July/August 2006 Feature

Isaac Bashevis Singer: an Unpublished Story

The year 2004 marked the centennial of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s birth. I was on the staff of the Jewish Division at the 42nd Street library, and my colleague there, Roberta Saltzman, had already published her bibliography of Singer’s works, which makes it possible to identify the Yiddish and English versions of a story with one another and to locate stories that had never been translated from the Yiddish. In fact, the publication of her bibliography marked 70 years of collaboration between Bashevis Singer and The New York Public Library.

Bashevis studied in the library frequently after his arrival in America in the 1930s. At the beginning of his relationship with his wife Alma, they would meet in the library. She was still married to her first husband, and a trip to the library must have been as innocent-sounding then as it is suspicious now. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, he gave readings at the library and participated in forums there. The Jewish Division even merits a mention in Shadows on the Hudson (Singer’s posthumously published novel translated by Joseph Sherman). David Neal Miller’s bibliographies of early Bashevis publications and Roberta Saltzman’s bibliography of his later years have closed the gap on what is still unknown about his output; her next update, which will cover the 1950s, will write the final chapter. These bibliographies are made possible, I should add, because of the Jewish Division’s fanatical microfilming campaign from the 1950s through the 1990s, which, however unpopular with those whose attachment to paper is still strong, has something to commend it. Thus it is that the Jewish Division’s microfilms provide much of the most complete run of the Forverts still available anywhere—the newspaper’s own offices included.

When the Jewish Division was approached by the Library of America to participate in its I.B. Singer centenary publication, it seemed bashert. To mark the publication of the Library of America’s three-volume collection of Singer stories in English translation, the librarians of the Jewish Division organized a symposium that brought together the country’s leading Bashevis scholars. To enhance the celebration, it was resolved to translate one of the many Yiddish stories identified in Roberta Saltzman’s bibliography as never having appeared in English. The first task was to find interesting work buried in the mass of deadline pieces Singer churned out for the Yiddish press to pay the bills. To this end, I read through a considerable quantity of his untranslated work. I made the decision at the start to ignore longer works, as impractical for what was only an experiment, aimed at gauging whether there was material of lasting value left in the untranslated part of the oeuvre. I decided, as well, to ignore the more overtly journalistic work Bashevis published under the pen-names D. Segal and Yitskhok Varshavsky, and concentrate on his Yitskhok Bashevis persona. These were the works that he considered “literary.”

And literary they are. No matter how shapeless, rambling, error-filled, or, sometimes, uninspired, they were undeniably Bashevis. You could always see his hand in it—not only his lively prose style and quirky use of Yiddish, but also his well-known thematics of ghostly visitations (usually malevolent) and women’s perfidy; his deep cynicism about politics in general and the politics of the left in particular; and, finally, the feature that I find most intriguing: his examination of the bewildering variety of painful human experiences that he allows to remain, after examination, just as enigmatic as they were before.

And so it was from this last topic I chose a story I liked: that was not too shapeless, that rambled to good effect and that contained only a couple of inconsistencies or errors, and that dealt with an interesting topic: shyness. Absolute, paralyzing, course-of-life-determining shyness, what we would now call social phobia. The story hooked me. I sat down with it and my collection of Yiddish dictionaries, and pounded out what I considered a pretty close translation.

The story is one of the Bashevis genre in which a usually-unnamed, well-known Yiddish writer is accosted by a Jewish émigré with a heart-rending story, in this case, the story of his struggle with life-long shyness. It takes place while the writer is on a reading tour in Argentina, and the man who approaches him, himself a minor Yiddish poet, insists that his story is absolutely unique. The story is called “The Lost Wife.” The Singer character’s interlocutor grows up in a shtetl in Poland. His mother dies when he is young, his older siblings are out of the house, and his father is unsympathetic. Every event in everyday life, every event in Jewish life, is cause for potential embarrassment. It is a litany: “I was as afraid of the bathhouse as of the Angel of Death,” he confesses. “Sukkes was a hardship for me because you had to eat in the sukkah in front of strangers.” On Purim he throws down the well the shalakh-mones he is meant to deliver, rather than walk into a neighbor’s house where he might encounter a woman. When a female cousin comes for a visit, he is unable to sleep in the same house with her. If a hero’s life proceeds from battle to battle, this anti-hero’s life proceeds from humiliation to humiliation. He even says, in characteristic Singer fashion, “I still suffer from constipation, and all because of my shyness. I was ashamed to go to the outhouse and just held it in.” This last item, by the way, proves to be also a nicely-buried bit of foreshadowing.

