The Family Moskat
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Summary
The novel opens with Meshulam Moskat, an aging, wealthy patriarch presiding over a large, sprawling Jewish family in Warsaw, and follows that family through the first four decades of the twentieth century as it argues, marries, prospers and slowly comes apart. At the center of it is Asa Heshel Bannet, a brilliant but unworldly young man drawn into the Moskat orbit through Hadassah, one of Meshulam's granddaughters, already promised to a man named Fishel Kutner. Asa Heshel and Hadassah fall into a love neither of them is free to act on, and each ends up married elsewhere instead, a decision that never quite settles either of their lives. They eventually reunite after the First World War, marry, and have a daughter, Dacha, but the reunion brings Asa Heshel restlessness and depression rather than the resolution either of them expected.
Isaac Bashevis Singer surrounds this central pair with dozens of relatives, in laws, business partners and rivals, each one pulled between faith, socialism, money and family duty, and he lets Warsaw's whole Jewish community, its synagogues, its arguments, its marriages of convenience, carry as much weight as any single plot. The novel does not build toward a tidy conclusion. As German bombs begin falling on Warsaw, Hadassah and her daughter Dacha are killed, and Asa Heshel survives the wreckage of the city he has spent the whole novel arguing with. Singer ends the book there, with the family scattered and its survival genuinely in doubt, refusing to soften what was coming for the world he is describing.
Reading it means following a large cast through ordinary domestic concerns, courtship, debt, religious observance, that only gradually reveal themselves as the last normal decades of a world about to be destroyed. It suits a reader with patience for a wide, slow moving family chronicle over a tightly plotted novel, since the accumulation of ordinary lives is the point, not any single one of them.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Isaac Bashevis Singer the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature for an impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life. The Family Moskat, which Singer began writing in 1944 after the death of his brother, the novelist Israel Joshua Singer, and dedicated to his memory, was serialized in the Yiddish language New York newspaper the Forward from 1945 before its full 1950 publication, and the citation's language points squarely at the world it describes.
Singer wrote and published first in Yiddish and translated his own work into English himself, working with editors along the way, and his Nobel lecture, delivered in December 1978, was largely an argument for the language itself, which he called the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity. The Swedish Academy's citation is unusual for naming a specific cultural tradition, a Polish Jewish one, rather than gesturing at a national literature, a choice made at a moment when Yiddish's own readership had been devastated by the Holocaust the novel's ending anticipates.