Ventriloquism in Goray, or How Bashevis Found His Voice as a Dybbuk

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Satan in Goray constitutes a bold modernist experiment, reflecting a young author’s negotiation of aesthetic and cultural tensions. This article reframes the novel within the interwar trend of ironic appropriations of Jewish traditional genres, situating it alongside works such as Moyshe Broderzon and Al Lissitzky’s Sikhes Khulin (1917) and S. Y. Agnon’s The Bridal Canopy (1931), the latter serving as a central intertext. Both Agnon and Bashevis challenge European aesthetic conventions, particularly the norms of the Western novel, by transforming folkloric elements into a complex and innovative aesthetic language. This article focuses on Singer’s use of the mayse-bikhl storyteller, the dybbuk, and the wedding badkhn (jester and master of ceremonies) to illuminate how these traditional forms enabled him to articulate a distinctive and radically modern artistic voice. Through the ventriloquization of Jewish oral traditions, Singer enacts what the article terms a “barbaric disruption” of European literary norms, positioning Satan in Goray as a landmark of Jewish modernist innovation and a profound assertion of cultural otherness.