Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  In the first years following the Revolution, the Forward, a socialist newspaper, had expressed sympathy toward communism. But Abe Cahan quickly realized that he had erred and the Forward became sharply anti-Communist, actually the most important anti-Bolshevik newspaper in America. The Forward writers, most of whom were experts on all the radical movements in Russia, uncovered Stalin’s murders long before the democratic world became aware of them. The Forward would arrive at the Writers’ Club and I read it. America was enjoying “prosperity” (one of the English words that American-Yiddish adopted). Jews grew wealthy from real estate, from stocks that kept ever climbing, and from various other businesses. The Forward printed stories and novels by the best Yiddish writers as well as articles written by prominent non-Jewish socialists and liberals in Europe. The people at the Writers’ Club laughed at the somewhat anglicized Yiddish employed in the Forward, yet they all strove to work for this affluent newspaper which paid generous fees.

  A second child had been born to my brother—Joseph, or Yosele (who is now the translator of most of my works). My brother had rented a comfortable apartment at 36 Leszno Street. One day he was a pauper; the next, he was considered rich by the indigent literary community. He wanted to help me, but I had resolved to live on my earnings. I actually avoided him, and the reason for this was my shyness. Known writers and young women who were admirers of literature used to congregate at his home. Most of these young women came from wealthy homes, were fashionably dressed, smoked cigarettes, spoke a good Polish, laughed loudly, and kissed the men, and I was ashamed before them with my cheap clothes, my broken Polish, and my yeshivah-student-like bashfulness. They were all older than I and they discussed me as if I were some curiosity. They would point their manicured fingers and ask: “Wherever did he get such fiery red hair? Do you notice how blue his eyes are?”

  It was enough for a woman to merely glance at me to make me blush deeply. At Gina’s house I was a mighty lover, but here I again became a child, a cheder boy. This double role confused me and evoked astonishment among others, since it was known that I wrote and had a mistress. In some book or magazine, I had stumbled upon a phrase, “split personality,” and I applied this diagnosis to myself. This was precisely what I was—cloven, torn, perhaps a single body with many souls each pulling in a different direction. I lived like a libertine yet I didn’t cease praying to God and asking for His mercy; I broke every law of the Shulhan Arukh and at the same time I read cabala books and Chassidic volumes; I had spotted the weaknesses in the famous philosophers and great writers yet I wrote things that emerged naïve, awkward, amateurish. Now my potency was beyond belief—suddenly I became impotent. Some kind of enemy roosted within me or a dybbuk who spited me in every way and played cat-and-mouse with me. As soon as I read of some phobia or neurosis, I immediately acquired it. All the afflictions psychiatrists and neurologists described in their works assailed me one after another and often, all at the same time. I was consumptive, had cancer in my intestines, a tumor in my brain, I was growing blind, deaf, paralyzed, insane. I suffered from nightmares and compulsions. Some maniac uttered crazy words inside my brain and I could not silence him. At the same time I held myself in such check that not even Gina knew what I was going through. Older writers at the Writers’ Club often told me they envied my youth and I said: “Believe me, there is nothing to envy.”

  I sought in books a solution to my distraction (and to all other enigmas). I constantly browsed through bookstores and libraries, but the books nearly all disappointed me, even the works of masters. The philosophers all made claims whose truths they couldn’t substantiate. What’s more, even if what they said were true, I found no new data there and certainly no solace. The literary works, the novels, all concurred that a man could love just one woman at a time and vice versa. But I felt that they lied. Rather than literature denying men’s laws, the laws had seized literature in a trap and kept it there. I frequently fantasized about writing a novel in which the hero was simultaneously in love with a number of women. Since the Orientals were allowed to practice polygamy and to maintain harems (if they could afford it), the European could do the same. Monogamy was a law established by legislators, not by nature. But an artist had to be true to nature, human nature, at least in his descriptions regardless how wild, unjust, and insane it might be. Somewhere I had the suspicion that what was going on in my head went on in many other heads as well. Not only Yiddish literature but many other literatures struck me as too inhibited. Already then I had the feeling that every kind of censorship did great harm to literature. When I read Anna Karenina, I thought how good it would have been if Tolstoi could have described Anna’s sexual relationships with her husband, and later, with her lover. All the details about Anna’s dress, her visits, her friendships, and her journeys did little to reveal her situation. How much better it would have been to learn of her erotic relations with the two men; the crises and inhibitions that emerge in bed, when the person doffs not only his or her physical clothes but some of his spiritual ones as well. The sexual organs expressed more of the human soul than all the other body parts, even the eyes. To write about love and exclude sex was a useless labor.

  Rummaging through the bookstores and libraries, I encountered a number of books that steered me in the direction I was to follow later. I found Professor Kraushaar’s works about the False Messiah, Jacob Frank, and his disciples. I read whatever I could about the era of Sabbatai Zevi, in whose footsteps Jacob Frank had followed. I ran across many books that described the punishments imposed upon witches in Europe and America, the Crusades and their mass hysterias, as well as various accounts of dybbuks both Jewish and Gentile. In these works I found everything I had been pondering—hysteria, sex, fanaticism, superstition. The fact was that in our house these subjects had always been discussed and analyzed.

