What Yiddish Says

ON A FEW OCCASIONS I have been asked who among the writers of the past half century I thought might be read a hundred years from now. I could think of only Isaac Bashevis Singer–chiefly because he is the single writer of our time who might as easily have been read a hundred years before his birth. And yet, most critics prefer not to delve into the reason behind Singer’s literary timelessness.

Born in Poland in 1904 and coming to America only in 1935, Singer wrote all his stories in Yiddish and had translators with greater fluency than he. Although his knowledge of English improved greatly over the years, Singer always spoke in a greenhorn’s accent. (“It is a rare mark of individuality to be a great writer in a language he speaks so badly,” wrote Paul Valéry of Joseph Conrad, who never lost his strong accent, either.)

That Singer wrote in the dying language that is Yiddish makes his case all the more interesting. Three volumes of his stories have now been collected and published in the Library of America. (The only other non-American-born writers in this canonical publishing enterprise are Vladimir Nabokov and Alexis de Tocqueville.) Singer’s devotion to Yiddish–the mameh loshn, or mother-tongue–was complete. He insisted it has “vitamins other languages haven’t got” and claimed that it is “very rich in describing character and personality, though very poor in words for technology.” In his Nobel Prize lecture of 1978, he remarked that the language captured “the pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience, and deep appreciation for humanity” of the Yiddish-speaking people among whom he came of age in Poland. And yet, in the same lecture, he claimed universality for Yiddish, averring that “in a figurative way Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, a frightened and hopeful humanity.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Leoncin, Poland, the son and grandson of rabbis. He grew up in an atmosphere of grinding poverty and conflicting piety. The conflict derived from the continuing argument between Singer’s father’s mystical tendencies and his mother’s more traditional, rationalistic Judaism; the poverty, from Singer’s father’s refusal to take a Russian-language examination required by Czarist law, so that, despite his considerable learning, he was forced to work as, in effect, a clandestine rabbi serving the poorest of Jews.

The central figure in the Singer household was his mother, Bathsheva, after whom Isaac took his middle name Bashevis. The daughter of a distinguished line of rabbis, a woman of genuine Jewish learning in her own right, she was, from all reports, a personality of great force. Singer was said to resemble his mother physically–small-boned, blue-eyed, and red-haired–and, some say, temperamentally; and he reverenced her all his days.

THE OTHER IMPORTANT FIGURE in Singer’s family life was his brother Israel Joshua Singer, himself a writer and for many years one of greater renown than Isaac Bashevis. The elder by eleven years, he wrote novels famous in their day, Yoshe Kolb (1933) and The Brothers Ashkenazi (1936), and died of a heart attack when he was fifty years old. The Brothers Ashkenazi remains a magnificent novel, one in which the villain is no less than the country of Poland and the first book in which I learned, a lesson often repeated, that the one thing the far left and the far right always come around to agree upon is hatred of the Jews. Although Isaac Bashevis would eventually achieve much greater fame than his brother, and although his talent was more various and fecund, he never came near writing a novel as powerful as The Brothers Ashkenazi.

In fact, Isaac Bashevis Singer is a great writer in part because of the plentitude of his production. Here he was lucky even in his misfortune. His family’s poverty caused the Singers to retreat to the backwaters to live, at one point with his mother’s father in the village of Bilgoray, where the intrusions of modernity were few, and later on Krochmalna Street, in the slums of Warsaw, where a buzz of urban tumult played out on the street, which Singer later referred to as “my literary gold mine.” In both the rural retreats and the intensely urban setting, the young and always observant Isaac acquired material sufficient to sustain him through a long career. His life in New York, to which he came in 1935, a life lived among the Jewish refugees from Hitler and Stalin, gave him yet more material.

Singer came by one of his major themes, the conflict between the religious and the secular life, as part of his birthright. Among Eastern European Jews, this conflict was brought to the foreground by the Haskalah, a period of great transition for the Jews of Eastern Europe. A delayed enlightenment, the Haskalah caused Western literature, philosophy, and art to impinge on traditional Jewish orthodoxy, a world hitherto contentedly self-enclosed within Torah, Talmud, and the commentaries of the sage rabbis.

