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March 9, 2001/Adar 14, 5761, Vol. 53, No.23
'New' stories emerge from 'Father's Court'
REBECCA KAPLAN BOROSON
Special to Jewish News
It's like finding buried treasure - 27 "new" stories by an old master, Isaac Bashevis Singer, consummately "Englished" by a modern master, Curt Leviant.
"More stories from My Father's Court," (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $22, hardcover) like the wonderful "In My Father's Court," chronicles the lost world of early 20th-century Polish Jewry. Though the earlier book, translated by various hands, is more or less in chronological order, and the young "Bashevis" the family historian, this is in many ways a portrait of the artist as a young man.
We, so many years in his future, know that the boy called Bashevis will become a Nobel laureate, one of the greatest writers of fiction in any age, and we see him store up material, images, sensitivities, spirit. He is, in Wordsworth's phrase, "a heart that watches and receives."
He sees, through the lens of his father's bet din, a father deprive himself ultimately of life so that a son may become a Torah scholar. He sees husbands and wives, engaged and disengaged couples, malign each other, some to part forever, some to reunite. He sees his parents' otherworldliness, and the all-too-worldliness of others.
And we see him - we see him listening at the door, hiding in a corner, and storing every overheard scrap.
In one story, "He Wants Forgiveness from Her," a man who had broken an engagement and married someone else years before asks Singer's father to intercede with his former fiancˇe and help him obtain a letter of forgiveness.
"They talk; the murmur," the young Singer observes, of the pair who reunite in his father's court after so many years. "Father waits, but he's impatient. The talking and murmuring of this formerly engaged couple smacks of sin."
Finally, Singer's father writes the letter in Hebrew and the woman signs it in Polish, the only language she can write - a telling detail of her worldly life - and the pair leave together.
"It seems to me," the older Singer writes of his boyhood perception, "that Father wants to call them back and warn them that they are not allowed to go together, but before he can say a word, they are already on their way downstairs.
"I run out to the balcony, waiting to see them emerge from the front gate. But it takes a long time and I don't know what to think. Did they remain in the courtyard? Are they inside the gate? Or perhaps I missed them and they have already gone.... Finally, they appear and he seems to be holding her by the arm. Not actually holding her, but supporting her elbow with his hand. Strange, how slowly they're moving..."
It's a universe of feeling expressed in a gesture that is perfectly observed, perfectly translated - into language itself, not merely Yiddish or, as now, English.
But the observer - we are actually glad to see - is still a boy, with a boy's vast and wild imaginings. The young Singer has "already read the romances of the popular Yiddish writer Shomer, and my imagination is working overtime. Perhaps, I think, the man wants to take her to his castle. Perhaps he is a count. Perhaps she, the woman with him, is in disguise. Perhaps he will shoot her with a pistol and then take his own life. Perhaps the entire matter of forgiveness is only a ruse. Perhaps I should run down to the street and follow them. But no - they would recognize me. I remember the money in my pocket and decide to go to Tvarda Street to buy myself a storybook. Not one, but two. Not two, but six."
The book is an amalgam of stories from the original Yiddish edition ("Bet Din") of "In My Father's Court" and never-translated stories from The Forward of the 1950s and 1960s that had been collected in an Israeli edition by the late scholar Khone Shmeruk. According to Ethan Nosowsky, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Singer's publishers for about 40 years, "one-third of the book was about the same period as 'In My Father's Court.'
"We realized suddenly that we had about a book's worth of stories," Nosowsky said in an interview. "The publisher, Roger Straus, in coordination with a couple of scholars and myself, contracted with the (Singer) estate to publish this new collection."
Leviant, the author of a number of highly regarded novels with Jewish resonance and a well-known translator of Yiddish and Hebrew classics, was chosen to translate the book "because of his impressive resumˇ," Nosowsky said, particularly vis-a-vis his Sholem Aleichem translations.
"Translating is an enormous part of bringing a book ... to a new audience," Nosowsky added.
Rebecca Kaplan Boroson writes for The Jewish Standard in New Jersey.
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