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Source: Encounter, March 1966.
Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
– Would it be fair to say that you are actually writing in a somewhat artificial or illusory context, as if none of the terrible things that have happened to the Jewish people during the last two decades really did occur?
Singer: Yes, very fair. There was a famous philosopher, Vaihinger, who wrote a book called The Philosophy of ‘As If’ in which he showed that we all behave ‘as if’. The ‘as if’ is so much part of our life that it really isn’t artificial... Every man assumes he will go on living. He behaves as if he will never die. So I wouldn’t call my attitude artificial. It’s very natural and healthy. We have to go on living and writing.
– But do you agree that at the heart of your attitude there is an illusion which is consciously sustained?
Singer: Yes.
No other living writer has yielded himself so completely and recklessly as has Isaac Bashevis Singer to the claims of the human imagination. Singer writes in Yiddish, a language that no amount of energy or affection seems likely to save from extinction. He writes about a world that is gone, destroyed with a brutality beyond historical comparison. He writes within a culture, the remnant of Yiddish in the Western world, that is more than a little dubious about his purpose and stress. He seems to take entirely for granted his role as a traditional story-teller speaking to an audience attuned to his every hint and nuance, an audience that values story-telling both in its own right and as a binding communal action – but also, as it happens, an audience that keeps fading week by week, shrinking day by day. And he does all this without a sigh or apology, without so much as a Jewish groan. It strikes one as a kind of inspired madness: here is a man living in New York City, a sophisticated and clever writer, who composes stories about places like Frampol, Bilgoray, [1] Kreshev, as if they were still there. His work is shot through with the bravado of a performer who enjoys making his listeners gasp, weep, laugh and yearn for more. Above and beyond everything else he is a great performer, in ways that remind one of Twain, Dickens, Sholom Aleichem.
Singer writes Yiddish prose with a verbal and rhythmic brilliance that, to my knowledge, can hardly be matched. When Eliezer Greenberg and I were working on our Treasury of Yiddish Stories, he said to me: ‘Singer has to be heard, to be believed.’ Behind the prose there is always a spoken voice, tense, ironic, complex in tonalities, leaping past connectives. Greenberg then read to me, with a fluency and pith I could never capture in my own reading of Yiddish, Singer’s masterpiece, Gimpel the Fool, and I knew at once (it took no great powers of judgement) that here was the work of a master. The story came as a stroke of revelation, like a fiction by Babel or Kleist encountered for the first time.
Singer’s stories claim attention through their vivacity and strangeness of surface. He is devoted to the grotesque, the demonic, the erotic, the quasi-mythical. He populates his alien sub-world with imps, devils, whores, fanatics, charlatans, spirits in seizure, disciples of false messiahs. A young girl is captured by the spirit of a dead woman and goes to live with the mourning husband as if she were actually his wife; a town is courted and then shattered by a lavish stranger who turns out to be the devil; an ancient Jew suffering unspeakable deprivations during the First World War, crawls back to his village of Bilgoray and fathers a son whom, with marvellous aplomb, he names Isaac. Sometimes the action in Singer’s stories follows the moral curve of traditional folk tales, with a charming, lightly-phrased ‘lesson’ at the end; sometimes, the spiral of a quizzical modern awareness; at best, the complicated motions of the old and the contemporary yoked together, a kind of narrative double-stop.
Orgiastic lapses from the moral order, pacts with the devil, ascetic self-punishments, distraught sexuality occupy the foreground of Singer’s stories. Yet behind this expressionist clamour there is glimpsed the world of the shtetl, or East European Jewish village, as it stumbled and slept through the last few centuries. Though Singer seldom portrays it full-face, one must always keep this world in mind while reading his stories: it forms the base from which he wanders, the norm from which he deviates but which controls his deviation. And truly to hear these stories one must have at least a splinter of knowledge about the culture from which Singer comes, the world he continues to evoke as if it were still radiantly alive: the Hasidim still dancing, the rabbis still pondering, the children still studying, the poor still hungering as if it had not all ended in ashes and death.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Radzymin, Poland, in 1904. Both his father and grandfather were rabbis, in the tradition of Hasidism, a kind of ecstatic pietism, though on his mother’s side the misnagid or rationalist strain of Jewish belief was stronger.