As a boy and young man, Singer straddled both worlds. He was sent to a rabbinical seminary, and he spent some time teaching in a yeshiva in a Jewish village, but he did both with less than passionate enthusiasm. The distraction was his brother Israel Joshua, who was, so to say, Haskalah all the way. He had lived briefly in Russia, saw the Russian revolution at firsthand, and had an instinctive revulsion for the lives of the shtetl Jews; in a memoir, I.J. Singer, describing these lives, refers to “the stink of religion,” an unforgettable phrase. Living with the unrelenting arguments between his older brother and their parents, Singer decided, at least at the time, that “all his arguments were very strong, while the arguments of my parents seemed to me weak.”

Through his brother, Singer got a job working as a proofreader for a Yiddish magazine, and fell in with the Jewish bohemian circles of 1920s Warsaw, a city that was then roughly a third Jewish. He began to publish articles and stories; he was a young man with many romantic entanglements. A relationship with a woman of revolutionary spirit produced a son, Singer’s only child. The mother of the boy took him off to Russia and then to Israel. Singer himself emigrated to the United States, where his brother had arranged a job for him on the Yiddish-language Jewish Forward.

FOR SOMETHING LIKE an eight-year stretch, Singer, this most productive of writers, felt himself blocked after his arrival in the United States, producing only driblets of negligible journalism. Some claimed that the shadow of his more famous brother eclipsed him and that he only began to come into his own at his brother’s death in 1943. More likely, he was stunned by the sheer force and energy of America; he found American character incomprehensible. He felt torn from his old world and his linguistic roots: He had a smattering of Hebrew, Polish, and German, but spoke only Yiddish. He was already thirty and quite without prospects of any kind. “In reality,” as he told Richard Burgin, in Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer, “I considered myself a has-been writer, an ex-writer, a writer who lost both the power and the appetite for writing.”

The writing of his family-chronicle novel The Family Moskat got him back on track; the fact that the novel was being serialized in the Jewish Forward, with the pressure of a new chapter required every week, kept him there. The book was eventually translated and published in English by Alfred A. Knopf, though originally in a much-cut version. In 1952, Partisan Review published his story “Gimpel the Fool,” in a translation said to have been done in a few hours by Saul Bellow, and soon after the New York intellectuals took him up, though he never took them up. Not long afterward Cecil Hemley, the chief editor and publisher of the small and distinguished Noonday Press and one of those self-effacing friends of literature, arranged for a translation of Singer’s first novel, Satan in Goray, and brought out a volume of his stories. When Farrar Straus, and Giroux acquired Noonday Press, Hemley took Singer along. In 1967, he made a New Yorker connection, becoming the first writer the magazine published regularly in translation. Eleven relentlessly productive years later, Singer won the Nobel Prize.

AT FIRST, a serious attempt was made to sell Singer as a modernist writer. Some claimed that religion formed no more than a background in his fiction, and that his novels and stories worked out only that modern trinity of the Freudian id, ego, and superego. Others claimed that “there’s a religious dimension to his writing that is remarkably modern.” The critic Morris Dickstein said that Singer “had a vision of life that promoted the idea that we should live all we can and live out our desires, even though it may lead us to be kind of shadows who are just dancing around in a void. Both a gloomy, grim, dark philosophy at the same time–one that had to do with a very positive view of living in the moment, and particularly about living sexually.” If this reading were true, Isaac Bashevis Singer would be a much lesser writer than I believe he is.

But, then, Singer and sex is a subject unto itself. In various interviews, Singer has said that the best story is a love story. Oddly, he himself tended to write not about love but about passion, which is far from the same thing. As a character in his “The Beard” tells the story’s Singer-like narrator, “You write about love, but you don’t know what it is. Forgive me, but you describe passion, not love, which makes sacrifices and ripens over the years.” Perhaps the best critic of Singer was Singer himself, in such squibs provided in his own stories.