  My father thought the world of Rabbi Jonathan Eibeshutz and bore a grudge against Rabbi Jonathan’s enemy, Reb Jacob Emden. Rabbi Jonathan’s book Tablet of the Testimony almost always lay on the desk in my father’s study. Father often discussed with Mother (who was a scholarly woman) the fact that Rabbi Jonathan had been a just and pious man and that the accusations made against him by Reb Jacob Emden alleging that he, Rabbi Jonathan, was a secret follower of Sabbatai Zevi and that he issued amulets with allusions to Sabbatai Zevi and that he had brought down an epidemic and other misfortunes upon pregnant women, were false. Father constantly brought up Reb Jacob Emden’s “Torat ha-Kenaot,” “Edut beyaakob,” “Shebirat Luhot ha-Aron,” and his other tracts. Disputes between rabbis going back some two hundred years had more substance in our house than current events in the daily newspaper. Father believed every word written by the cabalists and waged a private war against those who openly or covertly contended that the Zohar hadn’t been written by Rabbi Simon Ben Yohay but by Reb Moshe de Leon. One of the most outspoken opponents of the cabala had been the Italian scholar and exegete Reb Aryeh de Medina, and his name was anathema in our house.

  Because my brother Joshua had become enlightened and Father was terrified lest the younger children follow his example, he constantly plied us with tales of transmigrated spirits, dybbuks, and miracles performed by various wonder-rabbis and saints. Somewhere inside Father nursed a resentment against Mother, who was inclined toward logic and science and had even been slightly infected by the Enlightenment. Her father, the Bilgorai rabbi, my grandfather Reb Jacob Mordecai, thought highly of Jacob Emden and was a bit of a misnagid, or anti-Chassid, and Father occasionally erupted with angry words against his father-in-law. From childhood I had been steeped in Chassidism, cabala, miracles, and all kinds of occult beliefs and fantasies. After lengthy stumbling and groping I rediscovered what I had been carrying within me the whole time.

  2

  Somewhere, I had heard or read the expression “the reappraisal of all values” and it was clear to me that this was what I had to do—reappraise all values. I could not rely on any authority. I still hadn’t published a single word and
at the Writers’ Club I was known only as “Singer’s brother.” Just the same I waged contentions with God, the Prophets, religions, philosophies, as well as with the creators of world literature. Was Shakespeare really the genius he was made out to be? Were Maxim Gorki and Andreyev pillars of literature? Were Mendele Mocher Sforim, Peretz, Shalom Aleichem, and Bialik really as great as the Yiddishists and Hebraists wanted them to be? Had Hegel really said anything new in philosophy? Had the species really originated as Darwin claimed they had? Was there any substance to the assertions of Karl Marx, Lenin, Bukharin? Was democracy indeed the best system? Could a Jewish State in Palestine really solve the Jewish question? Did the words “equality” and “freedom” really mean something or were they mere rhetoric? Was it worthwhile to go on living and struggling in this world or were those who spat upon the whole mess right?

  I was surrounded on all sides by the faithful who all believed in something: the Orthodox and the Zionists, the Chassidim and the misnagdim, the writers of the editorials in the Yiddish press and the anti-Semites in the Polish press, those who defended the League of Nations and those who opposed it. The brides and grooms who were congratulated in the newspapers apparently believed in the institution of marriage and in bringing forth new generations. I had often heard educators discussing the problems of rearing the young. In his letters to me, my father constantly warned me to live like a Jew and not—God forbid—forget or disgrace my heritage. Mother, on the other hand, pleaded again and again that I guard my health, not catch cold, God forbid, eat on time, go to sleep early, and not overwork. She wished me long life and hoped that I would make a good match and provide her with grandchildren. My sister-in-law Genia, Joshua’s wife, often consulted with her sister, Bella, and with neighbors about which would be best for Yosele—to breast-feed him or give him a bottle, to use this formula or that? But something within me asked: “What for? Why? Why slaughter chickens, calves, and kids and bring up people? Why slave and stay up nights so that there would be a Yosele, and Isaac, or a Gina?”

  As skillful as Tolstoi was in portraying individual types, so naïve did he seem to me when he tried to give advice on how to solve the agrarian problem in Russia or to expedite the teaching of the Gospel. All this babble about a better tomorrow, a rosier future, a united mankind, or equality was based on wishes, delusions, and sometimes merely on lust for power. It was clear to me that after the First World War there would have to come a second, a third, a tenth. Most faces expressed callousness, supreme egotism, indifference to everything outside their own ken, and, quite often, stupidity. Here they prayed and there they slaughtered. The same priests who preached love on Sunday morning hunted a fox, a hare, or some other helpless creature on Sunday afternoon or tried to hook a fish in the Vistula. The Polish officers who strutted about displaying their medals, brandishing their swords, and saluting each other hadn’t the slightest chance of defending their country if it were attacked by Russia or Germany. And it was just as hard to believe that England would surrender her mandate in Palestine or that the Arabs would allow the Jews to establish a nation there. By now, I knew that atheism and materialism were just as unsubstantial as the religions. All my probings led to the same conclusion—that there was some scheme within Creation, someone we call God, but He had not revealed Himself to anyone nor was there even the slightest indication that He desired love, peace, and justice. The whole history of man and beast; all the facts pointed to the very opposite—that this was a God of strength and cruelty Whose principle was: Might makes right.