My father [recalls Singer] always used to say that if you don’t believe in the zaddikim [the ‘wonder-rabbis’ of Hasidism] today, tomorrow you won’t believe in God. My mother would say, it’s one thing to believe in God and another to believe in a man ... My mother’s point of view is also my point of view.
Raised in a poor neighbourhood of Warsaw, on Krochmalna Street, Singer received a strictly traditional Jewish education. He studied in a rabbinical seminary which was ‘a kind of college’ providing secular as well as religious studies. During his adolescence he spent three or four years in his grandfather’s shtetl, Bilgoray, which would later show itself as a strong influence upon his work. Bilgoray ...
... was very old-fashioned. Not much has changed there in generations. In this town the traditions of hundreds of years ago still lived. There was no railroad nearby. It was stuck in the forest and it was pretty much as it must have been during the time of Chmielnicki ... [2] I could have written The Family Moskat [a novel set in Warsaw] without having lived in Bilgoray, but I could never have written Satan in Goray [a novella dealing with seventeenth-century false messianism] or some of my short stories without having been there.
A decisive example was set by Singer’s older brother, Israel Joshua, who began to write in his youth and became a leading Yiddish novelist, author of The Brother Ashkenazi and Yashe Kolb. Throughout a distinguished career, I J Singer remained pretty much within the main lines of the Yiddish tradition, both as to moral and social attitudes, even though he was strongly influenced by contemporary Western writing, especially the kind of large-scale family novel popular in Europe at the turn of the century. Controlling the older Singer’s fiction is the Jewish community, both as social framework and source of values; his style, fluent, relaxed and smooth, can be taken as a model for cultivated modern Yiddish. The older brother represents that which I B Singer learned from, struggled with, and then mostly left behind.
In the Jewish world of Warsaw during the time Singer was growing up, a decision to become a secular writer meant a painful conflict with family and culture, a symbolic break from the paths of tradition:
It was a great shock to my parents. They considered all the secular [Yiddish] writers to be heretics, all unbelievers – they really were too, most of them. To become a literat was to them almost as bad as becoming a meshumed, one who forsakes the faith. My father used to say that secular writers like 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. In my family, of course, my brother had gone first, and I went after him. For my parents, this was a tragedy.
In these early years of the century Warsaw was a lively if troubled city, the main centre of Jewish cultural life. The binding tradition of Yiddish literature had already been set by the pioneer generation of writers: Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholom Aleichem, I.J. Peretz. It was a literature strongly devoted to problems of communal destiny and survival; characterised by a high, sometimes consuming ethical intent; closely tied to folk sources; drawing profoundly upon, even as it kept moving away from, religious tradition; resting upon a culture that might still be described as ‘organic’ and certainly as coherent; and yet displaying many signs of the influence of European, especially Russian, writing. In Warsaw the major social and cultural movements of East European Jewish life found their most sophisticated versions: Yiddishism, the effort to create an autonomous secular culture based on the language of galut; Bundism, the organisation of a distinctively Jewish socialism, and Zionism, potentially of great importance but at this point still weak. Peretz’s home became the gathering-place for young writers fresh from the provinces where the majority of Jews still lived; here, in this cosmopolitan haven, they could begin planning their novels and stories about the overwhelming memory of the shtetl, And the religious community, though now challenged from several directions and past the high point of its power, remained a major force within the world of the East European Jews.
