The Art of Isaac Bashevis Singer

During the last four decades, after the second world war, more Americans than other nationals had won the Nobel Prize. Even the one for literature. It was Saul Bellow in 1976; and Isaac Bashevis Singer a couple of years later. The second was rather more unexpected than the first. Never before in the history of the Nobel Prize for literature, were two American writers chosen in such quick succession for this rare honour. It is almost like Upton Sinclair succeeding Sinclair Lewis. Both Bellow and Singer are American Jews and both are writers of fiction. But while the former writes in English, though he knows Yiddish, the latter writes only in Yiddish, though he knows English well enough to revise the translations.

Singer is, therefore, strictly speaking, outside the American tradition. It is remarkable that Yiddish, which is used by such a small community of American Jews, has produced a writer of world standing. Feared to be a dying language, sentenced under the law of diminishing returns, it has come into the limelight because of a writer of proven dynamism, whose world view is instinct with a universal appeal.

The first thing to remember about Isaac Bashevis Singer the writer is that he is a Jew. His Jewishness is even more central to his fiction than Anglo-Catholicism was to the poetry of T. S. Eliot. He writes almost exclusively about the Jewish society. For the simple reason that he knows it best, being himself a part and parcel of it. He deals mostly with the Jews in Poland before the second world war or in the United States of America after it. At one time, nearly one-third of the population of Warsaw was Jewish, before it was squeezed out by Hitler, and there may now be a few million of them in the U. S., still retaining their cultural identity.

Born in Warsaw In 1904, Singer migrated to America in 1935, becoming an American citizen in 1943. He has been living in New York all these years. Son of a Rabbi, Singer was brought up in traditional and orthodox religious surroundings. He started writing quite early in life, winning a prize for one of his stories in 1925, when he was only about twenty-one. Those were the palmy days of Yiddish literature (Yiddish was spoken by the Jews settled in Germany, Poland and other parts of Central Europe.) Warsaw was the Mecca of Yiddish writers until the German invasion of 1939. To be a Yiddish writer in Warsaw, in the words of a well-known Jewish poet, was to be in the centre of things and feel on top of the world.

Since his arrival in New York, Singer tried hard to find his feet, locating himself finally as a regular contributor to the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper with a readership of about 50,000 or so. It was in this paper that all his stories are published and his novels serialised. He became known to the general reading public in America, when the eminent literary critic, Irving Howe, drew its attention to him in the ’Fifties and the periodicals, Partisan Review and Commentary, commended his work. Many of his stories were later published in New Yorker, always known to be choosy about its contributors.

An artist in the classical tradition, Singer has always been careful about the quality of his work and never allowed himself to dilute it for the sake of easy money or popular appeal. He is an impenitent conservative who writes about a close-knit rabbinical society, whose leaders have no doubts about the superiority of their way of life. Much of the interest for the reader in this lies in the tension caused by the rigidity of the inhibitions and injunctions and the strong temptation to break them on the sly, without openly flouting them. The love-hate relationship between the Jew and the Gentile, and the mutual impact of their life styles and the cultural patterns is also depicted with vivid realism, often lit by a tongue-in-the-cheek humour. In the conflict between a baffling variety of human uncertainties and the one and only divine certitude, the reader is left in no doubt about where the author’s own sympathies lie.

But neither the apparently limited range of the theme nor the unabashedly old world philosophy of the author, should make the least difference to the reader’s enjoyment of Singer’s work. For he is essentially a story-teller (like “Tusi Tala,” as R. L. Stevenson called himself), who seeks to entertain his readers. He has few illusions about the fiction-writer’s capacity to reform society or to improve human nature. That is why he told a correspondent in an interview, he would be happy to learn that somebody had spent an enjoyable hour with his novel on a train journey; but if anyone were to claim that he had opened a new chapter in his life, after reading his book, he wouldn’t believe him:

Singer is one with E. M. Forster, who said in his “Aspects of the Novel”that the prime function of a novel is to tell a story, “In the old times,” wrote Singer, “a writer knew he had to tell a story. Now, many writers cannot write a story at all. They give symbols or a patchwork. All tbis gekviteh un geshray (hue and cry) about symbolism is doing great damage.”