In spite of his crippling shyness, as a young man he manages to find a woman to marry, though there are more complications caused by his embarrassment at getting married in public, so that he insists on leaving his shtetl of Markishav and on having their wedding in the relative anonymity of Warsaw. Naturally, the whole town believes the reason for running off to marry in Warsaw is because the bride is already pregnant. But nothing could be further from the truth: even after the wedding there are some difficulties having sex, as you might imagine would be the case for a seriously shy person. Then he and his brand-new wife set off for America, via England where the bride has a cousin.

The couple has to wait in London for a few days, until their boat departs for New York. But on the first night, staying at the cousin’s flat in London, he is overcome with mortification. First, he goes to take a bath and can’t figure out how to use the coin-operated water heater. Then he finds the family is having a party in their honor, and he has to be in company with dozens of strange people. Finally, he goes to the outhouse, and loses his way coming back. He simply cannot figure out where he is among the London tenements, which, to our shtetl-born hero, all look identical. “After a while,” he says, “it occurred to me that I didn’t know my wife’s relatives’ address, and I couldn’t remember the name of the cousin we were staying with. It was as if it were fated. What I did know was that back at my wife’s relatives’ house they would be worried about me and start looking for me, and the entire situation was so humiliating that I lifted my eyes to heaven and said, ‘God, do me a favor and take me to you!’”

Our hero instead finds shelter at daybreak in a synagogue, where he joins in morning prayers and finds someone to take him in, gets a menial job, learns English, and finally makes his way to Argentina, as a place suitably out-of-the-way so that he won’t know anyone there and can’t be made fun of for getting lost coming back from the privy. He never sees his wife again, nor his family back in Poland, and lives out his life in poverty as a traveling salesman. “Sometimes when everything gets me down, my poverty and my whole situation, and I find myself thinking about God’s ways, it occurs to me that the answers to all the big questions are probably very simple: if nobody in all of Markishav could guess at my motives for wanting to get married in Warsaw, why should we be able to guess at God’s motives? Maybe God is shy sometimes, too?”

When you translate a story, you learn things that you don’t from reading it, whatever the language you read it in. I think you learn things that even the author may not have realized. Early on in this story, the narrator says that the reason he had chosen to tell all to the unnamed, famous Yiddish writer, was that, years earlier, this famous Yiddish writer had written a short piece about shyness, and that it had seemed to him, our shy hero, that this writer understood just how serious and debilitating shyness could be. Curious about this detail, I looked through the Bashevis bibliographies and found, in David Neal Miller’s bibliography, which covers the years up to 1949, an article called “Shyness, an affliction from which young and old, rich and poor alike suffer; why people get embarrassed.” The lengthy subtitles read: “Very often a person has no reason to be embarrassed, but they get embarrassed just the same; What doctors and researchers say about shy people; A king who during his lifetime was ashamed that after his death people would see him naked; A girl whose knees blushed when she got embarrassed.”

This is fairly typical of a “Yitskhok Varshavsky” popular science article for the Forverts, dated January 26, 1940. The story “The Lost Wife” is dated December 3 and 4, 1965. I was astonished that Bashevis could remember, and perhaps find artistic inspiration in, an article he wrote twenty-five years earlier, and I do think this gives us some insight into the way he worked. It also further complicates what we know about this character he deployed, this famous Yiddish writer whose relationship to a real person called I.B. Singer remains a bit hard to pin down.

