July/August 2004 Feature

Revaluating Jewish Identity: A Centenary Tribute to Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)

If, over the last half-century, Yiddish literature has been able to speak to readers born after the language itself was murdered, the credit is largely that of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Not that he would openly have appreciated this tribute. After all, over many years, he took pains to claim that any work in Yiddish that he himself had not written was wholly without artistic merit:

The themes employed by Yiddish writers and the writing itself struck me as sentimental, primitive, petty […] Although Yiddish literature flirted with socialism and […] with communism, it had remained provincial and backward.[…] Yiddish literature ignored the Jewish underworld, the thousands and tens of thousands of thieves, pimps, prostitutes, and white slavers […] True, Sholem Asch had […] taken up themes that till then had been considered taboo, but he was and remained a rustic […] His stories personified the pathos of the provincial who has been shown the big world for the first time […].1

Pronouncements of this kind enraged the dwindling band of Yiddishists. Jacob Glatstein, the leading Yiddish poet and critic of his generation who may stand for all of them, forcefully insisted that Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish lacked “artistic breath,” and had no nuance or stylistic originality, so it was easily translated and actually read better in translation. This year’s centenary invites a stocktaking not only of Bashevis’s service to Yiddish literature, but also of the way he obliged modern Jews to re-evaluate themselves.

The most widely read Jewish writer of the twentieth century, the son and grandson of rabbis on both sides of his family, was born Icek-Hersz Zynger, on July 14, 1904, in the village of Leoncin, in Poland, although his family soon relocated to Warsaw. At the outbreak of World War I, his mother took her children and returned to her birthplace, the shtetl of Bilgoray, where her learned rabbi father ruled his community with iron discipline. Like all Orthodox Jewish boys of his time, Singer was educated in religious schools where he studied Bible and Talmud. In Bilgoray, a place untouched by modernity, he also acquir-ed intimate knowledge of the strict observances of Juda-ism, of Jewish folk customs and superstitions, and a rich range of Yiddish idioms, the raw material from which, as he often acknowledged, he later shaped his fiction. Since his parents expected him to enter the rabbinate, Singer, at the age of seventeen, enrolled for one year in the Takhkemoni Rabbinical Seminary in Warsaw, but abandoned these studies to return briefly to Bilgoray, where he taught Hebrew privately.

Strongly influenced by his older brother, the admired Yiddish writer Israel Joshua Singer (1893-1944), Isaac was early drawn toward secular European culture. Returning to Warsaw, he immersed himself in the classics of Russian, German, and modern Hebrew literature; he served a literary apprenticeship as proofreader for the Warsaw Yiddish journal Literarishe Bleter [Literary Pages] between 1923-1933, and translated a number of novels from Ger-man into Yiddish. His earliest original work was published to some acclaim under the pseudonym Yitskhok Bashevis, a derivative of his mother’s personal name adopted to set him apart from his brother. In 1933, he and his lifelong friend Arn Tseytlin jointly founded and co-edited Globus, a new Yiddish literary journal in which Bashevis — as he would always be known to his Yiddish readers — published his first novel, Der sotn in Goray (Satan in Goray) in 1935. That same year, through the influence of his brother, who had established himself on the staff of New York’s Yiddish daily, the Forverts (Forward), Bashevis also emigrated and began working first as a proofreader and then as a columnist at the Forverts, at that time the largest circulating Yiddish newspaper in America. He became a United States citizen in 1943.

In America, Bashevis realized that he would have no future if his work were to be published only in Yiddish, a language with a steadily diminishing readership. Emulat-ing Sholem Asch (1880-1957), the first Yiddish writer to gain international recognition, Bashevis encouraged those English translations of his work through which he progressively achieved worldwide celebrity. By the time of his death at the age of eighty-seven, he had received a lion’s share of the world’s literary prizes from the United States, Italy, France, Israel, and finally, from Sweden, the ultimate literary accolade, the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded in 1978. He had been granted eighteen honorary doctorates and had been elected a member of both the American Academy and the American Institute of Arts and Letters.

