Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
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Contents of Vol. 1 no. 54
July 27, 1991
 
1) I.B. Singer (Edward Alexander)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat,  27 Jul 91 22:38 +0300
From: RWERMAN@HUJIVMS.HUJI.AC.IL
Subject: Singer obit.

Edward Alexander
Dept. of English, GN-30
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
tel. 524-7086; 543-6045.

                       ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER:

                      Rebel and Traditionalist

     Isaac Bashevis Singer, the celebrated Yiddish
writer who won the National Book Award in 1970 and
1974, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, and the
Gold Medal of the American Academy and Institute of
Arts and Letters in 1989, died on July 24 in Florida at
the age of 87.  A native of Poland, Singer came to the
U.S. in 1935, and became an American citizen in 1943.  

   The tale of his remarkable career is one of the most
improbable in all literature.  How did it come to pass
that this storyteller (as Singer liked to call him-
self), writing in a "dead" language (Yiddish) about a
vanished world (the Jews of Eastern Europe) not only
fashioned the most successful career in modern Yiddish
letters but became the only Yiddish writer whose work
in translation has caught the imagination of the west-
ern (largely American) literary public?  "How had he
begun?" asks a resentful fellow-writer of Yiddish in
Cynthia Ozick's short story "Envy; or, Yiddish in
America."  "A columnist for one of the Yiddish dailies,
a humorist, a cheap fast article-writer, a squeezer-out
of real-life tales. . . . From this, how did he come to
the New Yorker, to Playboy, to big lecture
fees, invitations to Yale and M. I. T. and Vassar, to
the Midwest, to Buenos Aires, to a literary agent, to a
publisher on Madison Avenue."      

     Singer's beginnings do not, at first glance, seem
well-suited to a literary career at all.  He was born
in 1904 into a world of almost medieval Polish-Jewish
orthodoxy.  His father, an impoverished rabbi and
Chassid, held rigidly to the conviction that the world
itself was treyf (unclean).  It was a function of
his father's unworldliness to condemn theater, the
visual arts, and literature as idolatrous.  Literature
might be supposed less offensive than painting or the
stage because it was, like Jewish religion itself,
oriented toward the word rather than the graven image. 
But Singer's father saw in literature, especially
Yiddish literature, the most potent threat of all to a
way of life in which every human activity--including
cooking, eating, wash-ing, praying, and lovemaking--was
regulated by reli-gious law.  "My father," Singer
recalled, "used to say that secular writers like [I.
L.] Peretz were leading the Jews to heresy. He said
everything they wrote was against God.  Even though
Peretz wrote in a religious vein, my father called his
writing 'sweetened poison,' but poison nevertheless. 
And from his point of view he was right.  Everybody who
read such books sooner or later became a worldly man
and forsook the traditions."

     Singer too would forsake the traditions as they
are commonly understood, for he was not a religiously
obsevant Jew; and he took up a calling that to his
father made him as bad as a meshumad (apostate). 
But the father despaired (as fathers are wont to do)
prematurely.  For Singer instinctively understood the
literary possibilities of the intensely traditional
life to which he had immediate access of a kind denied
even to writers older than himself.  They, still more
his contemporaries, could only revisit the rich social
and spiritual texture of the covenant-determined reli-
gious life nostalgically or through the collection of
folk materials.

     No more than Peretz or Sholom Aleichem was Singer
an unsophisticated folk artist.  He recognized, as they
did, that folklore is the soil on which literature 
grows best; and his rootedness in the old Jewish life
would make his books a bridge between the assimilated
Jews of America and the destroyed world of their ances-
tors.  But when critics like Irving Howe and Cynthia
Ozick speak of the unique recklessness with which
Singer surrendered himself to the claims of imagina-
tion, they mean something more than his ability to
write about the world of Eastern European Jewry as if
it were still brilliantly alive. They pay tribute to
him as a magnificent inventor of an imagined world, not
the curator of the artifacts of a vanished one.      