As I thought more about it, I realized that there was a conflict in my role as a translator. In common with most readers of Yiddish, I believe that he is ever so much better in the original. I’m not conceited enough to think I can succeed at conveying the Yiddish original where greater minds have failed. As I’ve indicated, I tend to be a close and careful translator, to think hard about artistic intent, and to make as few changes as necessary to construct readable English sentences. This story was not particularly taxing as a translation exercise. It’s not as if it had been one of the kabalistic tales or a story set in Poland where he used an ekht dialect, neither of which are things I know much about. Aside from the use of a single word of Argentinean Yiddish—the word “kventenik” to mean traveling salesman, which derives from the Spanish and is non-standard Yiddish—there was very little I found linguistically a challenge. Perhaps I chose this story to translate because I felt that less of it would be lost in translation than if I had approached one of the earlier stories. But on finishing the story, I wondered about the extent to which certain meanings are embedded for a Yiddish reader that are not for an English reader, which cannot be replicated no matter how you translate the words. So I sat down to re-read my English translation with this in mind, and got as far as the first paragraph before I realized the impossibility of the task I had set out before me.

This story was told to me by a Yiddish writer—not one of the famous ones, but the kind who, from time to time, self-publishes a book. Before I made his acquaintance in Buenos Aires, I didn’t know he existed. But he gave me to understand that he had published two volumes of poetry, and that they had been noticed in the local press, and in some weekly journal in Mexico or Rio de Janeiro.

You’ll have to take my word for it that this is a close rendering of the original. But what I have completely failed to convey, what would take an army of footnotes to convey, is the irony and cruelty of this paragraph. How many Yiddish writers self-published their own books? Almost all of them, especially by the era of this story, 1965, when commercial Yiddish publishing in Poland was long over. If they didn’t self-publish, there was a committee to publish their works, which did it for them, or they got their landsmanshaft to do the job. Glatshteyn did it; Bashevis’s good friend Arn Tseytlin did it; and while Bashevis himself never self-published, early on he relied at times on informal publications by organizations for whom publishing was a side-activity, rather than a regular publishing house, to bring out his works. For example, the Yiddish PEN club published Der Sotn in Goray in Poland in 1935. So here we have not just a translation problem but a context problem. Most Yiddish readers, reading at the advanced level of a Bashevis story in its original, would see this paragraph as full of amusing references. The mention of being noted in a weekly journal in Mexico or Rio—to a Yiddish audience—is surely a sign of provincialism, even though both harbored active Yiddish circles, whereas to an English-speaking audience the names are intriguingly exotic.

Among the holdings of The New York Public Library’s Jewish Division are thousands of photographic prints and tens of thousands of negatives taken by Layle Silbert, which she donated to the Library just before her death in 2002. Silbert, the daughter of a Chicago Yiddish newspaper editor, was a short-story writer and poet and an avid photographer of other writers—especially American Jewish writers. Among the pictures in her immense archive are several of Bashevis. He was not a good-looking man, and by the time Silbert took his picture, he wasn’t a young one either. In the most prepossessing of these images, he looks mildly, and slightly sadly, into the camera, one hand against his chin. The light streams from his right side, highlighting the few remaining tufts of white hair; his shirt and tie fit him awkwardly, and the wall behind the sofa on which he sits is bare. Silbert took this picture, along with many others, in Bashevis’s apartment; later, she wrote a story about an unnamed photographer going to take a picture of an unnamed famous Yiddish writer, and how, while posing, the writer presses the photographer for personal information, ever eager for a new idea for a story, while the photographer attempts to evade capture by giving answers that conceal as much as they reveal. This is a far cry from the image we’ve gotten from Bashevis of the writer who finds himself trapped with gabby strangers, forced to listen to the stories they pour into his unwilling ear. With Bashevis, it seems, reality and fictions are always co-existing. •

About the author
Faith Jones heads the Literature and Languages Collection of NYPLs Mid-Manhattan Library; she previously served as Yiddish Bibliographer in NYPL's Dorot Jewish Division. Her translations of Yiddish poems and stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines, and she serves as Yiddish editor for Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal. Her scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as Canadian Jewish Studies, and she is a contributor to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the forthcoming revised Encyclopedia Judaica and other reference works.