Self-promotion was unquestionably the chief aim of Bashevis’s public pronouncements. His tendentious re-marks about Yiddish literature were demonstrably false, and he knew it. The shtetl underworld had been treated as early as 1865 in Der vintshfigerl (The Wishing-Ring) by Mendele Moykher Sforim; in 1909, when Bashevis was only five years old, I.M. Weissenberg had drawn a brutal picture of Jewish squalor and criminality in his novel A Shtetl; and in 1920, when Bashevis was still a schoolboy, Oyzer Varshavski had uncompromisingly exposed Jewish criminal degradation in his novel Shmuglyars (Smugglers). Yiddish-speaking prostitutes in a bustling Jewish brothel had been the subject of Sholem Asch’s 1907 play, Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance), and before Bashevis was twenty years old, this play had been denounced from the pulpits of New York’s synagogues and had been closed down for gross immorality by the city’s police. And the kind of sizzling eroticism Bashevis claimed to have made sensationally his own was at the center of Zalman Shneour’s 1930s novel Noyekh Pandre. Not only were all these works — and many others besides — perfectly well known to Bashevis, but they were also models with which he regularly engaged in creative polemics.

In deriding the “Yiddish literary tradition,” Bashevis, then adopting his American-English persona of Isaac Singer, tried to hide the extent to which he was integrally part of it himself. He got away with his facile disparagements because he was speaking to English readers who generally knew little about the Yiddish language and less about its literature. Few outside their limited circle paid much attention to those Yiddish critics who fulminated against Bashevis’s unprincipled self-aggrandizement. Those who did wrote off their attacks as the product of crazed envy, a situation famously dramatized by Cynthia Ozick in her 1969 short story “Envy: Or Yiddish in America,” which for many years was taken to be a satiric representation of the rivalry between Bashevis and Glatstein. All the time, however, Bashevis — who always took his profession with deadly seriousness — was engaging with the Yiddish literary tradition through a technique that may be called “polemicization.”

Russian writers, for example, have always acknowledged the continuity of the tradition in which they write, even as they underline their individual variations upon it, by open intertextual reference to work that has preceded their own. The process is clearly illustrated by Chernyshevsky’s radical 1862 novel, What Is to Be Done? This became the blueprint for generations of revolutionaries. Lenin, maintaining that his life had been transformed by it, published his own version in 1902; in 1990, Solzhenitsyn issued a reactionary reworking, under the cognate title, How shall we organize Russia? While this technique’s success is most obvious in what Russians call publisistika, literary polemics with socio-political intention, it is equally effective, though more subtly deployed, in belles lettres. A writer takes a central text from his own literary tradition and pays it homage by rewriting it in various ways — from parody at the lowest end, to stylistic or thematic reconstruction at the highest end. This process always had exemplars in Yiddish literature. Weissenberg’s bleak novel A Shtetl (1909) deliberately set out to undercut the idealized portrait of the Jewish market-town given by Asch in his 1905 novel of the same title. Bashevis followed such examples with a variety of Yiddish literary milestones. One need only compare Asch’s 1934 novel Der thilim-yid (translated into English as Salvation) with Bashevis’s 1962 novel The Slave, or his family saga Di familye Mushkat (The Family Moskat, 1950) with his brother Israel Joshua’s 1936 novel Di Brider Ashkenazi (The Brothers Ashkenazi) to see exactly what he is doing.

Scholarly attention has focused on the extent to which Bashevis manipulated the work of, inter alia, Ayzik-Meir Dik, Peretz, Bergelson, Lamed Shapiro, and Sholem Asch. Although more instances remain to be demonstrated, all future research should prove what is already apparent — Bashevis knew and respected the Yiddish literary tradition, and founded his own work on it. His denigration of the work of others in the American press was simply an exercise in image management. Perhaps Bashevis always knew this; in his quest for a place in the literary firmament, he probably regarded all means as fair. Of more lasting significance are the insights his work opens up into the tradition from which it draws and back into which it feeds.

