Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Everything had grown remarkably complicated, but I needed these complications and sought others. At the Writers’ Club I met one of those girls who were called in jest “literary supplements.” They came to the Club to partake of the literary and journalistic gossip, to strike up acquaintance with the writers and launch illicit affairs with them. At times it came out that these girls—there were some married women among them as well—wrote poems in Yiddish or in Polish. Some were Zionistically inclined and wanted to go to Palestine; others were Communist sympathizers who one day might cross illegally into the Soviet Union. Some came from wealthy families, and the literary Don Juans got small loans from them. The management of the Writers’ Club made frequent resolutions to bar these women. It was voted that no one but members and their wives or husbands would be admitted. A number of special guest cards were printed and a woman was stationed by the door to keep strangers out. But somehow it was impossible to get rid of these hangers-on. They claimed to love Yiddish literature, they admired the writers’ talents. Some offered to translate the writers’ works into Polish. Although the Yiddish actors had their own union, many actors and actresses were standing guests of the Writers’ Club—painters and sculptors as well as potential producers of Yiddish films who were merely waiting for the right screenplay and money. The proprietor of the buffet and the waitresses often extended credit to these uninvited guests.

  Miss Sabina was small and plump, with a high bosom, a short neck, a hooked nose, full lips, and a pair of brown eyes that reflected the merriment of those who have little to hope for. She made jokes, smoked cigarettes, told spicy anecdotes. She owned a Yiddish typewriter and the writers occasionally gave her a manuscript to type. She worked in a library part-time and supported a widowed mother and two younger brothers. Sabina claimed to be my age but she looked older. She dressed poorly and with a touch of the Bohemian. Someone had told me that she had been the sweetheart of an old writer with one lung and one kidney who had been impotent besides. He had just recently died.

  Sabina talked a lot and told me stories that seemed to be lies, but I subsequently became convinced that for all their strangeness they were true. The impotent old writer had had a whole harem of mistresses. He spent every penny he earned on them. He had indulged in all kinds of quirks and perversions. He slept days (after swallowing enormous quantities of sleeping pills) and stayed up nights. He had stopped writing fiction in his last years and lived from the one feuilleton he published every Friday. He would write the piece at the last minute, at the same time consuming so many cigarettes that once a dense smoke began issuing from his window and the policeman outside called the fire department. L. M. Preshburger, as I call him here, had lost the talent or the urge to write, but he had concentrated all his art in his tongue. He would repose on the couch, smoke, drink, and utter words that evoked amazement, shock, and awe from his female admirers. The doctors had long since given him up—he lived in defiance of all the laws of medicine.

  Sabina liked to walk, unlike Gina, who had stopped taking walks since she complained of pains in her legs. Sabina would accompany me for miles. After Pilsudski became the dictator, we went to see the damaged buildings where the fighting had taken place. We bought rolls from a street vendor and munched them as we strolled along. Sabina had told me her life story in all the details. She was descended from rabbis and merchants. Her father had died of typhoid fever leaving nothing but a large apartment of six rooms plus a kitchen. Because of the rent control the rent was cheap and her mother rented rooms to elderly bachelors and cooked lunch for them. One time, the mother rented a room to a female cousin, a rabbi’s daughter who turned out to be a Soviet agent. One night the house was surrounded by police, the cousin was arrested and sentenced to death. However, the Communists managed to free her and smuggled her into Russia where she became a highly placed official in some ministry and a leader in the Comintern. Beside her passion for communism, this cousin had a wild appetite for men. It later came out that she had had doings with all the old bachelors in the apartment, and following her arrest, one of them (after learning that he hadn’t been her only lover) attempted suicide.

  Yiddish literature had remained naïve and primitive and even its radicalism was provincial, but from Sabina’s lips poured tales of high adventure. After nearly two thousand years of ghettos and extreme segregation from the Gentile world, there had been awakened in the emancipated Jew an enormous yearning for worldliness coupled with a boundless energy. In Poland, this transformation had evolved later than in the other lands, but with incredible rapidity. Yiddish literature with its sentimentality and slow pace wasn’t ready for such a transformation. The same writers who told astounding stories at the Writers’ Club trembled the moment they took pen in hand lest, God forbid, they slip into melodrama. Among the Communist writers it had become fashionable to fling mud at the shtetl and to contend that its time had passed. But even this they did in provincial fashion. From reading the world literature I had realized that the Gentile writers too lacked the perception to describe the epoch in which they lived. They were also rooted in a literary tradition which discouraged them from writing what their eyes saw.

  There had appeared such works as Jean Christophe, by Romain Rolland, and The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann. I had translated this latter work into Yiddish and I had had the opportunity to analyze its construction so to say “from the inside.” Both these works represented long essays spiced with description. Neither Jean Christophe nor Hans Castorp were living beings but mouthpieces through which the authors spoke. Both books lacked the suspense and vitality that great literature evokes in a reader even if he is a simple soul. These were works for intellectuals seeking a purpose, a sum total, a cross section of culture, an indication for the future, and other such fine things that no art (and actually no philosophy) is capable of supplying. These were works for critics, not readers. They bored me, but I was afraid to say so since all so-called aesthetes had seized on them as if they were treasures. Already then I realized that there was emerging in the world the kind of reader who sought in a book not the synthetic but the analytical. They dissected the books they read and the deader the corpse, the more successful the autopsy. I liked much better Thomas Mann’s The Buddenbrooks and Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon, works full of the zest of life.