He is very critical about what passes for the latest tendencies in modern fiction. “Since modern literature tells little”, he remarks, “it goes deeper and deeper into commentary, into sociology and pseudo-psychology. If Homer had written the Illiadand Odesseyin terms of the psychology of his time, we wouldn’t be able to read them today. It is a wonderful thing that Homer gave us the story and let others decide the meaning.”

So does Singer himself, in all his works. Six of his novels are now available in English; the best-known of which are: The Magician of Lublin, Satan in Goray and The Family Mosket. Of the two dozen and more of his stories, translated in English, Gimpel the Fool, The Spinoza of Market Street, and A Friend of Kafka are the most familiar. Besides these, he has a collection of fictionalised memoirs, under the caption In my father’s court, and a number of children’s stories, like The Fearsome Inn, The Milk of the Lioness, Ziateh the Goat. Elijah the Slave and A Day of pleasure. In all these, one could see the master of the narrative technique, which transports the charmed reader into the delightful borderland of fact and fiction.

The illusions of his people are, for him, the illusions of mankind. They had built Warsaw and later New York and are now helping to build Tel Aviv and fighting to save the promised land. “The vandals who murdered millions of these people” he says, “have destroyed a treasure of individuality that no literature dare try to bring ” But Singer has done his best to recapture it and this world lives in his fiction. The Torah and the Talmud continue to guide the social mores, even when they are more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

The world of Polish Jews, of learned Rabbis in Gaberdine gowns, with their red beards and sidelocks, of synagogues, prayer shawls and phylacteries, as also of cheap prostitutes, and common felons, is vividly depicted in all its minute detail in the powerful novel The Magician of Lublin. It is the exciting saga of Yasha Mazur, master-magician (in the manner of the great Houdini), sceptic, clairvoyant, lover and illusionist, tight-rope walker and escape artist, apostate and finally the holy man. Born in Lublin and performing in Warsaw from season to season, Yasha finds the Polish capital too narrow and provincial for the full recognition of his undoubted talents and complete realisation of his high ambitions.

Like all the galivaunting heroes, familiar to the stories of oriental romance and adventure, Yasha is frankly polygamous in his instincts and revels in his conquests. They include Magda, his gentle maid-cum-mistress, Zeftel, the wife of an absconding thief, and Emelia, a Catholic widow of a professor, whom he falls in love with, besides his wedded wife, Esther, a seamstress, who worships him on this side idolatory. The constant wife, whom he easily pleases, after long spells of neglect, reminds the reader of the traditional Hindu wife. Even the words and sentiments sound so familiar to Indian ears, as, for instance, when she says to herself: “If only he comes to me, I shall gladly wash his feet and drink the water.”

Everything seems to go on well for the merry magician, who flourished on his wits and tricks, wiles and lies and bouts of generosity, until he overreaches himself in his attempt to break open an iron safe to grab the money needed for marrying the professor’s widow and migrating to Italy. But the plan misfires, as luck would have it, and the acrobat sustains a fracture in jumping down the wall. The loyal maid, Magda, commits suicide and the show in Warsaw is off. Rejected by the widow, and exposed to the world, he confesses his guilt and lands himself in a jail. His wife, the onlyperson, who stands by him, throws in her last penny to earn his release. But he is overcome by repentance, renounces the world and walls himself up. He is hailed as a holy man and people from far and near come to him for his blessing. He has at last attained the peace of mind that had eluded him all these years. His wife slaves for him and is happy that he is , though not at home with her. It is so much like an Indian story, where every sinner is a potential saint, and genuine penance helps him to purge all the sins.

There are some readers and critics, who consider his Satan in Goray (translated by Jacob Sloan, formerly Editor of Span)as the greatest of Singer’s novels. Sub-titled A Story of Long Ago, it moves into a semi-legendary past to draw a bead on contemporary reality. Described as an anachronism because of its antique properties, it is marked by a rare mastery of language, distinction of style and perfection of form.

But there is a quaint tenderness in the story, titled The Spinoza of Market Street, unparalleled in recent fictional literature. Dr. Fischelson, the scholar of Theology, spends almost all his life single, in trying to understand Spinoza’s “Ethics”,with little or no success. He is learned, otherworldly, poor, old and neglected. The most unexpected change in his life comes about when he is looked after in his sick bed  by an illiterate middle-aged house-maid, Black Dobbe, who establishes a rapport with him. Their dialogue throws a flood of light on his life and philosophy:

“Well, do you believe in God?”, he finally asked her.