Bashevis’s partisanship also incrementally enlarged general interest in Yiddish literature. Those who knew no Yiddish sought more translations, thus creating a market for new versions. In putting his work into English, Bashevis was favored by the multicultural climate in which his powers peaked. Translations of Yiddish literature had appeared early. Before World War II, Maurice Samuel had elegantly put before English readers the works of Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and Israel Joshua Singer. From the 1920s onwards, Sholem Asch ensured that the Yiddish editions of his newest work appeared as often as possible with their simultaneous English and German translations. Although Asch’s status has sadly declined in recent times, between the world wars his work was respected and popular, and Yiddish writing as a whole basked in his reflected prestige.

All this was not lost on Bashevis. After he had overcome the trauma of displacement from Poland to the United States, he saw clearly that Yiddish readers had, in all conceivable respects, literary tastes very different from his own. Most 20th-century Yiddish writers were engagé, determin-ed to deliver a “progressive message,” and thus in the vanguard of those preaching not faith in God but the perfecti-bility of humankind. Bashevis, however, insisted that he wrote in full respect for the ethical imperatives of Judaism. He was unconditionally hostile to this leftist socio-political agenda. Where the zeitgeist favored Leftism, Bashevis had, from his earliest years, been a radical conservative.

Thus it was inevitable that his first — and perhaps greatest — novel, Der sotn in Goray (Satan in Goray), should be a critique of antinomianism. Justly described as “one of the finest political novels in the Western canon,” this narrative depicts the destructive effects of Shabbetai Zvi’s false messianic claims on a Polish shtetl already decimated by Chmielnicki’s massacres. Meticulously recreating the style of 17th-century community histories, Bashevis by analogy explodes the claims of all utopianisms.

Directly exposed for the first thirty years of his own life to those 20th-century upheavals that eroded traditional Jewish identity, Bashevis repeatedly weighed what the Jewish people had gained when Emancipation and the Haskalah enabled them to share the culture of Europe, against what they had lost by surrendering their faith and its observances.

His two rich saga novels, The Family Moskat (1950) and Der Hoyf (1953-55), published in English as The Manor (1967) and The Estate (1969), fictionalize the history of Polish Jewry from the failed Polish rebellion against tsarist rule in 1863 to the Nazi bombardment of Warsaw in 1939. Here the manifold ambiguities of trying to preserve a Jewish identity in the modern world, later developed in numerous short stories, are comprehensively explored for the first time.

Though he and his brother had been raised in the same rabbinical home, Bashevis never followed Israel Joshua into secularity. In contrast, he remain-ed all his life torn between his parents’ conflicting conceptions of faith. His Hasidic father, awed by the putative power of the sitre akhre, the dark side of Creation, was constantly at loggerheads with his misnaged mother, contemptuous of all phenomena incapable of logical explanation.

Bashevis evocatively dramatized this conflict in his memoir, Mayn tatns bezdin shtub (In My Father’s Court, 1966). One Sabbath eve, a distraught housewife discovers that the slaughtered geese she has bought for the Sabbath still shriek. Are these geese kosher, the woman demands, or are they possessed by unquiet spirits? Bashevis’s rabbi father is appalled by what he takes to be this supernatural manifestation, but his mother is scornful:

“Did you remove the windpipes?” my mother asked.

“The windpipes? No …”

“Take them out,” said my mother, “and the geese will stop shrieking.”

My father became angry. “What are you babbling? What has this got to do with windpipes?”

Mother took hold of one of the geese, pushed her slender finger inside the body, and with all her might pulled out the thin tube that led from the neck to the lungs. Then she took the other goose and removed its windpipe also. […] On her face could be seen the wrath of the rationalist whom someone has tried to frighten in broad daylight.

Father’s face turned white, calm, a little disappointed. He knew what had happened here: logic, cold logic, was again tearing down faith, mocking it, holding it up to ridicule and scorn.

“Now, if you please, take one goose and hurl it against the other!” commanded my mother.

Everything hung in the balance. If the geese shrieked, Mother would have lost all: her rationalist’s daring, her skepticism which she had inherited from her intellectual father. And I? Although I was afraid, I prayed inwardly that the geese would shriek, shriek so loud that people in the street would hear and come running.

