Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  No, I could find no answer in the Scriptures. The Scriptures indirectly confirmed the theories of Malthus. When the Jews were stronger, they killed the Philistines, and when the Philistines were stronger, they killed the Jews. According to the Scriptures, the Jews fell before their foe because they had sinned, but was every soldier in the war a sinner? And what about the children who were frequent victims of these wars? It seemed that God didn’t punish individual sinners directly—He punished the entire group. But this same God had also said that fathers mustn’t die for the sins of their children nor children for the sins of the fathers, but that everyone must die for his own sins.

  I did find a trace of comfort in the cabala books. These books described the earth as the meanest of all the worlds. The evil spirits, the dissenters, Satan, Lilith, Naamah, Machlat, Shibta—all had dominion in this den of evil. Our world was the lowest of all the worlds, far removed from God and His mercy. But just because we were so far from God and His benevolence, He had given us the greatest gift in His treasury—free will. The angels have no choice, but man could choose between good and evil. This world is, you might say, the weakest link in God’s chain, and a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. When man chooses virtue, he strengthens all the spheres. Angels and seraphim look forward to a man doing a good deed, since this brings joy and strength to all the worlds. A good deed helps God and the Divine Presence to unite. A sin, on the other hand, evokes gloom in all the worlds.

  Assume it was so. But does a cat have a choice? Does a mouse? I once heard the scream of a mouse that a cat had caught, and this cry haunts me still. Do the chickens slaughtered in Yanash’s Market have a choice? Do they have to suffer because of our choice? Well, and those children that died of scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and other diseases—how were they guilty? I had read and heard that the souls of the dead were reincarnated in cattle and fowl and that when the slaughterer killed them with a kosher knife and said the blessing with fervor, this served to purify these souls. What about those cows and hens that fell into the hands of Gentile butchers? …

  “I’m becoming a heretic!” I said to myself, or thought it.

  My urge to know what the unbelievers or the scientists had to say grew ever stronger. Who knows—perhaps the truth lies with them? A Jewish publisher in Warsaw had begun to issue a series of popular books on science, and I asked my brother to bring them to me. My brother and I now shared a secret. I read a popular book on physics. I read about astronomy. To the scientists, the universe was larger than the World of Deed as described in the cabala. In infinite space floated countless bodies, some already cooled, others of a temperature of thousands and millions of degrees, others still composed of gases or mists. All these bodies were ruled by one law—gravity. The book provided the cosmological theory of Kant and Laplace. Earlier, the universe had consisted of one immense fog. This fog existed in a state of equilibrium. But something occurred so that in one place in this fog the molecules grew denser and began to attract the surrounding molecules. A body formed which grew from moment to moment—a cosmic ball. In time, this ball grew so immense that it tore apart and formed the sun, the other stars, the planets, and the comets. The sun itself grew too big and unwieldy so that a part of it tore away and later became our Earth and the moon …. I discussed this theory with my brother. “Where did the first fog come from?” I asked him, and my brother replied: “Where did God come from? You must accept the fact that something has existed forever and you can just as well say that nature existed forever as you can say that God did. It’s the same with gravity and all the other laws. They were a part of nature forever, but so long as the cosmic fog was in a state of equilibrium these laws remained passive (more or less).”

  Even a child could detect the similarity between the cabala and the cosmology of Kant and Laplace. The only difference lay in the fact that the infinity as described by the cabala possessed consciousness, wisdom, beauty, and mercy, whereas the fog of Kant and Laplace was dead. The question of how this dead golem could have produced trees, blossoms, birds, lions, Maimonides, Copernicus, Newton, and the Baal Shem, the scientists had one answer: development, evolution. My father called it by another name—an inkwell that had spilled on a scroll and written a book full of wisdom ….

