Although he is Jewish, Yasha is not terribly devout: "Yasha spent his Sabbath talking and smoking cigarettes among musicians. Yasha Mazur, a magician from the Polish city of Lublin, travels the country performing for audiences. In a 2010 review commemorating the book's fiftieth anniversary, The New Republic's Adam Kirsch calls the book's reissue "very welcome, because the novel is one of the clearest examples of the ways this modern urban intellectual writer makes use of the materials of the Jewish past." The story is set in the late 19th century when Poland was under the rule of the Russian Empire. In 1979, the book was adapted into a movie directed by Menahem Golan, starring Alan Arkin. Written in Yiddish, Polish-American author and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s historical novel The Magician of Lublin (1960) tells the story of a Jewish traveling magician in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland at the turn of the 20th century.
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