But alas, the geese were silent, silent as only two dead geese without windpipes can be.2

Bashevis’s chief characters, like their creator, are painfully torn between the sacred and the profane. It has thus become a critical commonplace to argue that “Bashevis has trouble with his endings,” since these conflicted men do not so much resolve their struggles as flee from them. Yasha Mazur in The Magician of Lublin, Joseph Shapiro in The Penitent, Hertz Grein in Shadows on the Hudson all lock themselves away from a world they have grown to loathe. It has been argued that if Judaism can offer no other means of moral engagement with the world than panic-stricken flight from it, it has nothing to say to modern people. But Bashevis, both as man and artist, clearly saw no other alternative. As he remarked in a 1973 interview with Irving Howe, published in Midstream, “The best thing you can do is to run away from evil, not fight it, because the moment you begin to fight evil, you become part of evil yourself.”3 He saw engagement with the world as morally defiling, yet he reaped too many of its richest rewards to exchange it for strict Orthodox observance. His ambivalence is neatly pointed in an anecdote recorded by Dorothea Straus, one of his earliest translators. Bashevis once told her that all women taken in adultery should be hanged. Shocked, she demanded to know whether he truly believed that. Bashevis is said to have answered: “No. But I wish I did.”

This desire to place human action within the absolute categories of sin and virtue informs the graphic use Bashevis makes of sex and sexuality, the chief area that outraged his Yiddish critics. Glatstein, for example, maintained that since the reading tradition of non-Jews had conditioned them to superstition and horror stories, Bashevis was simply pandering to decadent tastes with characters “made alien by villainy, brutality, and cynicism.” Although many who denounced Bashevis as a pornographer upheld as a social principle the rejection of bourgeois norms, as Jewish littérateurs they were unavoidably part of a cultural tradition that valued modesty of expression, particularly about sexual matters. Nevertheless their reaction was textually obtuse, for it is readily apparent that Bashevis’s use of “sensational” material is never gratuitous. His serial adulterers are emotionally withered beings, their damaging condition often pointed with bold, even melodramatic, symbolism, as in the case of the sexually voracious Risha in “Blood”:

Late in the evening Reuben [a ritual slaughterer], accompanied by Risha [his employer], went to the shed where she stood next to him as he slaughtered, and while the animal was throwing itself about in the anguish of its death throes, she would discuss with him their next act of lust. Sometimes she gave herself to him immediately after the slaughtering. [ …] Sometimes Reuben lay with her on a pile of straw in the shed, sometimes on the grass outside, and the thought of the dead and dying creatures near them whetted their enjoyment. […] One transgression begets another. One day Satan, the father of all lust and cunning, tempted Risha to take a hand in the slaughtering […] Risha took such pleasure in killing that before long she was doing all the slaughtering herself […] She began to cheat, to sell tallow for kosher fat, and she stopped extracting the sinews in the thighs of the cows. […] She got so much satisfaction from deceiving the community that this soon became as powerful a passion with her as lechery and cruelty.4

In the end, Risha’s insatiable lust — for sex, blood and Satan — deprives her of all vestiges of humanity, and she is stoned to death as a werewolf.

His deployment of evil spirits, for which Bashevis was just as roundly reviled by his Yiddish critics, also purposely separates sacred from profane. Demons torment the promiscuous, the blasphemous, and the arrogant; they are powerless against the chaste, the pious, and the humble. Inevitably Bashevis makes them the ultimate measure of the illimitable evil of the Holocaust. “Why demons,” asks the demon-narrator of “Mayse Tishevits” (translated into English as “The Last Demon”), “when man himself is a demon? […] There is no further need for demons. We have also been annihilated. I am the last, a refugee. I can go anywhere I please, but where should a demon like me go? To the murderers?”5 Best to depict a world where moral absolutes had once held sway. Bashevis deliberately set much of his work in the destroyed world of Eastern European Jewry. There, far from technological advancements and not yet convulsed by what Bashevis always regarded as the corruptions of the Haskalah, the precepts of the Torah were venerated as unalterably binding. As in all human worlds, there were sinners, but they did not yet inhabit a hefker velt, les din ve-les dayan, an arbitrary world without judgment and without judge.

