Metro Communications – David Silber

In the shadow of one of the most brutal massacres in human history, a love blossoms between two people who should be enemies.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed in the Chmielnicki pogroms that swept the Ukraine in the late Seventeenth Century. Thousands more were raped, crippled and enslaved. In the acclaimed novel, The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature explores the fate of one such slave, Jacob, a learned Jewish man who has lost his entire family to the Cossack hordes and is sold to labor as a farmhand for a Polish family in a remote, mountainous region. The loneliness and sorrow might have killed him, were it not for the kindness shown him by Wanda, the young, widowed daughter of the family for whom he works. Although she is an uneducated peasant, she possesses a nobility of soul and a purity of spirit that draws him to her, and the two fall deeply in love. But how can love survive in a world where hatred, fear and superstition rule?

The Slave tells the story of a love so great that it can overcome blind hatred and rampant superstition, and of two people who cling to each other for safety even as the world tries to pull them apart, during one of the darkest and most violent eras mankind has ever known.