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August 27, 2004/Elul 10 5763, Vol. 55, No. 49
A new look at the Old World
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
I recall nights on the pullout sofa in my grandparents' cramped Bronx living room, lulled to sleep by the low hum of conversation from the kitchen in a language I did not know.
Perhaps they were talking about the old country, but stories about their lives before arriving in America were as sparse as my knowledge of the mamaloshen.
So when a new collection of Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories was released with much fanfare this summer, I considered a review reluctantly.
I had read one or two translations of the tales by the Yiddish master in college and had seen Barbra Streisand's movie version of "Yentl," but I was put off by Singer's demons, dybbuks and Old World otherworldliness. And like many second generation American Jews, I found little of shtetl life, and its aftermath in the Holocaust, endearing.
Yet the prolific, prodigious Singer, I was reminded by his publicists, was the seventh American writer, and only Yiddish writer, to be awarded a Nobel Prize for literature. He wrote in Yiddish, later translating his works into what he called "second originals" in English.
Beginning his American literary career writing for the Yiddish "Foverts," (The Jewish Daily Forward, now The Forward), he later attracted a widely diverse English readership; his stories appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire and Commentary, among others.
He became a literary force, who continued to write until Alzheimer's stilled his mind, and his hand, in the years just preceding his death at the age of 87 in 1991.
The new, ballyhooed collection of his short stories, edited by noted scholar Ilan Stavans and published by the prestigious Library of America Press, (three volume set, with "Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Album" included, $104.95 hardcover) marked the centennial of Singer's birth. Press abounded; I felt I needed to read Singer.
I opened up the first volume and began with "Gimpel the Fool."
I was hooked.
"Gimpel" is classic Singer, not only because the tale is brilliantly conceived, subtly layered with spiritual underpinnings and historical fatalism but because of the lore that surrounds it. The story goes that Saul Bellow, whose literary reputation was yet to be established, translated the original on an old typewriter in his apartment as a favor to Irving Howe, a noted critic of the day, as Singer read the original aloud in Yiddish.
The story appeared in 1953 in the Partisan Review to favorable reviews, breaking Singer's seven-year writer's block and assuring his future as a writer to watch - and read.
The story tells of the simpleton Gimpel who is cuckolded repeatedly by his wife but refuses to succumb to suspicion. He goes to the rabbi for advice and is told, "It is written, it is better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil. You are not a fool. They are fools. For he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses Paradise himself."
But when his wife confesses to her infidelity on her deathbed, Gimpel accedes to the devil's entreaties for revenge; only a vision of his wife suffering in the next world stays his hand. At the end of the story, Gimpel packs up his few things and becomes a wandering storyteller.
"The longer I lived, the more I understood that there were really no lies," Gimpel narrates. "Whatever doesn't really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year. What difference does it make?"
What difference does it make indeed - in this world or the next? And what say do we have in it anyway?
Singer's fascination with good and evil, with this world and the world to come, captures the immense turmoil of his times. He grew up in a crucible of change, the son of an impoverished Hasidic rabbi and maternal grandson of two generations of rabbis who hewed to a sterner, more traditional religiosity.
Part of his childhood was spent in Bilgoray, a tiny Polish village steeped in folk tradition and superstition, and part in Warsaw, where Singer was exposed to the burgeoning intellectualism of the Jewish enlightenment. He studied Torah and Talmud at cheder, read Tolstoy and Spinoza at night, later becoming part of a tight-knit group of young Yiddish writers in Warsaw, "The Gang." He followed his older brother, Israel Joshua, also a writer, to America in the mid-1930s, landing his first job as a proofreader at the Foverts. For Singer, his life, with all its conflict and contradiction, animated his art.
Consider "The Mirror," where an imp entices a narcissistic wife to go with him - to the devil. Or "Crown of Feathers," where a young woman is persuaded to convert to Christianity after finding a crown of feathers in her pillow, only to regret her decision and seek to repent. Or "The Gentleman from Cracow," where an entire village is seduced by a rich doctor and his wealth only to find they have been deluded by the devil. Or "Memorial Candles," where a beggar tells of preparing a body for burial only to have the corpse awaken. Or "The Little Shoemakers," which tells of a shoemaker's sons who leave one by one for America and their father's unwilling departure after the Nazis arrive. He finds new life in the new land only after recovering his tools and setting about to repair shoes for his extended family.
Singer's gift is manifest in the simply told tales, often narrated in first person, in lean, unsentimental prose.
Later stories, and many of Singer's longer works, deal with the inherent conflicts of making a new life in a new land, especially for those who survived the horrors of the Holocaust. They are set on the Upper West Side of New York, where Singer and his wife, Alma, spent the majority of their 50 years together and Surfside, Fla., a Miami suburb where they maintained a second residence. "Shadows on the Hudson," serialized in The Forward in 1957-58, stories such as "A Wedding in Brownsville" and "The Cafeteria" capture the dislocation and disruption of both greenhorns and survivors.
"The Cafeteria" evokes a disparate group of "cafeterianiks," would-be writers, professors, artists, whose chance encounters over lunch at a local eatery lead to a loose confederacy. "One of them disappears and I think he is already in the next world," writes Singer, "suddenly he reappears and he tells me that he has tried to resettle in Tel Aviv or Los Angeles. Again he eats his rice pudding, sweetens his coffee with saccharin. He has a few more wrinkles, but he tells the same stories and makes the same gestures. It may happen that he takes a paper from his pocket and reads me a poem he has written."
A woman tells her story of failed attempts to recover war reparations, later revealing to one of the cafeterianiks that she has seen Hitler in the Broadway cafeteria. He suggests she go see the psychiatrist her lawyer suggested.
Later, he hears of a suicide.
"Years have passed and I have never seen Esther again," he writes. "Yes, corpses do walk on Broadway. But why did Esther choose that particular corpse? She could have got a better bargain even in this world."
Other stories speak of the hollowness of the New World and its shallow promise of assimilation. It is as if his characters, even as they make their way in this world, are mere specters of the old one now destroyed.
And, so when Singer was awarded the Nobel in 1978 and traveled to Stockholm to receive the prestigious prize, as described in Stavans' marvelous biographical album, he used his commemorative lecture to extol the charms of the Yiddish language. Two days later at the awards ceremony, he confided to the august assembly that he liked to write ghost stories.
"Nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language," he quipped.
Contact the writer here.
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