Bashevis gazed unblinkingly at a world reduced to moral nihilism. He spoke of it through his own “survivor guilt” at having lived comfortably in the cafeterias and streets of New York while the Jews among whom he had grown up — his own mother and younger brother among them — were destroyed in gas chambers and Soviet work camps. “A writer can only write about people and things he knows well,” he asserted, insisting to the end that “fiction is always about a few people. You cannot write fiction about the masses.”6 After World War II, these few people were Holocaust survivors, trying to rebuild their lives in America. Bashevis compassionately yet shrewdly calculated the damage they had sustained and which they, in turn, would inflict on others, just as he ruthlessly measured the indifference of those who had not suffered. The tart reply of a waiter in a kosher hotel to a woman who complains about the food he has served her, “By Hitler you ate better?” still shocks the reader who first encounters it. “In what way are these [vulgar New York Jews] my brothers and sisters? What have we in common?” murmurs Herman Broder, the ghostly survivor through whose perceptions we view the action of Enemies: A Love Story (1972). The Holocaust, Bashevis repeatedly concludes, made Jews neither better nor worse. It left the secularized and acculturated floating in a moral limbo such as materialistic America, savagely bodied forth in both Shadows on the Hudson (serialized in Yiddish in 1957, but first published in English forty years later), and in Enemies: A Love Story. In New York, Jewish refugees are estranged and helpless, their emotional and spiritual dislocation emblematized in their self-perception as stunted outsiders, or as victims of a cancer that is made a metonym for both the psychic vacuity of post-Holocaust Jewry and the fearful arbitrariness of human existence.

Whether set in the 17th or in the 20th centuries, Bashevis’s work is preoccupied with the dissolution of Eastern European Jewish values. But his determination to engage with the realities of a world in which Yiddish and its speakers were effectively dead, and to explore the condition of those still clinging to the wreckage through the mainstream medium of English translation, set him at odds with his Yiddish literary contemporaries. In the mid-1950s, a number of Yiddish critics publicly addressed the contemporary state of Yiddish letters. Glatstein grieved that Yiddish writers were tormented by an awareness that they were “writing in a language that is on the verge of extinction, which may have, indeed, already died.” Shmuel Niger regretted that the Holocaust had obliged Yiddish writers to erect literary “gravestones” in “jargonized Yiddish” sullied by too long a contact with English, and that Yiddish literature had become an artificial replacement of real Yiddish life. Judd Teller pointed out that the American Yiddish writer’s preferred isolation from contemporary cultural concerns before the war had been broken only in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, but that “when normality was restored […] the American Yiddish writer was again shunted back into his isolation.” Bashevis, on the other hand, categorically rejected this isolation. He was determined to speak to as wide a body of readers as he could, both in his choice of themes and through the accessibility of translation.

Not that Bashevis ever came to easy accommodation with the contemporary world and its hedonistic values. He continued stridently to attack them, his most notorious outburst being the 1983 translation of a novel he had declared ten years before to be “the work of his that he liked best,” The Penitent. Unusual-ly, this novel had first been published in Yiddish in Israel in 1973; only after Singer had won the Nobel Prize were his American publishers persuaded to issue it in English. The reason they disliked it was soon apparent in the furor the novel caused. Throughout, in a virtual monologue, its chief character, a rich and worldly Jew named Joseph Shapiro, vilifies every aspect of the secular world, including the entire Western canon:

All the heroes in world literature have been whoremongers and evildoers. Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Raskolnikov, and Taras Bulba are the typical heroes and heroines of literature. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust, right down to the trash aimed at pleasing the street louts and wenches, are full of cruelty and abandon. All worldly art is nothing but evil and degradation.

