After the Khmelnytsky massacres, in which his wife and three children were murdered by Cossacks, Jacob is sold as a slave to gentile peasants in the southern Polish mountains.

In his dream, Wanda is pregnant and asks Jacob why he abandoned her and left the child in her womb to be raised by gentiles.

In Pilitz, Wanda becomes known as 'Sarah' and Jacob instructs her to be pretend that she is deaf and mute so as not to reveal her gentile origins.

Frustrated at the predictions of her death openly discussed around her, Sarah has enough, demanding to be able to die in peace and pointing out the hypocrisy the townsfolk.

The book's setting during the aftermath of the Khmelnytsky massacres could be seen as a historical parallel to what many American Jews were thinking and feeling during the early 1960s.

The Jews of Pilitz in The Slave make a point of keeping commandments between man and God, but many treat Sarah and Jacob in ways that does not square well with Jewish ideals.

[1] Writing in the New York Times, Orville Prescott called the novel a 'Jewish Pilgrim's Progress', in which the hero keeps his faith despite all setbacks.

[4] Rafael Broch[5] notes how the purity of the rural scene and of the hero's faith contrast with the vulgarity of the 'lewd peasants and prejudiced landowners'.