Religious zeal is another realm that fascinated Singer. In his story “Passions,” he describes a man who one night leaves his little house in the village of Radoszyce in Poland and walks all the way to Jerusalem; another man, a tailor, owing to a contretemps in synagogue, enters into a wager that requires him to become a serious scholar within a year; still another man decides to treat every day as if it were Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement: “Everything can become a passion, even serving God,” is the story’s final sentence.

But the main passion on display in Singer’s stories and novels is usually the sexual one. His characters are inevitably swept up in the pure heat of desire, whose first consequence is to cause them to abandon duty to family, to community, above all to God. They throw away everything in the blind certainty that their pleasure in the objects of their passion will endure forever. The sheer sexiness of Singer’s writing is one of the many things that infuriated his fellow refugee Yiddish writers, though not so much, one suspects, as did the envy they felt at his immense success in America.

SINGER HIMSELF, a small, alopeciac man with striking blue eyes who tended to dress in the greenhorn style of mismatched colors and small outrageous touches–one of my favorites was his apparent weakness for polka-dot shirts–was nonetheless, by all accounts, what used to be known as “a real ladies man” and what continues to be known as a “chaser.”

Everyone has a story about Singer’s activities in this line. My own derives from a woman who told me that Singer came up to her, in an empty college auditorium an hour or so before a reading he was to give, to ask if she was Jewish and, if so, where her family was from. She replied that she was indeed Jewish and her family was from Bialystok. Singer told her that he knew a great deal about Bialystok and would like to know more about her family. He suggested they meet after the reading.

HE HAD BEEN GIVEN TWO ROOMS in the building in which he had earlier read. In the sitting room there were a couch, a few chairs, a table upon which was a bowl filled with fruit. They sat on opposite ends of the couch. Singer asked the woman–she was then in her thirties, he perhaps in his late sixties–to tell him what she knew about her family history. She recounted what little knowledge she had for perhaps four or five minutes, when Singer, leaning toward her, made his move:

“Do you mind,” he asked, in his immigrant’s accent, “if I kiss you?”

“Oh, Mr. Singer,” she said, “I’m very honored you would ask, but I’ve just begun a marriage and I don’t want anything to go wrong, I hope you understand.” (To me she said the thought of popping into bed with him “would have been like sleeping with my grandfather.”)

Singer put up a hand, palm outwards. “No, no, no,” he said. “Don’t vorry.” And, pointing to the table in the center of the room, he added, “Please, take some fruit to your husband.”

The point of this story is not its salaciousness, for it hasn’t any. The point is to recount that Singer’s knowledge of sin was not entirely theoretical. He was apparently one of those seducers who proceed on an actuarial basis, who tries all women on the statistical assumption that he might just strike fire and accepts defeat with the same equanimity as success. He was a married man, and if ever one wishes to see a face precisely describable as long-suffering, one cannot do better than gaze upon a photograph of his wife Alma. When Alma left her husband to marry Singer she also left her two young children, about whom, in the Singer biographies, one hears nothing further. Singer was parted from his own son for twenty years without, so far as is known, any strenuous attempts on his part to get in touch with the boy. Janet Hadda, one of Singer’s biographers, and not an unsympathetic one, remarks tersely: “He was a negligent husband, an unfit father, and he knew it.”

NOT ALL THE SIN described in Singer’s stories is sexual; sometimes it has to do with worshipping idols or following false messiahs, or being too zealous in one’s worship. Of his story “Pigeon Feathers,” the novelist Francine Prose has remarked on “its insistence on looking beneath the surface pieties of religion to examine the unruly hungers, obsessions, rages, griefs, and mysteries that faith and culture address.” I don’t happen to think Singer thought religion, at least the religion of Judaism, had any pieties that he would care to call “superficial.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer was a great literary artist, in the pure-storyteller division. But many critics who admire him are not quite ready to take his subjects seriously or accept his themes, preferring instead to find the modern note in him. In his story “The Briefcase,” the Singer-like narrator is to give a lecture titled “Is There a Future for the Literature of the Subconscious and the Absurd?” In the story the lecture is never delivered, but elsewhere Singer has supplied the answer to the question posed in its title, and that answer is No. Insofar as modernism in literature was connected with stream of consciousness, experiments in style, or the attempt to penetrate further in the realm of depth psychology through literature, Singer eschewed the entire enterprise. He thought Joyce’s Ulysses “almost boring,” never read The Sound and the Fury, and thought little of Samuel Beckett. Believing literature is an art without a history of progress, he thought the best novels and short stories were, with very few exceptions, written in the nineteenth century. He was non- if not anti-modernist, above all in holding that literature and culture would never replace religion; nor did he for a moment feel they deserved to do so.