Conspicuously missing from the cacophony of critical denunciation this eclectic work elicited, however, was an awareness of how far its structure set up both the prosecution and the defense of its author’s own case, even though by the end, neither side could claim victory. This was the import of the book’s oddly placed “Author’s Note,” which Bashevis situated at the end rather than at the beginning and which he tried to integrate into the body of the whole:

While I was brought up among extremists who thought and felt like that angry man, Joseph Shapiro, I cannot agree with him that there is a final escape from the human dilemma, a permanent rescue for all time. […] The remedies that he recommends may not heal everybody’s wounds, but the nature of the sickness will. I hope, be recognized.7

The extent of Bashevis Singer’s disagreement with Shapiro’s “remedies” could be measured in terms of his publications. The latest list of his works in English numbers thirteen novels, ten volumes of short stories, five volumes of memoirs, fourteen books for children, and three anthologies of selected writings. In Yiddish, on the other hand, there are only five novels, three collections of short stories, and two volumes of Mayn tatns bezdn shtub. This disparate ratio has raised many eyebrows. In Stockholm, at a question-and-answer session after his Nobel Lecture, Singer told an outright lie to a questioner who wanted to know why his books were not published in Yiddish: “My books did appear in Yiddish, but they sold out, and there were no second editions. [...] With the prize money, I hope to get my works published in Yiddish.”8 For so passionate a defender of Yiddish to so fanatical a detractor as Menachem Begin — as in the bitter quarrel between them when they met in New York en route to receive their respective Nobel Prizes9 — Bashevis seemed determined to ensure that very little of his work ever appeared in book form in Yiddish. The question of why this was so, impossible to answer with any certainty, is nevertheless central in evaluating what texts bring the reader to the heart of his work. Obviously, there are two corpuses, and in the larger English corpus, we confront texts that are not simply “translations” but works sometimes conceptually recast by the author, and Englished by teams of collaborators. Yet we cannot easily gain access to the Yiddish corpus. Even if its extended serializations could all be tracked down in the crumbling pages of sixty years of the Forverts or their costly (and incomplete) microfilms, we would still confront two disparate texts. Janet Hadda, Singer’s biographer, has identified the immediate cause of this dualism:

Bashevis, that sharp-witted, conflicted, sometimes harsh literary genius, would gradually yield to Isaac Bashevis Singer [...] Consciously or not, he had learned that Bashevis, the enfant terrible, would never capture the heart of an American audience. [...] Bashevis had correctly, if intuitively perceived that for readers of English, an Eastern European Jew had to be old-fashioned, mild-mannered, even naïve in order to be believable.10

Paradoxically, however, even as Bashevis broke with his Yiddish contemporaries, he remained rooted in the Yiddish literary tradition. No one could mistake his work for “American” literature; thematically and stylistically. It remained quintessentially Yiddish. For zealots determined to see Yiddish as sacred, of course, Bashevis was a betrayer; for everyone else he revitalized both the language and its literature through the medium, ironically, of English.

Bashevis’s endemic ambivalence naturally extended also to the State of Israel and its revival of Hebrew. Like so many people, he was distressed that after the destructions wrought by Hitler and Stalin, the newly established Jewish state itself vigorously stamped out what remained of the Yiddish language. However much it was argued at the time that nation-building justified the insistence of Ben-Gurion and his disciples on the supremacy of Hebrew and the elimination of the “jargon of the galut,” it remains a shocking legacy of its early years that Israel’s government persecuted Yiddish in a way it never did to any other language that new immigrants brought with them. While the state permitted the regular publication of newspapers in English, French, German, and even Hungarian, it placed every obstacle in the way of perpetuating Yiddish as a living language. It harnessed all its powers to downgrade Yiddish, where it survived at all, from a daily language to the esoteric preserve of a cultural elite, while it promoted synthetic Hebrew to do the linguistic work required by the masses on the street. The Yiddish-speaking narrators of Bashevis’s Israel stories always find modern Hebrew artificial; they are troubled by the destructive tension they recognize between the sacred roots of the language and the worldly uses to which it is put:

I read the signs over the women’s clothing stores. The commission for modernizing Hebrew had created a terminology for brassieres, nylons, corsets, ladies’ coiffures, and cosmetics. They had found the sources for such worldly terms in the Bible, the Babylonian Talmud, the Jerusalem Talmud, the Midrash, and even the Zohar.11