  3

  I had written a story and submitted it to the editor of the magazine of which I was the proofreader. He promised to read it and if it pleased him, to publish it. After a while he informed me that he had read the story and even though he found it flawed, he would print it. I asked him what these flaws were and after some deliberation he said that the piece was too pessimistic, that it lacked problems, and that the story was negative and almost anti-Semitic. Why write about thieves and whores when there were so many decent Jewish men and devoted Jewish wives? If such a thing were translated into Polish and a Gentile read it, he might conclude that all Jews were depraved. A Yiddish writer, my editor argued, was honor-bound to stress the good in our people, the lofty and sacred. He had to be an eloquent defender of the Jews, not their defamer.

  I didn’t have the opportunity to answer him since the telephone range at that moment and he stayed on it for a long time, but his comments irked me. Why did a story have to be optimistic? What sort of criterion was this? And what did it mean that it “lacked problems”? Wasn’t the essence of the existence of the world and of the human species one enormous problem? And why must a Yiddish writer be a defender of his people? Was it the Yiddish writer’s obligation to conduct an eternal dialogue with the anti-Semites? Could a work written in this vein possess any artistic value? The Scriptures on which I have been raised didn’t flatter the Jews. Quite the contrary, they constantly spoke of their transgressions. Even Moses didn’t emerge pure. I didn’t have too high an opinion of this editor and his contentions. I had observed his politicking. Now he was a Communist and now an anti-Communist. Now he was for Zionism, now against it. He published and praised bad things b
y known writers and often rejected good things by unknown writers. Might was right always and everywhere—in literature, in the universities, in the community office that appointed rabbis, in the Vatican, even among those who demanded justice for the exploited and oppressed. As soon as two people met, one assumed the dominant role.

  In America, a faction had formed among Yiddish writers called Die Junge (The Young). In their little magazines they poured vitriol upon “the old.” The Yiddish newspaper publishers in Warsaw had engaged persons of little taste to be critics. My friend Aaron Zeitlin told me that some vandal of an editor had permitted essays written by his father, Hillel Zeitlin, to be altered, cut, and often corrupted. Hillel Zeitlin was a deep thinker, a cabalist, and an exceptionally capable journalist besides. God had granted power to every bully to annoy and destroy animals and people as well. I noted with sorrow that I was no exception. In my chance opportunities to write reviews I had already denigrated writers whose works had displeased me. No matter how weak one was there was always someone weaker upon whom he might vent his fangs and claws.

  I managed to do this with Gina. The more she was drawn to me, the more drawn was I to others. Although I felt no love toward her (who knows what love is anyway), I started up with the maid at the house where I boarded. Marila and I had already kissed and made clandestine plans for me to come to her in the kitchen when the household was asleep. I had also promised to go through with the wedding ceremony with Miss Stefa, an act which Gina would consider treacherous. Stefa had sent off a long letter to her fiancé and everything depended upon his reply.

  I had become a thief not for money but for love. I had discovered how easy it was to inveigle oneself into a woman’s heart. I had even tried to start something with Stefa. I did it all with the quiet desperation of one who is aware of how senseless his deeds are. I often felt as if I were two people—one young, full of ambition, passion, and hope; the other a melancholic indulging in a final frolic before being lowered into the grave. Oddly enough, all the Jewish funerals wound beneath Gina’s window while all the Catholic passed beneath mine on Zamenhof Street. I constantly heard the dirges of priests, and sometimes Chopin’s Funeral March as well. Each time I glanced outside I caught glimpses of a coffin bedecked with garlands (real or tin), a priest in a cassock with lace at the sleeves and a miter, men carrying halberds and lanterns, and women with black-veiled faces and hats draped in crepe. The female Jewish mourners shouted their laments, clawed their cheeks, and howled in chorus while the Gentiles bowed their heads silently. Death notices plastered all the walls, and the newspapers were filled with obituaries. Every second, people passed into eternity. But what was the eternity? So long as I couldn’t find the answer to this, all I did was sheer futility.

  Was this state of mind hypochondria or a true foreboding of death? I often went to sleep with the certainty that I would never get up any more. When I went to buy razor blades and the storekeeper asked if I wanted two blades or five, I always answered: “Two.”

  I still groped in books hoping for an answer, but I knew beforehand that none would be forthcoming. I even became disappointed in psychic research. The dead who supposedly materialized at séances spoke as foolish as the living. One had to be an idiot to believe in their authenticity. The philosophers’ commentaries all led to the same conclusion: We neither know nor could know the essence of things. I believed in God anyhow, but there wasn’t, nor probably would there ever be, any proof that He preferred Gandhi to Hitler, Stalin, or Genghis Khan.