Growing up in this feverish but immensely stimulating atmosphere, the younger Singer carved out a path of his own. He was not drawn to any of the Jewish movements: indeed, he has always been sceptical of the political messianism which, as a partial offshoot of the earlier religious messianism, runs through twentieth-century Jewish life. He edged away from formal piety, yet remained close to the Jewish religious tradition, especially its more esoteric and cabbalistic elements. And while a master of the Yiddish language – he is second only to Sholom Aleichem in his command of its idiom – Singer was neither a programmatic Yiddishist nor notably at ease in the world of Yiddish culture, which has in the main been secular and rationalist in stress.
As a youth Singer began to read in forbidden tongues, discovering E.T.A. Hoffman and Edgar Allen Poe in the libraries of Warsaw. The exotic romanticism of these writers stirred his imagination rather more than did the work of most Yiddish writers, who were then in a realistic or even naturalistic phase, and with whose materials he felt all too familiar. An even stronger alien influence was that of Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian novelist, who enjoyed an international vogue during the years before World War II. Hamsun’s novels, especially Pan, impressed upon the younger Singer the claims of the irrational in human existence, the power of the perverse within seemingly normal behaviour. Now, several decades later, it is hard to see much evidence of Hamsun in Singer’s work: perhaps it was the kind of influence that does not leave a visible stamp but instead liberates a writer to go his own way.
A still more alien influence – for a young Jewish writer fresh from the yeshiva, in influence downright bizarre – was that curious body of writings known as spiritualism or ‘psychic research’, which Singer somehow came upon in Warsaw and would continue to follow throughout his life. Could anything be more distant from the tradition of Yiddish literature or, for that matter, from the whole body of Jewish religious thought? Fortunately for his career as a writer, Singer has preserved a keen Jewish scepticism – in that department he is entirely traditional! – towards this branch of ‘knowledge’, taking the sophisticated view that belief in the reality of spirits provides his fiction with a kind of compositional shorthand, a ‘spiritual stenography’. As he remarks: ‘The demons and Satan represent to me, in a sense, the ways of the world. Instead of saying this is the way things happen, I will say, this is the way demons behave.’ Which is precisely what any cultivated sceptic, totally unconcerned with ‘psychic research’, would also say.
In 1935, convinced that ‘it was inevitable after Hitler came to power that the Germans would invade Poland’, Singer emigrated to the United States. He joined the staff of the Jewish daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper, in which he printed serious fiction under his own name and a large quantity of journalism under the pen-name of Warshofsky. His first major work, the novella Satan in Goray, appeared in Yiddish in 1935. Since then he has written full-scale novels, one of which, The Family Moskat, was published in an English translation in 1949, as well as a number of short novels (in English: The Magician of Lublin and The Slave) and several collections of stories. His best work has been done in short forms, the novella and the story: exciting bursts and flares of the imagination.
Isaac Bashevis Singer is the only living Yiddish writer whose translated word has caught the imagination of a Western (the American) literary public. Though the settings of his stories are frequently strange, the contemporary reader – for whom the determination not to be shocked has become a point of honour – is likely to feel closer to Singer than to most other Yiddish writers. Offhand this may be surprising, for Singer’s subjects are decidedly remote and exotic: in Satan in Goray the orgiastic consequences of the false messianism of seventeenth-century East European Jewish life; in The Magician of Lublin a portrait of a Jewish magician-Don Juan in late nineteenth-century Poland who exhausts himself in sensuality and ends as a penitent ascetic; in his stories a range of demonic, apocalyptic and perversely sacred moments of shtetl life. Yet one feels that, unlike many of the Yiddish writers who treat more familiar and up-to-date subjects, Singer commands a distinctly ‘modern’ sensibility.
Now this is partly true – in the sense that Singer has cut himself off from some of the traditional styles and assumptions of Yiddish writing. But it is also not true – in the sense that any effort to assimilate Singer to literary ‘modernism’ without fully registering his involvement with Jewish faith and history is almost certain to distort his meanings.
