities, the country began to grow.
It was said that Calman had been blessed by a holy man. A building boom was in progress, and his lime quarry yielded immense profits. Scores of Jews and Gentiles earned their livelihood from it. Calman purchased horses and wagons and built a smithy. As if all this were not enough, the Russian government decided to build a railway line through Jampol. …
Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Manor. Avon Books, 1979. p. 9.
Accompanying the rebellions and the commerce are a set of perpetual questions that have yet to be definitively answered.
Does a live carp suffer agonies when it is scaled and cut to pieces for the Sabbath meal? Why are some people poor and others rich? What was there before the universe? Does a goat have a soul? Was Adam a Jew? Did Eve wear a bonnet? And he was constantly finding contradictions in the Holy Writ, pointing out that in one place it is stated that a man is punished only for his own sins, but in another, that the third and fourth generations must suffer for them; and first the Lord is said to be invisible, then it is written that the elders while they ate and drank saw the Lord. For another thing, Ezriel criticized the prophet Elisha for causing the children to be attacked by bears; the boy felt bitterly reproachful toward King David for slaying Uriah the Hittite, and he wept and blasphemed when he read how Abraham sent his concubine Hagar into the desert with nothing but a jug of water, and how she almost perished of thirst.
Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Manor. Avon Books, 1979. pp. 23-24.
Consider specifically the question of what was before the universe. Today our greatest cosmologists and physicists continue to ask this very question. This confirms a famous quote from William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”