     It is the justified boast of Yiddish literature
that it was based on a peculiarly intimate relationship
between authors and readers for whom storytelling was a
commu-nal activity. When Peretz died in 1915 75,000
people came to his funeral in Warsaw, and Sholom
Aleichem's funeral in the following year was attended
by an even greater number in New York; such demonstra-
tions of popular affection were unmatched with respect
to any other modern writers.  Singer  never achieved
the status of these classical Yiddish masters within
the community of Yiddish readers, and was even looked
upon with some degree of reserve and suspicion by them. 
Yet he too began by writing only, as he put it, "for
people who know everything I know--not for the strang-
er."  He sternly resisted the uniquely Jewish form of
parochial-ism called "universalism," that siren call
which has lured so many Jewish writers to the self-
destructive waste of their talent in pale imitations of
western literature and endless returns to worn-out
bolshevist politics.

     "Assimilation," Singer said, "is poison from the
point of view of art, because . . . an artist is . . .
rooted in his milieu; he does not deny his parents and
grandparents."  Singer always saw himself as an old-
fashioned storyteller addressing an audience that
values stories for their own sake and as a unifying
agent of shared memories.  Content to speak as a Jew
instead of masquerading as "mankind," Singer made
himself heard not only among the Jews but everywhere.

     What Singer's readers hear is a writer who claimed
to be in the Jewish rather than the Yiddish tradition.
By this he meant that he eschewed the sentimentalism
and the espousal of "social justice" that characterized
much Yiddish writing. "The storyteller," he declared in
his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "must be an enter-
tainer of the spirit in the full sense of the word, not
just a preacher of social and political ideals."  In
pursuit of this aim, he opened himself to older sources
of inspiration in Jewish lore and thought, especially
mysticism. Singer resisted the role of cultural spokes-
man for his people; instead he created a body of work
that encompasses the old world, the new world, and the
next world, in both its upper and lower reaches.  The
supernatural pervades his writing and expresses his
belief in the power of the spirit over the body.  "The
Higher Powers, I am convinced, are always with us, at
every moment, everywhere, except, perhaps, at the
meetings of Marxists and other left-wingers.  There is
no God there; they have passed a motion to that ef-
fect."

     Singer's boundless curiosity about the "higher
powers" expresses itself in three kinds of stories: 
supernatural, apocalyptic, and moral. In the first
group, he uses Satan or some lesser demon as a symbol,
a kind of spiritual stenography. "Every serious writ-
er," said Singer, "is possessed by certain ideas or
symbols, and I am possessed by my demons."  Singer's
receptivity to the supernatural, and his consequent
desire to wrench readers out of their naturalist com-
placency may be seen in several stories (like "Jachid
and Jechida" in Short Friday) which play with the
idea that we die into life, trailing clouds of glory
from our divine home.  Such tales suggest the tenuous-
ness of our accepted standards and values, and the
strong possibility that what we hold to be the goods of
this world are really its evils, and what we suppose to
be its ultimate calamity, death, a release into the
only true life.  In Singer's symbolic geography, dark-
ness often has positive connotations--as if he meant to
suggest that virtue, like any other plant, will not
grow unless its root is hidden.  In his own way, Singer
could be as anti-Enlightenment as his Chasidic father.

     Closely related to the supernatural tales are
stories of apocalypse that express Singer's guilty
fascination with the messianic impulse in Jewish life
and his disapproval of the modern form of that impulse: 
political utopianism.  Here more than anywhere Singer
saw himself returning to Jewish sources that preceded
the rise of secular Yiddish literature in the nine-
teenth century. The novel Satan in Goray (1934),
set in 1648, explores the messianic longing of Polish
Jews reeling from the Ukrainian Bogdan Chmielnicki's
massacres, the worst that had ever been perpetrated
upon the Jewish people.  In their desperation they seek
the consummation of their ordeal through the agency of
a false messiah named Sabbatai Zevi, who encourages
abomination and blasphemy as the means to redemption. 
Singer is at once fascinated and repelled by Jewish
messianism, which, by stressing the inevitability of
cataclysm in the transition from historical present to
messianic future, encourages fanaticism, hysteria, and
disintegration.  These long-ago events were to become
an enduring paradigm for Singer:  "To me, Sabbatai Zevi
was the symbol of the man who tries to do good and
comes out bad . . . . Sabbatai Zevi is in a way Stalin
and all these people who tried so hard to create a
better world and who ended up by creating the greatest
misery."

