Descent into Abaddon

THE FAMILY MOSKAT by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 611 pages. Farrar, Straus & G/roux. $5.95.

Isaac Singer, who was born in Poland and now lives in New York, has been comfortably labeled the greatest living master of Yiddish prose--a judgment that is a kind of dismissal. But The Family Moskat, unavailable for many years and now reissued, makes clear his right to stand among the important contemporary novelists of any creed or any language.

Its setting is ostensibly remote--Warsaw's 600-year-old ghetto. And Singer's novel might be read only as a superbly vivid chronicle of its last years, from just before World War I, when dwarfs still sold whips for naughty children in the streets, to the outbreak of World War II, when its destroyed people stared into its shattered ruins as if into Abaddon, the bottomless pit of hell.

But it is also a story of what has been lost in the passing of a stable old way of life--and what was gained and not gained by the new. This equation is viewed with neither regret nor reproach. The story is principally told through its varied, vivid characters. Reb Meshulam Moskat is a patriarch with a talent for victory, who manages his business and his family with a high, old-fashioned hand. But not without opposition. "I spin and I spin and nothing comes of it. I've had two wives, seven children, given out dowries, supported sons-in-law. It's cost me millions! And what have I got? A bunch of enemies, gluttons, parasites." His moody granddaughter, one of the new wave, reads Strindberg, rejects the suitor whom the old man selects for her. She chooses defiantly an impecunious intellectual who talks but cannot act, who admits he is "without God, without a goal, without a skill," who has spent his life running away from life. He marries her, fathers her child, ends by neglecting them both. But when the Germans attack Warsaw in 1939, "the eternal deserter" chooses to remain with his people, to accept life by accepting death.

Author Singer's deep-running narrative makes a microcosm of the Warsaw ghetto. Reminiscent in scope of the great Russian novels of the 19th century, his novel moves with the leisure of abundance--eddying, pausing, plunging. Its surface ripples with passages of delicate description, trenchant dialogue and precisely observed detail; its depths roll forward with the heavy, hidden surge of life itself.

With passionate impartiality, the book exploits its period to reveal the agonized encounter of traditional Judaism and contemporary reality. Solution there is none. But the reader will better understand what it means to be a Jew--or a man. "Never fear the sensational, the perverse, the pathological, the mystical," says Singer. "Life has no exceptions."

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