FOR A MAN who claimed to care very little for style, Singer wrote wonderfully well. His English prose is winningly rhythmical, the rhythm playing out most attractively over the length of single paragraphs. He produced strong novels–Satan in Goray, The Magician of Lublin, Enemies: A Love Story are among the best of them–but his real mastery was in the short story. Four or five sentences into a story, and he has you hooked. He knew where life’s dramas lay, and he provided an endless cast of characters to work them out. He was in possession of all the perfect details required to make his stories live. No other writer could get one into a story more quickly. Here is the opening paragraph of “The Beard”:

And here is the opening of “Sam Palka and David Vishover”:

Once presented with these Pupkos and Palkas, one wants to know what Singer will do with them. Extraordinary things, it turns out, but none of it would have worked if Singer hadn’t understood that all good fiction is anchored in interesting character. “Something attracted me to that playful little man,” he writes about a character named Liebkind Bendel in the story “The Joke.” “Perhaps it was because I couldn’t fathom him. Every time I thought I knew him some new whim popped up.” Singer knew that character is endless in the richness of its variety, even if his characters come chiefly from the closely circumscribed world of Eastern European Jewry and those survivors of Stalin and Hitler who settled chiefly in New York, though also in Buenos Aires and a few other world capitals.

TO EVINCE AN INTEREST in character is, of course, to show an interest in human nature, a subject on which, despite the best efforts of science and social science, we remain in the same centuries-long state of high ignorance. For Isaac Bashevis Singer every human being was an exception who proved no rule. That ought to be the credo of every artist. Nor was fate, the mysterious chess game of life, any more easily understood. Explanations requiring elaborate abstractions leading onto clichés, a taste for which Singer found strong in Americans, only made things worse.

Philosophy did not, in Singer’s view, make them much better. As a younger man, he read a great deal of philosophy. He much admired Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and called the latter “a beautiful writer, a sharp observer of human affairs.” But the limits of philosophy for Singer were too strictly marked, and philosophy itself, as he told an interviewer, “a kind of learning in which you really have to believe.” Nor did philosophy speak to all the mysteries of life that beset Singer and with which he besets many of his most interesting characters. One among them, Hertz Grein, in Shadows on the Hudson, himself a former student of philosophy, claims that he went into a “field that has been bankrupt from the start–philosophy has been dead for two hundred years. . . . The riddle grows greater, not smaller, and there’s absolutely no way to solve it. It’s hopeless.”

Many who have written about Isaac Bashevis Singer’s fiction underscore the point that he writes about a world that has disappeared, by which of course they mean the world of pre-Holocaust Jewry. “They had perished in the ghettoes or concentration camps or had died in Russia of hunger, typhoid fever, and scurvy,” reads a sentence from the story “The Mentor,” and it could have been inserted in many another of Singer’s stories with a modern setting.

IN “PIGEONS” Singer wrote the most beautiful story I know about the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, it does not take on the subject directly but symbolically. The story has to do with one Professor Eibeschutz, a scholar who has taken to feeding the pigeons on the street below his apartment. He tells his Polish maid Tekla that doing so is more important to him than going to synagogue. “God is not hungry for praise,” he reasons, “but the pigeons wait each day from sunrise to be fed. There is no better way to serve the Creator than to be kind to his creatures.” One recalls here that, when asked why he had turned vegetarian, Singer said that he did it not for his own but for the chicken’s sake.

