One way to read IB Singer's The Slave is to consider it thus: it was written by an American after the Second World War, by someone who did not survive the Shoah, and even though the novel's events take place during the 1600s, the fact that they focus on crimes perpetuated against Jews makes the book a piece of Holocaust Literature. This means that the memory of the gas chambers are forever stamped in the brains of all Jews of all future time; it is a universally Jewish event that binds us together through suffering and the remembrance thereof (as have many events throughout our long, horrible history). Writing about the pogroms in Poland in the 17th century was Singer's way of experiencing the Holocaust, and he had to grapple with its effects in order to write the novel; this entails the classic plot of man's search for meaning in the wake of disaster.
To think that Singer's link to the Holocaust is disingenuous would be unfair; he was born in Poland and lost family in the war. But these ties do not account for the high percentage of Jewish fiction writers who focus on the Holocaust: Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan Foer being several among many. Critics say the Shoah is an event with which every Jew (and especially the literary ones, as we can see) must grapple and make sense of, if possible.
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