Isaac Bashevis Singer: a Bibliography

Roberta Saltzman

I started working on my bibliography of Isaac Bashevis Singer some 15 years ago. My work was prompted by several of our readers in the Jewish Division of The New York Public Library who, over a period of a few months, asked whether we could find the original Yiddish version of a given story or novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. We assumed that the works of a Nobel Prize-winning author would surely be available in book form in the language in which he wrote. Singer was internationally famous by 1991, his works having been translated into about 12 languages; in addition to the expected Western European translations, there was The Estate in Finnish, In My Father’s Court in Ukrainian, Scum in Polish, and Zortzi kontakizun, a collection of eight Singer stories translated into Basque.

It turned out, though, that relatively little of his Yiddish work was available in book form. Indeed, the translations into modern languages were made from the English, not from the original Yiddish. Even the Hebrew translations by Singer’s own son, Israeli journalist and novelist Israel Zamir, were made from the English. Singer was very much involved in the translation of his works and sometimes made significant changes from the Yiddish original; The Family Moskat, for example, actually has a new, more upbeat final chapter in the English version. Singer was often writing on a deadline, so his eagerness to edit his work is understandable: he called the English translations of his work the “second original.” But in order to study Singer’s methods and intentions, scholars need access to his work as he originally wrote it.

Only nine separate Singer titles have been published in Yiddish in book form: three collections of short stories; Mayn tatn’s beys-din shtub (partially translated as In My Father’s Court); and the Yiddish versions of the novels Satan in Goray, The Family Moskat, The Slave, The Magician of Lublin, and The Penitent. I think that Singer must have been aware that, in the late twentieth century, the market for Yiddish books was limited. In one of my favorite Singer novels, Enemies, a love story, a shopkeeper says, “New York is full of thieves, but I don’t have to worry about the store...my only fear is that some Yiddish author might break in at night and put in some more books.”

The overwhelming majority of Singer’s enormous output was published not in book form but serially in the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward), as well as in a few other Yiddish periodicals. Like most Jewish newspapers, the Yiddish Forward is not indexed; this means that most of Singer’s work was essentially unavailable in its original language. I was intrigued by this; what other major modern author publishes his novels in a newspaper? It was as if Singer were a nineteenth-century writer in late twentieth-century America.

There is a bibliography that covers Singer’s work up to 1949, written by David Neal Miller, a Yiddishist and professor at Ohio State University. I learned from an article in the journal Yiddish that Professor Miller had compiled a Singer bibliography covering the years 1950-1959 (although this has not yet been published). So I took 1960 as my starting point and began the wearisome but necessary task of looking through over 30 years of microfilm of the Forverts—a daily newspaper until 1983, when it became a weekly, which it remains today. I also surveyed other Yiddish periodicals that Singer contributed to during this period—Tsukunft [The Future] and Goldene Keyt [Golden Chain].

But I was not just searching for articles by “Yitshak Bashevis Zinger”; I learned that during the last third of his life, Singer wrote under three names: “D. Segal,” “Yitshak Varshavski,” and “Yitshak Bashevis” (or, after he won the Nobel, “Yitshak Bashevis Zinger”). “Yitshak Bashevis” was used almost exclusively for fiction. Singer used the pseudonym “D. Segal” for pieces on current events and celebrities (the assassination of JFK, the death of Marilyn Monroe, a hurricane in Florida, recent scientific discoveries, Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, or the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin); feuilletons (his vegetarianism, the rising crime rate in America); theater and movie reviews (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Night of the Iguana, Rhinoceros, as well as the immortal Midgie Purvis [a Tallulah Bankhead vehicle] and A Worm in Horseradish); and some children’s stories, such as the Chelm tales. Singer used “Yitshak Varshavski” for memoirs, some fiction, and literary criticism—of Yiddish literature in particular but also of literature in general; there are book reviews or essays on Sartre, Gogol, Spinoza, Bruno Schulz, Rabindranath Tagore, and Knut Hamsun, among many others. (Knut Hamsun was a particular favorite of Singer’s.) Early in his career, he had supplemented his income by translating modern fiction into Yiddish, including works by Hamsun, Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas Mann, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and Stefan Zweig. Singer was fluent in German and Polish and usually made his Yiddish translations from the German). By using pseudonyms, Singer was following a long tradition in Yiddish literature; many, if not most, of the greatest names in Yiddish letters are pseudonyms: Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Mokher Seforim, Der Nister, H. Leivick, Samuel Niger, S. An-Ski, Anna Margolin. The whole question of these writers’ relationship to names would be worthy of a book in itself.