Like many another Singer character, the professor tends to shift into sub species aeternitatis, to ponder the meaning of the universe in the light of eternity. He recalls a passage in the Talmud in which Jews are likened to pigeons. “The pigeon, like the Jew, thrives on peace, quietude, and good will.” He also does not mind indulging in teleology, or the consideration of designs and ends in the universe. “It was not easy to have faith in God’s benevolence,” he thinks, “but God’s wisdom shone in each blade of grass, each fly, each blossom and mite.”

One day, while out feeding his pigeons, the elderly professor is set upon by a gang of anti-Semitic Polish thugs, and struck in the head by a rock. The injury results in his taking to his bed, where he withers and soon dies. The pigeons, in flight, follow the professor’s hearse to the cemetery: “their wings, alternating between sun and shadow, became red as blood and then dark as lead.” The story ends on this splendid paragraph:

Which brings me round to the question with which I began: Why I believe that Isaac Bashevis Singer is the only writer of the past fifty years likely to be read with the same interest a hundred years from now. The answer, I believe, is not that Singer is a marvelous storyteller, which he was; nor because his oeuvre presents the most complete record of Ostjuden life before it was obliterated by the Nazis, which it does. No, I think that Singer’s fiction will continue to live because he placed his powerful talent in the service of a great theme: the continuing drama of salvation, or finding acceptance in the eyes of God based on the way that one has lived.

This drama of individual salvation was once played in the mind of nearly everyone, from kings to peasants. The Enlightenment and all that followed from it has gone a long way to muffle it. But not for everybody, not for lots of intelligent people who cannot find their answers to life’s deepest puzzles in philosophy or science–and distinctly not for Isaac Bashevis Singer.

I DO NOT PROFESS to report on the state of Singer’s soul. Apart from his literary gifts, he seems not at all Godly and not exactly God-fearing. Perhaps “God-haunted” describes him best. The question of the existence of God, His design, His meaning, why He allowed suffering, such things were never far from Singer’s mind. He claimed to believe in God, to have “made peace with human blindness and God’s permanent silence, but they give me no rest.” He also claimed to feel “a deep resentment against the Almighty,” in good part owing to His permitting the Holocaust, in lesser part for being a silent God, revealing “Himself in very, very small doses, yet showing very little evidence of His mercy.”

But, more important, Singer was able to revivify the old drama of finding acceptance before God. His most powerful characters do so by acting with a benevolent, wise simplicity: characters such as Gimpel in “Gimpel the Fool,” Akhsa in “A Crown of Feathers,” the magician in The Magician of Lublin, and many others. Reformed sinners, simple good souls, some who turn their backs on the world, others who struggle earnestly to understand the meaning of life, all in different ways are put to the test, are players in the drama of individual salvation.

What makes Isaac Bashevis Singer’s fiction so immensely alive is that its author understood that nothing has successfully replaced this drama, with its sense that one’s actions matter, that they are being judged in the highest court of all, and that the stakes couldn’t be greater. No contemporary human drama has been devised that can compare or compete with the drama of salvation, including the various acquisition dramas: those of acquiring pleasure, money, power, fame, knowledge, happiness on earth in any of its forms.

Nor can the drama of progress in understanding the universe promised by science. As Hertz Grein in Shadow on the Hudson, a character who has fallen away from the religion of his fathers, and one of Singer’s questers, reflects: “What was the universe as Einstein or Eddington conceived it? A lump of clay packed with blind atoms rushing backward and forward, hurling themselves feverishly about.” In the way of personal drama, the best that science provides is that exceedingly dull, altogether predictable three-part scenario: life, death, and certain oblivion.

Meanwhile, Isaac Bashevis Singer, in a thoroughly secularized age, through the power of storytelling, can still persuade his readers that other possibilities exist and that life is not without meaning. Which is why his work will still live when that of the professionally sensitive, the socially engaged, and the literary trick-shot artists of our time is long forgot.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.