Those meanings, one might as well admit, are often enigmatic and hard to come by. It must be a common experience among Singer’s readers to find a quick pleasure in the caustic surfaces of his prose, the nervous tokens of his virtuosity, but then to acknowledge themselves baffled as to his point and purpose. That his fiction does have an insistent point and stringent purpose no one can doubt: Singer is too ruthlessly single-minded a writer to content himself with mere slices of representation or displays of the bizarre. His grotesquerie must be taken seriously, perhaps as a recoil from his perception of how irremediably and gratuitously ugly human life can be. He is a writer completely absorbed by the demands of his vision, a vision gnomic and compulsive but with moments of high exaltation; so that while reading his stories one feels as if one were overhearing bits and snatches of monologue, the impact of which is both notable and disturbing, but the meaning withheld.
Now these are precisely the qualities that the sophisticated reader, trained to docility before the exactions of ‘modernism’, has come to applaud. Singer’s stories work, or prey, upon the nerves. They leave one unsettled and anxious, the way a rationalist might feel if, waking at night in the woods, he suddenly found himself surrounded by a swarm of bats. Unlike most Yiddish fiction, Singer’s stories neither round out the cycle of their intentions nor posit a coherent and ordered universe. They can be seen as paradigms of the arbitrariness, the grating injustice, at the heart of life. They offer instances of pointless suffering, dead-end exhaustion, inexplicable grace. And sometimes, as in Singer’s masterpiece, Gimpel the Fool, they turn about, refusing to rest with the familiar discomforts of the problematic, and drive towards a prospect of salvation on the other side of despair, beyond soiling by error or will. This prospect does not depend on any belief in the comeliness or lawfulness of the universe; whether God is there or not, He is surely no protector.
He had worked out his own religion [Singer writes about one of his characters]. There was a Creator, but He revealed himself to no one, gave no indications of what was permitted or forbidden.
Things happen, the probable bad and improbable good, both of them subject to the whim of the fortuitous; and the sacred fools like Gimpel, perhaps they alone, learn to roll with the punch, finding the value of their life in a total passivity and credulousness, a complete openness to suffering.
Singer’s stories trace the characteristic motions of human destiny: a heavy climb upward (The Old Man), a rapid tumble downward (The Fast). Life forms a journeying to heaven and hell, mostly hell. What determines the direction a man will take? Sometimes the delicate manoeuvres between his will and desire, sometimes the heat of his vanity, sometimes the blessing of innocence. But more often than not, it is all a mystery which Singer chooses to present rather than explain. As his figures move upward and downward, aflame with the passion of their ineluctable destiny, they stop for a moment in the shtetl world. Singer is not content with the limitations of materiality, yet not at all indifferent to the charms and powers of the phenomenal universe. In his calculus of destiny, however, the world is a resting-place and what happens within it, even within the social enclave of the Jews, is not of lasting significance. Thick, substantial and attractive as it comes to seem in Singer’s representation, the world is finally but lure and appearance, a locale between heaven and hell, the shadow of larger possibilities.
In most Yiddish fiction the stress is quite different. There the central ‘character’ is the collective destiny of the Jews in galut or exile; the central theme, the survival of a nation deprived of nationhood; the central ethic, the humane education of men stripped of worldly power yet sustained by the memory of chosenness and the promise of redemption. In Singer the norm of collective life is still present, but mostly in the background, as a tacit assumption; his major actions break away from the limits of the shtetl ethic, what has come to be known as Yiddishkeit, and then move either backward to the abandon of false messianism or forward to the doubt of modern sensibility. (There is an interesting exception, the story called Short Friday, which in its stress upon family affection, ritual proprieties and collective faith, approaches rather closely the tones of traditional Yiddish fiction.)