  In the midst of all this, World War I erupted. Some assassin had killed the Austrian archduke and his wife, and millions of soldiers and civilians had to pay with their lives for this crime. The scholars of all the nations harnessed the eternal laws to decimate the enemy peoples. The Jews in the Radzymin study house where my father worshiped (we had moved from number 10 to number 12 Krochmalna Street) said that there were such cannons now that could kill a thousand soldiers with one shot. The airplane had been invented, a kind of heavier-than-air balloon. Until the war we had to be careful with the Yiddish newspaper in our house. Father said that the newspapers were full of blasphemy and heresy. He said that to start the day by reading the paper was like eating poison for breakfast. But as the armies fought around the towns and villages where we came from and the Tsar’s uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich, ordered the Jews driven out of those towns and even took Jews as hostage and sent them to Siberia, Father started to glance into the papers, too—not the first thing in the morning but later in the day, after praying and studying. New words had emerged which Father had never before heard. The Jew who had been in exile for two thousand years and never mixed into the Gentile wars had almost no names for arms and ammunition. Nor did he have words for strategy and tactics. The Yiddish journalists had to adapt all these words from the German and occasionally from Russian and Polish. Father read the reports. The enemy (the Germans) was constantly being repulsed—still he kept advancing steadily despite the heavy losses. The numbers of dead and wounded were listed. At times the writer added: “We suffered heavy casualties, too.” Father gripped his red beard while his blue eyes gazed out the window and up to heaven. They fought and shed blood over some poverty-stricken village, some muddy stream. They burned the wooden shacks and the meager possessions of paupers who often had to flee into the cold nights with their children. I heard Father mumble: “Woe, woe is us, God in heaven!”

  I wanted to say: “Papa, this isn’t the fault of God but of evolution. Had the fog remained in a state of equilibrium, we would all be in peace.”

  Five

  We starved at home. Bitter frosts raged outside, but our stove wasn’t lit. Mother lay in bed all day and read her books of morals—Duty of the Heart, The Rod of Punishment, The Good Heart, and occasionally the aforementioned Book of the Covenant. Her face was white and bloodless. She, too, sought the answers to the eternal questions, but her faith remained firm. She didn’t cast a speck of doubt upon the Almighty. Mother argued with my older brother: “It isn’t the Creator’s fault. He wanted to give the Torah to Esau and Ishmael but they rejected it.” My brother asked: “Were you there?” He denied the concept of free choice. There was no such thing as free will. If you were born into a Jewish house, you believed in Jewishness; if you were born into a Christian home, you believed in Jesus; if you were born a Turk, you believed in Mohammed. He said to Mother: “If someone abducted you as a child out of your father’s house and raised you among Gentiles, you’d keep on crossing yourself, and instead of the Jewish books you’d be reading the history of the Christian martyrs now.”

  Mother grimaced at this blasphemy and said: “May the Almighty forgive your words.”

  “There is no Almighty. Man is an animal like all animals. This whole war is on account of oil.”

  This was the first time I had ever heard such words. Oil, of all things? All the time we had lived in number 10 we had used oil or kerosene in our lamps. Now that we lived in number 12 we used gas. It seemed incredible that Germany, Russia, England, and France should fight over such a filthy thing as oil, but my brother soon explained it.

  Mother heard him out and said: “They only need an excuse to fight. Today they fight over oil; tomorrow it’ll be over soap or c
ream of tartar. The fact is that they are evildoers and the evildoer wants to commit evil. All he needs is an excuse.”

  “When the Jews had a country, they fought, too. The whole notion of the ‘chosen people’ isn’t worth a row of beans. We’re the same animals as all the others. We have our share of swindlers, fakers, and charlatans.”

  “It’s all because of the accursed Exile.”