I was lucky in that I had to search for Singer’s articles under only three pseudonyms; during the period 1924-1949, according to David Neal Miller, Singer used half a dozen pen names, includes “Tse” and “Yitshak Tsevi.” Singer may have chosen “D. Segal” because it’s a common name that would sound appropriately unremarkable for his everyday, non-literary work. “Yitshak Varshavski” (Isaac of Warsaw) is an easy choice for someone who spent his formative years in that city. And “Bashevis” is a matronymic: Singer’s mother’s name was Bathsheba, or, in the Yiddish pronunciation, Bas-sheve; “Bashevis” is the possessive form of his mother’s name, so “Yitshak Bashevis” might be translated as “Isaac, Bathsheba’s son.”

Every time I saw an article by Singer, I would note (on a 4 x 6 index card) its title, date and page, as well as the pseudonym that Singer used. If it was a work of fiction, I copied the first few sentences on the back of the index card, so that I could compare it to a story or novel published in English. (This was long before I had access to a microfilm printer, so I didn’t have the option of printing out pages). It wasn’t always easy to match up an English story with its Yiddish original; for example, “A kroyn fun federn” means “A crown of feathers” and that is indeed its title in the English translation; but “Dray shvester” (“Three sisters”) was translated into English as “A dance and a hop”; “Dray in a tsimer” (“Three in a room”) was translated into English as “The bishop’s robe;” “Di parti” (“The party”) became “There are no coincidences.” I tried to become familiar with all of Singer’s fiction in English, so that, often, I would immediately recognize the opening lines of a story—but this, too, was not always so easy, since about ten of his stories start something like this: “It had been snowing for three days straight” or “Outside, a heavy snow was falling. In the poorhouse, the beggars sat around the stove telling stories about … ”—and then the narrator would launch into the story.

In my survey of over thirty years of the Forward and other Yiddish periodicals, I found more than 1,100 separate pieces by Singer. He was tremendously prolific, and it was quite common for him to publish more than one article in a single issue of the Forward. There are even instances in which Singer had more than one article on the same page: on February 17, 1968, for example, there is an installment of the novel Der sharlatan by Yitshak Varshavski; in the upper left corner of the same page there is a piece by D. Segal, “Vos tut men mit der tsayt?” (How do you spend time?). Clearly, Singer spent a lot of time writing.

Although fiction was a relatively small percentage of Singer’s output, still, I found a total of fifty-five short stories, eleven novellas and eleven full-length novels that have not yet been translated into English. I didn’t read these works as I was compiling the bibliography, so I can’t vouch for their literary quality. It’s entirely possible that Singer himself did not think highly enough of these works to translate them; it’s also possible that he simply did not have the time for the exacting task of translating and revising all of his fiction, since he insisted on being involved in all the translations of his work. There were also probably pragmatic considerations: what suited a daily readership in the Yiddish press would not necessarily be a profit-turning book for an English readership.

Since I finished work on the bibliography in 2002, I’ve been contacted by a variety of researchers and translators interested in seeing these fugitive works. A professor in Brazil assigned a portion of one of the novels to her students studying Yiddish-to-Portuguese translation. A German literary critic was interested in many minute bibliographic details. Joseph Sherman, at Oxford, made a start on the untranslated underworld novel Yarme and Keyla even before my bibliography went to press, and one chapter has come out in the book The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer. For a librarian, there is no greater pleasure in life than making a bibliography; and it’s nice that it seems to be of use to students and scholars as they continue to find new ways to illuminate the always-elusive Isaac Bashevis Singer. •

About the author
Roberta Saltzman is known to I.B. Singer researchers and devotees as the compiler of the award-winning bibliography, Isaac Bashevis Singer: a Bibliography of His Works in Yiddish and English, 1960-1991. She is Assistant Head of the Dorot Jewish Division and chief cataloger of Judaica at The New York Public Library. She is currently compiling a bibliography to complete coverage of Singer’s lifetime work, encompassing the years 1950-59.