The historical settings of East European Jewish life are richly presented in Singer’s stories, often not as orderly sequences in time but as simultaneous perceptions jumbled together in the consciousness of figures for whom Abraham’s sacrifice, Chmielnicki’s pogroms, the rise and fall of Hasidism and the stirrings of the modern world are all felt with equal force. Yet Singer’s ultimate concern is not with the collective experience of a chosen or martyred people but with the enigmas of personal fate. Given the slant of his vision, this leads him to place a heavy reliance upon the grotesque as a mode of narration, even as an avenue towards knowledge. But the grotesque carries with it a number of literary and moral dangers, not the least being the temptation for Singer to make it into an end in itself, which is to say, something facile and sensationalistic. In his second-rank stories he falls back a little too comfortably upon the devices of which he is absolute master, like a magician supremely confident his tricks will continue to work. But mainly the grotesque succeeds in Singer’s stories because it comes to symbolise meaningful digressions from a cultural norm. An uninstructed reader may absorb Singer’s grotesquerie somewhat too easily into the assumptions of modern literature; the reader who grasps the ambivalence of Singer’s relation to Yiddish literature will see the grotesquerie as a cultural sign by means of which Singer defines himself against his own past.
It is hardly a secret that in the Yiddish literary world Singer is regarded with a certain suspicion. His powers of evocation, his resources as a stylist are acknowledged, yet many Yiddish literary persons, including the serious ones, seem uneasy about him. One reason is that ‘modernism’ – which, as these people regard Singer, signifies a heavy stress upon sexuality, a concern for the irrational, expressionist distortions of character, and a seeming indifference to the humane ethic of Yiddishism – has never won so strong a hold in Jewish culture as it has in the cultures of most Western countries. For the Yiddish writers, ‘modernism’ has been at best an adornment of manner upon a subject inescapably traditional.
The truly ‘modern’ writer, however, is not quite trustworthy in relation to his culture. He is a shifty character by choice and need, unable to settle into that solid representativeness which would allow him to act as a cultural ‘spokesman’. And to the extent that Singer does share in the modernist outlook he must be regarded with distrust by Yiddish readers brought up on such literary ‘spokesmen’ as Peretz, Abraham Reisen and H Leivick. There is no lack of admiration among Yiddish readers for Singer’s work: anyone with half an ear for the cadence and idiom of that marvellous language must respond to his prose. Still, it is a qualified, a troubled admiration. Singer’s moral outlook, which seems to move with equal readiness towards the sensational and the ascetic, is hardly calculated to put Yiddish readers at their ease. So they continue to read him, with pleasure and anxiety.
And as it seems to me, they are not altogether wrong. Their admiring resistance to Singer’s work may constitute a more attentive and serious response to his iconoclasm than the gleeful applause of those who read him in English translation and take him to be another writer of ‘black comedy’, or heaven help us, a mid-twentieth-century ‘swinger’.
The death of Satan was a tragedy for the imagination.
By and large Singer has been fortunate in his translators, but no translation, not even Saul Bellow’s magnificent rendering of Gimpel the Fool, could possibly suggest the full idiomatic richness and syntactical verve of Singer’s Yiddish. Singer has left behind him the oratorical sententiousness to which Yiddish literature is prone, has abandoned its leisurely meandering pace, what might be called the shtetl rhythm, and has developed a style that is both swift and dense, nervous and thick. His sentences are short and abrupt; his rhythms coiled, intense, short-breathed. The impression his prose creates is not of a smooth and equable flow of language but rather a series of staccato advances and withdrawals, with sharp breaks between sentences. Singer seldom qualifies, wanders or circles back; his method is to keep darting forward, impression upon impression, through a series of jabbing declarative sentences. His prose is free of ‘literary’ effects, a frequent weakness among Yiddish writers who wish to display their elegance and cultivation. And at the base of his prose is the oral idiom of Yiddish, seeded with ironic proverbs and apothegms (‘shoulders are from God, and burdens too’); but a speech that has been clipped, wrenched, syncopated.