  I didn’t know myself with whom to agree—I loved them both deeply—but it appeared that my brother was right. Whatever home one was raised in, that was the faith one accepted. The home hypnotized people like that hypnotist Feldman described in the newspapers. That which Feldman did in a minute the home did gradually. If you heard day in and day out that there is a God, you believed in God. If you raised children to believe that everything resulted from evolution, they would believe in evolution. But which was the truth? I, Isaac, or Itchele, from Krochmalna Street, wouldn’t let myself be hypnotized by anybody. I had to consider everything on my own and come to my own conclusions! I realized by now that reading popular books on science wouldn’t reveal the secret of the world to me. Kant and Laplace were men, too, not angels. How could they possibly know what had happened millions and myriads of years ago? Since one cannot dig a pit seven miles deep and see what goes on beneath the earth, how could they know how the universe had formed? It was all supposition or plain guesswork. Both the cabala and the astronomy book spoke of presences that existed forever, but I couldn’t for the life of me conceive of such a thing. If God or the fog had existed forever, this would mean you could take a wagonful of pencils and write the number of years these presences had existed and it still wouldn’t be enough. The fact was that you couldn’t write this total with all the pencils in the world on all the paper in the world. In the book on astronomy it stated that space was without limit as was the number of heavenly bodies. But how could something stretch on without an end? On the other hand, how could time have a beginning? What was before the beginning? And how could space have a limit? I spoke of this to my brother, and he said: “Your questions have to do with philosophy, not with science, but you can’t find the truth there either.”

  “Where can you find it?”

  “The real truth was never known, it isn’t known, and it will never be known. Just like a fly can’t pull a wagon of coal or iron, our brain can’t fathom the truth of the world.”

  “In that case, what’s to be done?”

  “Eat, drink, sleep, and if it’s possible, try to create a better order.”

  “What kind of order?”

  “One in which the nations stop slaughtering each other and people have work, food, and a decent place to live.”

  “How can this be done?”

  “Oh, there are all kinds of theories.”

  My brother waved his hand. He himself was in deep trouble. He was hiding from the Russian military authorities. He lived under a false passport listing a different name and different place of birth. He was living in some unheated studio of a sculptor and starving along with the rest of us. He risked his life every moment, since deserters were shot. Mother cried her eyes out as she prayed to God that no harm befall him. Although I doubted the existence of God, I, too, prayed to Him (whenever I forgot that I was a heretic). After all, you couldn’t be sure about such things.

  My brother left after a short visit, but before leaving, he glanced out the window to see that no military patrols were roaming about. I began to pace to and fro like a caged beast. How could you live in such a world? How could you breathe when you were condemned to never, never know where you came from, who you were, where you were going? I looked out the window and saw a freight wagon of sacks drawn by a skinny nag. I compared myself to this creature that pulled a load without knowing what it was or where it was going or why it had to strain so. My brother had just now advised me, like Ecclesiastes, to eat, drink, and sleep, but I had nothing to eat and it wasn’t even easy to drink a glass of water, since our water pipes had frozen. No matter how I covered myself at night I still felt cold. The mice in our apartment were apparently starving, too, since they grew ever bolder in their desperation—they even leaped over our beds. Well, and how would I go about creating a better order? Should I write a letter to Nicholas II or to Wilhelm II or to the English King that it didn’t pay to go to war over oil? Hadn’t Malthus said that wars and epidemics were useful—actually vital to man’s existence?

  My brother had mentioned the philosophers, and although he said that I could learn nothing from them, they had to know something, after all. Otherwise, why were they called philosophers? But where did one get such a book? I could have asked my brother, but first of all, he seldom came home now, and secondly, he often forgot what I asked him for and it took him weeks to remember. But I had to learn the answer right now! I began to rummage among my brother’s papers, and I found what I wanted—a book from Bresler’s Library listing its address somewhere on Nowolipki Street. Now I was ready to launch the biggest adventure of my life—namely, I resolved to go to this library and try to get a book out on philosophy. It was my feeling that my brother had probably already read this book and that it was high time he brought it back. A few times cards had come from the library demanding from my brother that he bring back books that were overdue. I would therefore take this book back and ask for another in its stead, one on philosophy. It was true that if my brother found out what I had done, he might grow terribly angry and might even slap me for going where I didn’t belong. But what was a slap compared to the joy that a book on philosophy would grant me? I burned with the urge to read what the philosophers had to say about God, the world, time, space, and, most of all, why people and animals must suffer so. This to me was the question of questions.