  Oddly enough, this total skepticism or agnosticism led me to a kind of private mysticism. Since God was completely unknown and eternally silent. He could be endowed with whatever traits one elected to hang upon Him. Spinoza had bestowed Him with two known attributes and an endless array of unknown ones. But why couldn’t one fantasize many other attributes? Why couldn’t creativeness be one of His attributes? Why couldn’t beauty, harmony, growth, expediency, playfulness, humor, will, sex, change, freedom, and caprice represent divine attributes too? And where was it written that He was the only God? Maybe He belonged to a whole army of gods, an infinite hierarchy. Maybe He procreated and multiplied and brought forth billions of angels, seraphim, Aralim, and cherubim in His cosmic harem as well as new generations of gods. Since nothing was known about Him and nothing could be known, why not confer upon this divine X all the possible values? The cabalists had done this in their own fashion, the idolators in another, and the Christians and Muslims in another still. I personally was fully prepared to crown Him with all kinds of possible attributes except benevolence and compassion. To ascribe mercy to a God who for millions of years had witnessed massacres and tortures and who had literally built an entire world on the principle of violence and murder was something my sense of justice wouldn’t allow me to do. In my mind I created a kind of pecking order between us. I, a dust speck trembling with fear and filled with a sort of sense of right based upon my own silly urges and convictions; He, a universal murderer, a cosmic Genghis Khan or Napoleon—eternal, infinite, omnipotent, so wise and mighty in knowledge and technique that He could keep track of every electron, every atom, every gnat, fly, and microbe. It was even possible that one could phone Him directly with a request through the medium of prayer but with no guarantee whatsoever of an answer. I had actually appropriated Spinoza’s God but I had extended Him, anthropomorphized Him, bestialized Him, and reworked Him in my imagination to suit my moods. Incredibly enough, I “phoned” Him my requests and hoped somehow that He could answer me if the notion struck Him to do so. At that time my most urgent request was that my stories be printed and that I could have a room of my own. Being together with Gina had begun to grow tiresome for me.

  Why? Because Gina grew ever more attached to me. She had seriously begun to demand that I marry her. She had grown jealous. She wanted to build her whole life upon me and even hoped that in time I would support her. I had no yen whatsoever to take a wife at least twenty years older and one that had already gone through who knows how many husbands and lovers before me. I didn’t want to assume any burdens. Somehow, almost overnight, Gina had turned solemn. I no longer dared remind her of her past and she began to deny the affairs of which she had once told me. She now nagged at me to work and to be disciplined. In short, she became that which I didn’t want—a wife.

  3

  Again I went around looking for a place to live. Again I climbed stairs and temporarily intruded into the lives of those who wanted to give up a portion of their living quarters.

  Most of the advertisements read: “For a gentleman only.” Others frankly specified that the lodger must be a bachelor. Those who rented rooms were nearly all women. I rang, they opened, and we contemplated each other. After a while they asked what I did and when I told them that I worked for a publication they were instantly won over. Our glances met and mutely asked: perhaps? I had become a connoisseur of faces, bosoms, shoulders, bellies, hips. I speculated how much pleasure these various parts could provide if it came to an intimacy. At times, within the space of a few minutes I gained insight into a life. Men had died leaving widows. The rich had grown impoverished. Husbands had stayed on in Russia, fallen at the front, gone off to America, or run away with other women. For a while it would appear that fate had steered me to the right place but soon the problems would begin to emerge—the rent was too high or the room was half-dark. Some of the rooms had no stoves to heat them. Actually I couldn’t afford even the cheapest room but if I was going to write I needed a room of my own. My publisher had promised to get me to do Yiddish translations of German, Polish, and Hebrew. Even as I talked to these women I formed conceptions of their character and intelligence. Some pouted and grew sarcastic when they heard that I wrote in Yiddish. Others asked if there really was such a thing as Yiddish literature. They had apparently never heard of Shalom Aleichem or Peretz, or they only made believe so. Those that agreed to rent to me for a small sum were ugly, neglected, with a houseful of children and rooms
that stank of pesticide. Their kitchens exuded the smell of onions, garlic, washing soda. To go to the toilet one had to pass through the living room. My eyes wearied of looking at closets, chairs, rugs, credenzas, beds, sofas, wall clocks, samovars, portraits, and knickknacks dating back to King Sobieski’s time. I inhaled the scent of perfumes, soaps, bodies. If I could have afforded a hundred zlotys a month I might have picked and chosen, but I couldn’t even consider paying more than fifty.