What is most remarkable about Singer’s prose is his ability to unite rich detail with fiercely compressed rhythms. For the translator this presents the almost insuperable problem of how to capture both his texture and his pace, his density of specification and his vibrating quickness. More often than not, even the most accomplished translator must choose between one effect and the other, if only because the enormous difficulty of rendering Yiddish idiom into another language forces him either to fill out or slow down Singer’s sentences.
By its very nature, pace cannot be illustrated, but the richness of Singer’s detail can, as in this characteristic passage from The Old Man:
His son had died long before, and Reb Moshe Ber said the memorial prayer, kaddish, for him. Now alone in the apartment, he had to feed his stove with paper and wood shavings from garbage cans. In the ashes he baked rotten potatoes, which he carried in his scarf, and in an iron pot, he brewed chicory. He kept house, made his own candles by kneading bits of wax and suet around wicks, laundered his shirt beneath the kitchen faucet, and hung it to dry on a piece of string. He set the mousetraps each night and drowned the mice each morning. When he went out he never forgot to fasten the heavy padlock on the door. No one had to pay rent in Warsaw at that time ... The winter was difficult. There was no coal, and since several tiles were missing from the stove, the apartment was filled with thick black smoke each time the old man made a fire. A crust of blue ice and snow covered the window panes by November, making the rooms constantly dark or dusky. Overnight, the water on his night table froze in the pot. No matter how many clothes he piled over him in bed, he never felt warm; his feet remained stiff, and as soon as he began to doze, the entire pile of clothes would fall off, and he would have to climb out naked to make the bed once more. There was no kerosene; even matches were at a premium. Although he recited chapter upon chapter of the Psalms, he could not fall asleep. The wind, freely roaming about the rooms, banged the doors; even the mice left.
Or, in a more colourful vein, from The Last Demon:
[The last demon]... came here from Lublin. Tishevitz is a God-forsaken village: Adam didn’t even stop to pee there. It’s so small that a wagon goes through the town and the horse is in the market place just as the rear wheels reach the toll gate. There is mud in Tishevitz from Succoth until Tishe b’Ov. The goats of the town don’t need to lift their beards to chew at the thatched roofs of the cottages. Hens roost in the middle of the streets. Birds build nests in the women’s bonnets. In the tailor’s synagogue a billy goat is the tenth in the quorum.
Or, grotesquely, from Blood:
Frequently she sang for hours in Yiddish and in Polish. Her voice was harsh and cracked and she invented the songs as she went along, repeating meaningless phrases, uttering sounds that resembled the cackling of fowl, the grunting of pigs, the death-rattles of oxen... At night in her dreams, phantoms tormented her; bulls gored her with their horns; pigs shoved their snouts into her face and bit her; roosters cut her flesh to ribbons with their spurs.
Or, tenderly, from Gimpel the Fool:
I was an orphan. My grandfather who brought me up was already bent towards the grave. So they turned me over to a baker, and what a time they gave me there! Every woman or girl who came to bake a batch of noodles had to fool me at least once. ‘Gimpel, there’s a fair in heaven; Gimpel, the rabbi gave birth to a calf in the seventh month; Gimpel, a cow flew over the roof and laid brass eggs.’ A student from the yeshiva came once to buy a roll, and he said, ‘You, Gimpel, while you stand here scraping with your baker’s shovel the Messiah has come. The dead have arisen.’ ‘What do you mean?’, I said. ‘I heard no one blowing the ram’s horn.’ He said, ‘Are you deaf?’ And all began to cry, ‘We heard it, we heard ...’
To tell the truth, I knew very well that nothing of the sort had happened, but all the same, as folks were talking, I threw on my wool vest and went out. Maybe something had happened. What did I stand to lose by looking? Well, what a cat music went up! And then I took a vow to believe nothing more. But that was no go either. They confused me so I didn’t know the big end from the small.