  I often heard people say: I believe in Zionism, in socialism, in a better world, in the endurance of Jews, in the power of literature, in democracy, and in many other such beliefs. But on what did they base their faiths? I could never forget the twenty million people who had perished in the war almost before my very eyes, this one for Russia, that one for Germany, some for the Revolution, others for the Counter-Revolution, this one while capturing some village, the other while retreating from the same village. Where were they, all those murderers and all those murdered? Did they share the same paradise? Were they roasting in hell together?

  The telephone rang and Marila came to announce that it was for me. She smirked and winked. I had already given her the right to be jealous. Her cheeks were red, her eyes blue. They reflected both strength and curiosity. It was Stefa calling. I barely recognized her voice. She sounded hoarse and choking, like someone gravely ill.

  She said: “Something has happened. Come right over! Don’t leave me waiting. When will you be here?”

  “What’s happened?” I asked.

  “Nothing good. Come at once!”

  And she hung up the receiver.

  I started right off for her house. I wasn’t too concerned whether the news was good or bad. I needed momentarily to forget myself with something. What could have happened? Had someone in the family taken ill? Had someone died? Hurrying along, it struck me how light I felt. From not eating I had lost weight. I would wake up in the middle of the night and my brain would be churning like a machine. I suffered from nightmares. Sometimes my fantasies evoked laughter even in myself. I had conquered not only earth but all the planets in all the galaxies. God had endowed me with powers He possibly didn’t possess Himself. Through some miracle I conducted affairs with all the beauties of all the ages. Since time and space were merely points of view and even existence itself was, as Salomon Maimon and the neo-Kantians clearly brought out, a category of thinking, perhaps miracles were more real than the laws of nature. Either everything that had ever been existed or nothing existed. You could roll back time like the hands of a watch. Since the world of deed and matter was energy and perhaps spirit, all impossibilities were nothing more than temporary inhibitions. I often felt myself being transported within seconds from depression to exultation and vice versa. I consulted the psychiatric textbooks and was fully cognizant of the symptoms.

  I rang Isidore Janovsky’s bell and Stefa opened the door instantly, as if she had been waiting for me on the other side of the threshold. I barely recognized her. In the few days I hadn’t seen her she had grown pale, emaciated, sallow. She looked disheveled, like someone who had just left her sickbed. She wore an old bathrobe and frayed slippers. She gazed at me a moment numbly as if she didn’t recognize me, then seized my wrist and led me to her room. She virtually dragged me along.

  Stefa’s room was in disarray as if she had been packing to go on a trip. Dresses, underwear, and stockings lay scattered across the floor along with books, magazines, and papers. The bed was unmade and toothbrushes, vials of perfume, jars of salves, and toothpaste lay strewn over the sheet. For a long while Stefa stared at me with the disoriented gaze of one who primed herself to say something but has forgotten what it was she wanted to say. Finally, she blurted:

  “He got married, that idiot! Ran away with some whore from England! Nothing is left me but to die!”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Eh? I know. I have a girl friend there and she telegraphed me. He is no longer in Palestine either. Left with her for England or the devil knows where. Maybe India.”

  “In that case, he is really a criminal.”

  “Eh? A charlatan, a madman, a scoundrel. We shared a great love but now he has killed it. It’s my fault, mine! My father was right. He needed but one look at him to know what he is. But he bedazzled me, hypnotized me. Well, what’s the difference? I must die and that would be a minor tragedy. That would actually be a release for me from all my misfortunes. But I simply can’t pass such a blow onto my parents. They lost one daughter, and now the other? Unless I took an ax and chopped off their heads. Yes, that’s it!”

  “No, Miss Stefa, we are still Jews.”

  “Eh? What kind of Jews are we? Maybe you are a Jew but what does my Jewishness consist of? I never wanted to be one. I was as ashamed of it as if of a scurf. He, Mark, ran from it too. But after he forged that promissory note and had to flee, he ran straight to Palestine. I helped him with my money, otherwise he would be rottin
g in jail this very minute. He had lost forty thousand zlotys to a colonel who threatened him with a revolver. That other was a drunk and a degenerate. What about your promise? Are you still ready to go through with that phony marriage with me? I have no more reason to go to Palestine. But what shall I do with my bastard?”

  And Stefa indicated her belly.

  “We can still go to Palestine,” I said without thinking.

  “What will we do there? Yes, so be it. We’ll find some kind of work. All I must do is wait till my parents die which I hope will be soon. My mother is sick from head to toe. Nor will my father drag around for long once she is gone. All they ever wanted was a little satisfaction from their children—some satisfaction they got! Why Jewish parents require so much satisfaction from their children is something I’ll never understand. They don’t have lives of their own. All their hopes are pinned on children and grandchildren. A crazy race. A sick race. Maybe it’s not too late for an abortion. I’m in my fifth month. If I should get blood poisoning it wouldn’t be any great loss either.”