Books: The Same Jacob

THE SLAVE (311 pp.)—Isaac Bashevis Singer—Farrar,Straus&Cudahy($4.95}.

Novelists who persist, in a secular age, in chronicling man's war and peace with God are quite likely to be artists, or at least men whose obsessions speak with the force of art; the hacks are more likely to follow the fashion, which is to whimper at Meaninglessness. The late Nikos Kazantzakis (The Last Temptation of Christ; St. Francis) was such a God-obsessed artist, and so, in a slighter and less intense way, is Isaac Singer, 57, a Pole (now a U.S. citizen) who lives in Manhattan...

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