Those of Singer’s stories which speed downward into hell are often told by devils and imps, sometimes by Satan himself, marvelling at the vanity and paltriness of the human creature. Singer’s arch-devil is a figure not so much of evil as of scepticism, a thoroughly modern voice to whose corrosive questions Singer imparts notable force in A Tale of Two Liars:
Are you stupid enough to still believe in the power of prayer? Remember how the Jews prayed during the Black Plague, and nevertheless, how they perished like flies? And what about the thousands the Cossacks butchered? There was enough prayer, wasn’t there, when Chmielnicki came? How were those prayers answered? Children were buried alive, chaste wives raped – and later their bellies ripped open and cats sewed inside. Why should God bother with your prayers? He neither hears nor sees. There is no judge. There is no judgement.
Using demons and imps as narrators proves to be a wonderful device for structural economy: they replace the need to enter the ‘inner life’ of the characters, the whole plaguing business of the psychology of motives, for they serve as symbolic equivalents and coordinates to human conduct, what Singer calls a ‘spiritual stenography’. In those stories, however, where Singer celebrates the power of human endurance, as in The Little Shoemakers and The Old Man, he uses third-person narrative in the closest he comes to a ‘high style’, so that the rhetorical elevation will help to create an effect of ‘epical’ sweep.
Within his limits Singer is a genius. He has total command of his imagined world; he is original in his use both of traditional Jewish materials and his modernist attitude towards them; he provides a serious if enigmatic moral perspective; and he is a master of Yiddish prose. Yet there are times when Singer seems to be mired in his own originality, stories in which he displays a weakness for self-imitation that is disconcerting. Second-rate writers imitate others, first-rate writers themselves, and it is not always clear which is the more dangerous.
Having gone this far, we must now turn again. If Singer’s work can be grasped only on the assumption that he is crucially a ‘modernist’ writer, one must add that in other ways he remains profoundly subject to the Jewish tradition. And if the Yiddish reader is inclined to slight the ‘modernist’ side of his work, any other reader is likely to underestimate the traditional side.
One of the elements in the Jewish past that has most fascinated Singer is the recurrent tendency to break loose from the burden of the Mosaic law and, through the urging of will and ecstasy, declare an end to the galut. Historically, this has taken the form of a series of messianic movements, one led in the seventeenth century by Sabbatai Zevi and another in the eighteenth by Jacob Frank. The movement of Sabbatai Zevi appeared after the East European Jewish community had been shattered by the rebellion-pogrom of the Cossack chieftain, Chmielnicki. Many of the survivors, caught up in a strange ecstasy that derived all too clearly from their total desperation, began to summon apocalyptic fantasies and to indulge themselves in long-repressed religious emotions which, perversely, were stimulated by the pressures of Cabbalistic asceticism. As if in response to their yearnings, Sabbatai, a pretender rising in the Middle East, offered to release them of everything that rabbinical Judaism had confined or suppressed. He spoke for the tempting doctrine that faith is sufficient for salvation; for the wish to evade the limits of mundane life by forcing a religious transcendence; for the union of erotic with mystical appetites; for the lure of a demonism which the very hopelessness of the Jewish situation rendered plausible. In 1665–66 Sabbatainism came to orgiastic climax, whole communities, out of a conviction that the messiah was in sight, discarding the moral inhibitions of exile. Their hopes were soon brutally disappointed, for Sabbatai, persecuted by the Turkish Sultan, converted to Mohammedanism. His followers were thrown into confusion and despair, and a resurgent rabbinism again took control over Jewish life. Nevertheless, Sabbatainism continued to lead an underground existence among the East European Jews – even (I have been told by shtetl survivors) into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It became a secret heretical cult celebrating Sabbatai as the apostate saviour who had been required to descend to the depths of the world to achieve the heights of salvation.
To this buried strand of Jewish experience Singer has been drawn in fascination and repulsion, portraying its manifestations with great vividness and its consequences with stern judgement. It is a kind of experience that rarely figures in traditional Yiddish writing yet is a significant aspect of the Jewish past. Bringing this material to contemporary readers, Singer writes in Yiddish but often quite apart from the Yiddish tradition; indeed, he is one of the few Yiddish writers whose relation to the Jewish past is not determined or screened by that body of values we call Yiddishism.