Following the Psalmist (Psalm 87:2) who differentiated “the gates of Zion” from “the dwellings of Jacob,” Bashevis consistently distinguishes between the Holy Land as spiritual Zion, the eternal hope of Jewish redemption, and the State of Israel as secular Zionism, the contemporary realization of nationalist aspirations. In all his tales set in shtetl Poland, dreams of the “Holy Land,” as it is always called there, are linked to the coming of the messiah and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, and inform the passions of his most saintly characters. For Bashevis, “the gates of Zion” open inward to individual spiritual regeneration; “the dwellings of Jacob,” by contrast, since they are founded on worldliness, are all alike. The locale of most of his Israel stories is generally Tel Aviv, a city whose outward appearance comes to reflect its origin in, and commitment to, secularity; its shabby air of transience is made a physical correlative of its spiritual hollowness. For Bashevis, the modern political realization of Zionism has negated the messianic promise to re-establish Zion, because it has sundered the spiritual from the material, and has substituted the gentile culture of 200 years of Haskalah, Enlightenment, for the Jewish culture of two thousand years of galut, Exile. Consequently, as Bashevis sees it, it has intensified rather than resolved the modern crisis of Jewish identity:

In what way was this the land of Israel? If it were not for the Hebrew signs it could just as well be Brooklyn — the same buses, the same noise, the same stench of gasoline, the same movie houses. Modern civilization wipes out all individuality.12

By transforming a spiritual ideal into a secular reality, the founders of the modern State of Israel, in Singer’s view, operated on profane principles. His halutzim adopt attitudes and mouth slogans common to all other radicals and revolutionaries; they discard a traditional identity as Jews in favor of a modern self-conception indistinguishable from that of gentiles. For Singer, the believer in spite of himself, as long as human nature remains unredeemed, all places in which people dwell will be alike. Once Jews cast aside the restraints of the Law, they become absurd, like the narrator of “Brother Beetle,” who is trapped stark naked on the rooftop outside the Tel Aviv apartment of a former mistress by the sudden return of her current lover. From this humiliating position, he looks up to “the numberless stars that hovered strangely near” and down to where “[a] huge beetle crawled at [his] feet” and is suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of his own insignificance:

I found myself in infinite space, amid myriads of galaxies, between two eternities, one already past and one still to come […] I asked God’s forgiveness. For instead of returning to His promised land with renewed will to study the Torah and to heed his commandments, I had gone with a wanton who had lost herself in the vanity of art.(“Brother Beetle,” p.131)

For Bashevis, all activity that does not heighten a sense of human inconsequentiality is idle vanity, as in the case of Dr. Nahum Fischelson, the German-educated scholar who has devoted his entire life to annotating Spinoza. Only when he falls seriously ill does he recognize the frailty of what it means to be human, and then in old age, this confirmed old bachelor, whose life hitherto has been wholly sterile, decides to marry his neighbor, an aged spinster who has brought him meals. On his wedding night, for the first time in his life, Dr. Fischelson experiences enriching physicality at the expense of barren intellectualism:

Dr Fischelson quietly got out of bed. In his long nightshirt he approached the window, walked up the steps and looked out in wonder. Market Street was asleep, breathing with a deep stillness. […] A cool breeze was blowing. Dr. Fischelson looked up at the sky. The black arch was thickly sown with stars[…] Yes, the divine substance was extended and had neither beginning nor end. It was absolute, indivisible, eternal, without duration, infinite in its attributes. Its waves and bubbles danced in the universal cauldron, seething with change, following an unbroken chain of causes and effects, and he, Dr. Fischelson, with his unavoidable fate, was part of this. The doctor closed his eyelids and allowed the breeze to cool the sweat on his forehead and stir the hair of his beard. He breathed deeply of the midnight air, supported his shaky hands on the window sill, and murmured, “Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.”13

About the author
Joseph Sherman, a former editor of the South African quarterly journal Jewish Affairs, is currently Corob Fellow in Yiddish Studies, at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Oxford University. He is a specialist in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, on which he wrote his doctorate. He met Singer in Miami Beach in January 1983, an encounter that he followed with a close examination of everything Singer ever wrote. He has published over 20 essays on both the novels and the short stories in the academic press. Of recent years, he has translated Singer’s best-selling posthumous novel, Shadows on the Hudson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Leviant Prize for Yiddish translation in 2002. His latest translation was that of Singer’s short story, “Androgynous,” published in The New Yorker (September 29, 2003), pp. 94-100.