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Dec. 8, 2006
A straightforward man of letters
Bashevis Singer eschewed Yiddishkeit in favor of a much bleaker
view of shtetl life.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Poland, then part of czarist
Russia, in 1904. His father and both his grandfathers were rabbis.
When Singer was four, the family moved to Warsaw, where his father
established a beit din, a rabbinic court, in a tenement located
in the poor Jewish part of the city. Singer later wrote a fascinating
book about the disputes his father had to adjudicate.
During his childhood, Singer was steeped in Jewish folklore and
mysticism, the latter to such a degree that his parents were concerned
that he was imbibing too much haggadah (storytelling) and
not enough halachah (Jewish law) – a disproportion that
could lead him astray from traditional observant Judaism into uncharted
areas of speculation and mysticism. Their apprehensions, it turned
out, were misplaced. Although Singer had the usual Jewish religious
education and, for a while, even entered a rabbinical seminary,
he ended up, not a kabbalist, but more or less a rationalist.
Singer's elder brother, Israel Joseph, was a successful writer and,
much to the chagrin of his parents, had also become a rationalist.
And Singer decided that he, too, would be a writer.
At first he wrote in Hebrew, but then, reaching for a broader readership,
he switched to Yiddish. His early work was published in Yiddish
literary magazines. When his brother emigrated to America, Singer,
leaving his first wife, Rachel, and their son behind, made his way
to New York to join him. Rachel and their son ended up in Palestine.
Singer became a regular contributor to the Forward, America's
leading Yiddish daily, which was politically socialist and ardently
anti-communist. For years, he was relatively obscure, but in 1950,
Knopf published an English translation of his novel The Family
Moskat, dedicated to his brother, who had died. It was about
the life of an Eastern European Jewish family from the beginning
of the 20th century, chronicling the impact the decline of traditionalism
was imposing on family life.
Singer never romanticized the Jewish experience. He wrote it as
he saw it, which did not always please readers nurtured on the genial
shtetl menschlichkeit portrayed by Sholom Aleichem. Singer's style
was spare and straightforward: simple language, short sentences,
usually a straight subject-verb-object word order, a minimum of
adjectives, similes and metaphors and no exploration of ideas, only
well-defined characters and the stories they were experiencing.
Singer continued writing in Yiddish for an estimated 18,000 who
followed his serialized works as they appeared in the Forward.
Others had to wait for English translations, which he carefully
supervised. He turned out a prodigious number of novels, stories,
even books for children, all in Yiddish. In the '60s and '70s, Singer
became a favorite of American university students.
Singer well understood that the traditional Jewish way of life was
not only fatally impacted by the Holocaust, but in an earlier, more
widespread, invasive and persistent manner, by modernism. The erosion
of traditional Jewish culture is a theme that appears again and
again in his work. While the Holocaust completely extinguished this
culture in Eastern Europe, there is little doubt that even in a
"normal" environment, i.e., normal for Jews, meaning emigration
and assimilation, it could not have survived unscathed to this century.
As part of his cynicism and his low regard for political systems,
Singer did not care for fiction with political, social or moral
messages and viewed ideologists and even his more enthusiastic readers
as idolators. He once said that writing was easier for him than
not writing, but, when asked to explain how he fashioned his works,
Singer, adept at aphorisms, suggested that was like asking a hen
how she made an egg.
In 1978, Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the
only Yiddish writer ever to receive this honor and an achievement
unlikely ever to be equalled. He remarried in 1940 and lived in
New York City until 1987, when he moved to Florida, where he died
in 1991.
Reading Singer, one is made more conscious of a theory of fiction
claiming that it is a form of voyeurism: authors observing people
around them, transforming them, individually or as composites, into
characters and making storylines of their experiences. It was different
with Aleichem; in the guise of every character he created, he wrote
about himself. Singer was much more elusive. His mode of apprehending
reality, which he stated himself, was solipsism: philosophically
extreme subjective idealism, in which reality is reduced to only
one's ever-growing, ever-changing, incalculably complex thoughts
about everything observed and learned, a collection of personal
sensations, ideas and images that have no existence independent
of their observer.
At times, Singer, feeling alienated in his own universe, took comfort
in apprehending his death. He even considered suicide. He would
have agreed with Schopenhauer, whom he respected, and who once remarked
that the only real subject in philosophy is suicide; everything
else is commentary. Singer was, moreover, a fatalist and a proud
one at that: "I never could hold out a hand for love, money
or recognition," he said. "Everything had to come to me
of its own or not come at all." This may not be have been true,
but is revealing. He took solace in what was essentially a grim
view of life: "I envied the cobblestones," he once wrote.
"The stones lived and I was dead."
Relating to his childhood interests, many of Singer's writings are
haggadic in nature, derived from fantasy and mysticism. His work
has been compared to Chagall's paintings, also haggadic, much of
it based on the old Jewish shtetl communities of Eastern Europe.
Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, one can view their depictions
as something suggestive of anthropologists rushing to observe and
record endangered cultures while evidence about them, even reminiscences,
are still fresh, before their final dissolution and disappearance.
The classical Yiddishist writers, Chagall and others may have been
moved by a largely subconscious element of urgency to depict this
vanishing culture with a passion deeper than that occasioned by
reality. It was as if they were trying to preserve their impressions
of it indelibly in print and on canvas, perhaps in the same way
the Impressionist painters used a supernatural chromatic vividness
depicting the brightness of landscapes soon to disappear or be rendered
dull by layers of industrial grime.
Early in his career as a writer, Singer was castigated for including
too much sex in his writing. The classical Yiddish writers considered
any mention of sex an impropriety, while Singer acknowledged it,
never pornographically, but candidly. He "confessed" his
sexual activities, which he pursued as well as he could, with women,
married or not, to him or someone else. But there is more to the
story than that. The difference was generational. The First World
War not only sent empires crashing to the ground. In the social
turbulence that it had stirred up, it wiped away many of the normal
restraints on life and art.
Singer had an incisive mind that cut through a lot of what he considered
nonsensical and useless. He once wrote: "One would have to
be totally indifferent toward man and beast to be able to be happy."
I have yet to see a picture of him smiling. Those I have seen all
show penetrating, searching eyes and a tightly corrugated brow.
Eugene Kaellis is a retired academic living in New Westminster.
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