Singer is a writer of both the pre-Enlightenment and the post-Enlightenment: he would be equally at home with a congregation of medieval Jews and a gathering of twentieth-century intellectuals, perhaps more so than at a meeting of the Yiddish PEN club. He has a strong sense of the mystical and antique, but also a cool awareness of psycho-analytic disenchantment. He has evaded both the religious pieties and the humane rationalism of nineteenth-century East European Judaism. He has skipped over the ideas of the historical epoch which gave rise to Yiddishism, for the truth is, I suppose, that Yiddish literature, in both its writers of acceptance and writers of scepticism, is thoroughly caught up with the Enlightenment. Singer is not. He shares very little in the collective sensibility or the folkstimlichkeit of the Yiddish masters; he does not unambiguously celebrate dos kleine menshele (the common man) as a paragon of goodness; he is impatient with the sensual deprivations implicit in the values of edelkeit (refinement, nobility); and above all he moves away from a central assumption of both Yiddish literature in particular and the nineteenth century in general, the assumption of an immanent fate or end to human existence (what in Yiddish is called tachlis).
But again qualifications are needed. It is one thing to decide to break from a tradition in which one has been raised, quite another to make the break completely. For Singer has his ties – slender, subterranean, but strong – with the very Yiddish writers from whom he has turned away.
At the centre of Yiddish fiction stands the archetypal figure of dos kleine menshele. It is he, long-suffering, persistent, lovingly ironic, whom the Yiddish writers celebrate. This poor but proud householder trying to maintain his status in the shtetl world even as he keeps sinking deeper and deeper into poverty, appeals to the Yiddish imagination far more than mighty figures like Aeneas or Ahab. And from this representative man of the shtetl there emerges a number of significant variations. One extreme variation is the ecstatic wanderer, hopeless in this world because profoundly committed to the other. An equally extreme variation is the wise or sainted fool who has given up the struggle for status and thereby acquired the wry perspective of an outsider. Standing somewhere between dos kleine menshele and these offshoots is Peretz’s Bontsha Schweig, whose intolerable humbleness makes even the angels in heaven feel guilty and embarrassed. Singer’s Gimpel is a literary grandson (perhaps only on one side) of Peretz’s Bontsha; and as Gimpel, with the piling up of his foolishness, acquires a halo of comic sadness and comes to seem an epitome of pure spirit, one must keep balancing in one’s mind the ways in which he is akin to, yet different from, Bontsha.
The Yiddish critic Shlomo Bickel has perceptively remarked that Singer’s dominating principle is an ‘anti-Prometheanism’, a disbelief in the efficacy of striving, defiance and pride, a doubt as to the sufficiency of knowledge or even wisdom. This seems true, but only if one remembers that in a good many of Singer’s fictions the central action does constitute a kind of Promethean ordeal or striving. Singer makes it abundantly clear that his characters have no choice: they must live out their desires, their orgiastic yearnings, their apocalyptic expectations. ‘Anti-Prometheanism’ thus comes to rest upon a belief in the unavoidable recurrence of the Promethean urge.
What finally concerns Singer most is the possibilities for life that remain after the exhaustion of human effort, after failure and despair have come and gone. Singer watches his stricken figures from a certain distance, with enigmatic intent and no great outpouring of sympathy, almost as if to say that before such collapse neither judgement nor sympathy matters very much. Yet in all of his fictions the Promethean effort recurs, obsessional, churning with new energy and delusion. In the knowledge that it will, that it must recur, there may also lie hidden a kind of pity, for that too we would expect, and learn to find, in the writer who created Gimpel.
1.Biłgoraj in Polish. – MIA
2. Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Ukrainian; Bogdan Khmelnitsky in Russian. – MIA
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Last updated: 20 December 2024