“I don’t know,” she answered, “Do you?”

“Yes, I believe.”

“Then, why don’t you go to a synagogue?” she asked.

“God is everywhere” he replied. “In the synagogue, in the market place, in this very room. We ourselves are part of God.”

These words are almost the same as those spoken by the young prince Prahlada (in the story of from Srimad Bhagavatam) in reply to his father, the demon-king Hiranyakasipu, before he kicks at the pillar from which breaks out Vishnu in the man-lion incarnation of Narasimha. One is not sure if Singer is aware of the Hindu parallel to quite a few of the pre-Christian Jewish beliefs. But the family resemblance recurs every now and then in his stories. Singer, despite the cultivated naivette of an un committed observer, is too well-informed a student of theology and metaphysics to be unaware of some of the basic strands of Hindu belief.

In some ways, Gimpel the Fool is one of the most memorable of Singer’s short stories. Baker Gimpel, the hero, rather the anti­hero, is good-natured and gullible. Though he is cheated and ridiculed by everyone in the village, he does not give up his good­ness. He is cuckolded by his wife, Elka, who bears children, keeping him always at a safe distance, but he continues to love her. But it is the wife, who suffers and dies, like the mad dog in Goldsmith’s Elegy. His assistant in the flour mill pulls the wool over his eyes, and manages to share his wife’s bed, but Gimpel hears him no grudge. The villagers twit tim on his children sired by others. But he smiles it all away. Even the learned Rabbi, who knows his plight, can hardly help him out. It is only when, in a state of exasperation, he listens to the voice of the devil and tries to cheat his customers, (by mixing urine with the dought – sic)that he gets into trouble. But soon, he gives it up and recovers his original nature.

Gimpel is a fool in the medieval tradition, more sinned against than sinning, half-clown, half-saint, who bears his cross with an amusing smile, on his lips. He may recall to one’s mind Tolstoy’s Ivan the Fool. The situation is well-explained in his self-introduction:

“I am Gimpel the fool. I don’t think myself a fool. On the contrary, that’s what the folks call me. They gave me the name while I was still in school. I had seven names in all–­imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny and fool. The last name stuck. What did my foolishness consist of? I was easy to take in ..”

But he had his own philosophy of life – simple, steady, unambiguous, uncomplicated.

“No doubt, the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world...When the time comes, I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception God be praised; there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.”

The translation is done by Saul Bellow. No small compliment this. But Singer deserves no less, when he is at his best. And he is fastidious about the translation, considering, as he does, English, as his “second original language.”

The world of some of Singer’s pre-war Polish stories is peopled by an amusing variety of supernatural characters, covering imps, spirits, spooks, seraphim, ghosts and goblins, which may put a strain on the credibility of a modern, sceptical mind. But they enter naturally into the tradition-bound Jewish households. They are much in evidence in the story, “A crown of feathers”, where the well-read heroine is led by her frustration in family life to a commerce with the devil. And, of course, pays the price for it. These spirits are sometimes as essential to the progress of the story as perhaps the ghost of the King in Hamlet. At other times, they could be diverting, mischievous and mis­leading. But they never form the basic substance as in Goethe’s Faust, or Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.

For a writer, of the classical ground and conservative taste of Singer, his stories and novels are marked by an excessive preoccupation with human passion, especially sex. But it is untouched by pornography. Sex is not introduced here as an aphrodisiac for the reader. It is an artistic function in keeping with the characters and incidents in the development of the story.

In the experimental chaos of contemporary American fiction, the art of Singer, like that of Bellow, from another direction, hearkens to the masters of the last century, like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol and Balzac. He shares Tolstoy’s meticulous realism in description, but not his supreme faith in the triumph of a moral order. His contemporary sensibility would not allow that. Nor his artistic instinct, for that matter. He sees that good does not always succeed against evil in this world; but knows that virtue is its own reward. He is a political in his approach to his themes. As for literature, he puts the highest premium on clarity and readability. To be boring is, according to him, a cardinal sin. “The bad reviewers should give up reviewing”, Singer quips, “and the bad writers should stop writing.”