  I took the book and started off toward Nowolipki Street. It was freezing outside. The Germans had pushed so close to Warsaw that I could hear their cannonfire in the streets. I pictured to myself how a thousand soldiers died from every shot. Freezing blasts blew, making my nose feel like a piece of wood. I had no gloves, and the fingers of the hand holding the book had become stiff. I was terribly afraid they would yell at me at the library or make fun of me. Who knows? My brother might even be there. I raced against the wind, and a voice within me shouted, “I must learn the truth! Once and for all!”

  I went inside the library and, for a moment, saw nothing. My eyes grew bedazzled and my head spun. “If only I don’t faint!” I prayed to the forces that guided the world. Gradually the dizziness subsided, and I saw a huge room, actually a hall stacked with books from floor to the astoundingly high ceiling. The sun shone in through the windows casting a bright wintery light. Behind a wide counter stood a corpulent man—bareheaded, beardless, with longish hair and a mustache—who placed paper patches on the margins of a book. For a long time he didn’t look up, then he noticed me, and his big black eyes expressed a kind of amiable surprise.

  He said: “What do you say, young fellow?”

  I savored the title “young fellow.” It was a sign that I was already half grown.

  I replied: “I brought back my brother’s book.”

  The librarian stuck out his hand and took the book. He stared for a long time at the inside of the cover and knitted his brow. Then he asked: “Israel Joshua Singer is your brother?”

  “Yes, my older brother,” I replied.

  “What’s happened to him? It’s a year since he took out this book. You’re not allowed to keep a book longer than a month. A pretty big fine has accumulated. More than the deposit.”

  “My brother is in the Army,” I said, astounded over my own lie. It was obviously either my way of justifying my brother’s failure to return the book or a means of drawing sympathy to myself. The librarian shook his head.

  “Where is he—in the war?”

  “Yes, the war.”

  “You don’t hear from him?”

  “Not a word.”

  The librarian grimaced.

  “What do they want—those savages? W
hy do they drag innocent victims into their murderous wars?” He spoke half to me, half to himself. He paused a moment, then said: “Your brother is a talented young man. He writes well. He paints well, too. A talent. A born talent. Well, and you obviously study at the study house, eh?”

  “Yes, I study, but I want to know what goes on in the world, too,” I said. I had the feeling that my mouth was speaking of its own volition.

  “Oh? What do you want to know?”

  “Oh—physics, geography, philosophy—everything.”

  “Everything, eh? No one knows everything.”

  “I want to know the secret of life,” I said, ashamed of my own words. “I want to read a book on philosophy.”

  The librarian arched his brows.

  “What book? In what language?”

  “In Yiddish. I understand Hebrew, too.”

  “You mean, the sacred language?”

  “My brother read the Ha-tzephirah, and I read it, too.”

  “And your father let you read such a heretical paper?”

  “He didn’t see.”

  The librarian mulled this over.

  “I have something about philosophy in Yiddish, but a boy your age should study useful things, not philosophy. It’ll be difficult for you and it’ll serve no practical purpose.”

  “I want to know what the philosophers say about why people must suffer and how the world came about.”

  “The philosophers don’t know this themselves. Wait here.”

  He went to search among the books and even climbed a ladder. He came down with two books and showed them to me. One was in Yiddish, the other in Hebrew.

  He said: “I have something for you, but if your father should see them, he’d tear them to pieces.”

  “My father won’t see them. I’ll hide them well.”

  “When you take out books from a library, you have to leave a deposit and pay for a month in advance, but you probably haven’t a groschen. All right, I’ll take the chance, but bring them back when you’re finished. And keep them clean. If you bring them back in time, I’ll find something else for you. If a boy wants to learn the secret of life, you have to accommodate him.”