     In Singer's moral tales the assumptions of a
religious way of life he had apparently rejected remain
a more imperious presence than the brittle doctrines of
new, secular faiths he (briefly) adopted. Although
Singer often declared (with feigned modesty) that
"literature will never replace religion" and that his
stories are not intended to "say" something, he has
just as frequently recalled that he was "brought up in
the categories of good and evil.  Almost nothing was
neutral. Either you did a mitzvah [good deed] or
you did an averah (sin)."  In the best of Singer's
ethical parables, we see the lingering influence of the
Chasidic ethos, which stresses deeds above good inten-
tions and intellectual grasp.  In such stories as "A
Piece of Advice" (The  Spinoza of Market
Street) Singer follows Peretz in singing the praises
of Chasidism for its joy, its openness to the Jewish
masses, and its moral efficacy; but Singer is also like
Peretz in that, finally, he can say nearly everything
in praise of the old faith except that it is true.

     Although Singer's tales about the conflict between
faith and doubt generally imply (as in the famous
"Gimpel the Fool") that belief of any kind, even to the
point of foolish credulity, is a good in itself, it is
clear that he had cast off the yoke of rabbinic Judaism
and the observance and self-discipline it entails. Yet
he remains a distinctively Jewish writer, mainly be-
cause he gives uniquely powerful expression to the
Jewish sense of memory.  He used to say that amnesia is
the only sickness from which Jews do not suffer.  By
this he meant not only that Jews remember what happened
in their own lifetime but that their memory stretches
back through the collective experience of their people,
even to its origins at Sinai. A recurrent scene in his
fiction is the eve of Tisha b'Av (Ninth day of the
month of Av), when Jews mourn the destruction of the
First Temple and all subsequent major catastrophes up
through (at least) the expulsion from Spain in 1492. 
Singer may be called the poet laureate of a Jewish
sense of the past that is archetypal and circular
rather than historical and linear.  His narratives
touching on the Holocaust, for example, view the Nazis
as merely the latest in the long succession of murder-
ous outsiders who have obtruded themselves upon Jewish
history.  "Yes," sighs the narrator of The  Fami-
ly Moskat (1950), "every generation had its Pharaohs
and Hamans and Chmielnickis.  Now it was Hitler."

     The stunning paradox of Singer's work is that, by
treating all these destroyers as indistinct repetitions
of one another, he is able to suggest that a nation
which has been dying for thousands of years is a living
nation.  His most beautiful story, "The Little Shoemak-
ers," which recounts Jewish catastrophes from the
seventeenth century through the Holocaust, is at once a
mourning over what has been lost and a celebration of
what has survived.  Such hymns to the Jewish power of
survival gain their special force from being built into
elegies over a destroyed civilization.  Singer's work
continually reminds us that the very first ancient non-
Jewish document to mention Israel is the gloating
report of Merneptah, king of Egypt, in 1215 B.C.E. that
"Israel is desolated; its seed is no more."  Singer's
fiction, written in a "dead" language about an appar-
ently dead civilization, is, like the modern state of
Israel, an expression of the Jewish capacity to make a
new beginning.

Edward Alexander is professor of English at the Univer-
sity of Washington in Seattle.  He is the author of
Isaac Bashevis  Singer:  The Short Fiction (G.
K. Hall, 1990).
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End of Mendele Vol 1.54