is a writer of far greater than ordinary powers.' As Milton Hindus wrote in The New York Times Book Review, 'The pathos of the ending may move the reader to tears, but they are not sentimental tears.

As such, it belongs on a small shelf with such mid-century classics as Rabbit, Run The Adventures of Augie March and The Moviegoer. At its heart, this is a book about the burden of sexual freedom.

Set in Warsaw and the shtetls of the 1870s-but first published in 1960-Isaac Bashevis Singer's second novel hides a haunting psychological portrait inside a beguiling parable. Now, though, his exploits are catching up with him, and he is tempted to make one final escape-from his wife and his homeland and the last tendrils of his father's religion. For Yasha is an escape artist not only onstage but in life, a man who lives under the spell of his own hypnotic effect on women. Half Jewish, half Gentile, a freethinker who slips easily between worlds, Yasha has an observant Jewish wife, a Gentile assistant who travels with him, and a mistress in every town. Yasha Mazur is a Houdini-like performer whose skill has made him famous throughout eastern Poland.

Where that used clear-eyed tender realism to point toward ambiguity of experience and mystery, Golan overdramatises, tips into hysteria, and substitutes a specious mysticism that is sadly literal.The fiftieth anniversary of a lost classic-a deceptively sophisticated tale of sexual compulsion and one man's flight from love Time Out London: 'Golan's treatment, with its mixture of art house pretensions and vulgarity, founders at precisely those points where it departs from Isaac Bashevis Singer's original Yiddish novel. The film was a box office and critical failure. The title song The Magician was performed by Kate Bush. His burned out manager/impresario Wolsky (Lou Jacobi) arranges for him to have one more chance at theatrical success, which requires that he pull off the trick of a lifetime in a Warsaw theater. Nearly everywhere he goes, Yasha has a local girlfriend, from the youthful Zeftel (Valerie Perrine), to the feisty Elizabeta (Shelley Winters). He tours through eastern Europe for his show while at the same time destroying his own career progressively through his personal problems. In the story, Yasha Mazur (played by Alan Arkin) is a turn-of-the-20th-century Jewish stage magician, conman and mystic. The film is based on the novel 'The Magician Of Lublin' by Isaac Bashevis Singer. 1979 film co-written and directed by Menahem Golan.

The magician of lublin book