The Tsaddik of the Seven Wonders: Into the Archive

The Tsaddik of the Seven Wonders … Isadore Haiblum

The Tsaddik of the Seven Wonders (1971; this edition 1981) has been described as a Hitchhiker’s Guide-style science-fantasy romp through Jewish history. First published in the Ballantine Books Adult Fantasy series, it was nominated for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award in 1972.

I first became interested in it as a volume in the series of BB Adult Fantasy; it was one of the original works (like Katherine Kurtz’s first Deryni book, or Joy Chant’s Red Moon, Black Mountain) that were printed along with established Fantasy classics. It seemed a somewhat obscure volume, and my curiosity was peaked. While the Ballantine book was a little pricey to blindly expend funds upon, this Doubleday reprint was much more within reach. If the story was good, what would be the difference?

It was just as well that I did. To tell the truth, Tsaddik seems a little scanty to qualify as a ‘romp’; perhaps they were trying to describe the jumpy nature of the narration. It is told by three different characters, and their voices are so similar it is hard sometimes to remember who is speaking. In a multiverse run by an omnipresent and powerful bureaucracy, it is up to the Tsaddik [Yiddish: ‘righteous man’ who can work miracles] and his associates to foil an attempt to destroy his timeline. Wackiness ensues.

Much has been made of its status as ‘the first Yiddish science fantasy novel’. I would be hard put to name the second; maybe that’s the joke. Amusing and entertaining in its parts, it is more like a series of skits than a story, and one steps off the ride wondering what one has just seen. The tale is indeed in the telling and not in anything that we are finally told. The presence of Greenberg, the homunculus, is made much of in descriptions of the book (he even appears on the cover), but he disappears quite soon, is gone for long swaths of the narrative, and only reappears at the end with little or no effect. Go figure. Maybe that’s the joke.

Isadore Haiblum kept publishing (science fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction) well into the early 2000’s, passing away in 2012.