Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  The status of Yiddish and Yiddish literature was such that there was no way it could worsen. Kleckin Publishing, with which I had been connected, had gone bankrupt, ceased operations. The evening newspaper Radio no longer required my services. The same colleagues who only a year or two before had chided me for working for a bourgeois newspaper, the so-called yellow press, thus helping to feed opiates to the masses, were now trying to peddle their own kitsch at half or quarter price. The disappointment with communism had imbued a good many radicals with Zionist doctrines. My only source of income now was a Yiddish newspaper in Paris which also was on the verge of suspending publication. The checks from Paris kept arriving later and later. Not only couldn’t I keep two separate rooms for my two girl friends, but maintaining even one became harder from month to month.

  I owed Mrs. Alpert several hundred zlotys rent, but she assured me each month that she had complete trust in me. I noticed that Marila, the maid, brought me more rolls for breakfast was my only meal of the day.

  I corresponded with my brother in New York, but I never complained about my lot. Although my plans depended on my brother sending me an affidavit to come to America on a tourist visa and later helping me to remain there, I seldom answered his letters. Writing letters had always been a burden for me and I envied those who found the time and the inspiration for extensive correspondence.

  Others bewailed their lot to me, but I never told them about my troubles. Some writers had become experts at requesting and obtaining various grants and subsidies, but I asked nothing of anyone. Gina, may she rest in peace, had nicknamed me “the Starving Squire.”

  I had often seen men chasing after women, pleading for love, a kiss, an endearment. Young and even elderly writers weren’t ashamed to besiege editorial offices imploring that they review their work. They praised themselves and toadied up to the editors and critics. I never could hold out a hand for love, money, or recognition. Everything had to come to me of its own or not come at all.

  I denied the existence of Providence, yet I awaited its dictates. I had inherited this kind of fatalism (if not faith) from both my parents. My one consolation was that if worst came to worst, I could commit suicide.

  The literary scene in Warsaw, which was so rife with favoritism, clannishness, with “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,” with sucking up to political factions and party leaders and seeking their patronage, found in me and alien element. Even though I felt that a man cannot go through life directly but must muddle through, sneak by, smuggle himself through it, I made my accounting with the divine or Satanic forces, not with the human.

  I had drifted apart from Sabina, who had broken with Stalinism and turned Trotskyite. Her brother, Mottel Duck, had done the same. Brother and sister both hoped that mankind would shortly realize that the true Messiah wasn’t Stalin but Trotsky, and that the social revolution in Poland would be led by Isaac Deutscher, not by that obdurate Stalinist Isaac Gordin (who subsequently spent eleven years in one of Stalin’s concentration camps).

  As for me, since I didn’t possess the courage to kill myself, my only chance to survive was to escape from Poland. One didn’t have to be particularly prescient to foresee the hell that was coming. Only those who were totally hypnotized by silly slogans could not see what was descending upon us. There was no lack of demagogues and plain fools who promised the Jewish masses that they would fight alongside the Polish Gentiles on the barricades and that, following the victory over fascism, the Jews and Gentiles in Poland would evolve into brothers forever after. The pious Jewish leaders, from their side, promised that if the Jews studied the Torah and sent their children to cheders and yeshivahs, the Almighty would perform miracles in their behalf.

  I had always believed in God, but I knew enough of Jewish history to doubt in His miracles. In Chmielnitzki’s times, Jews had studied the Torah and given themselves up to Jewishness perhaps more than in all the generations before and after. There was no Enlightenment or heresy at that time. The tortured and massacred victims were all God-fearing Jews. I had written a book about that period, Satan in Goray. It hadn’t yet appeared in book form but it had been published in the magazine Globus. I hadn’t received a penny in payment. Quite the contrary, I had to contribute toward the cost of the printing and paper.

  A person filled with my kind of doubt is by nature lonely. I had only two friends among the Yiddish writers: Aaron Zeitlin and J.J. Trunk.

  Aaron Zeitlin was some six or seven years older than I. I considered him one of the greatest poets in world literature. He was a master of both Yiddish and Hebrew, but his enormous creative force was better demonstrated in his Yiddish writings. He was a man of great knowledge, a spiritual giant among spiritual dwarfs. When the Yiddish PEN Club in Warsaw issued my book Satan in Goray prior to my departure for America, Zeitlin wrote the Introduction for it. The printed book, with its Introduction, didn’t reach me until I was already in America.

  We were both lonely men. We both knew that a holocaust was descending upon us. I often visited Zeitlin in his apartment on Sienna Street. We even tried collaborating on a book about the mad philosopher Otto Weininger. Sometimes Zeitlin visited me in the furnished rooms I kept changing. He supported himself by writing articles for the newspaper The Express, which occasionally published my little stories.

  Intellectually and literarily, we were as close as two writers can be, but we were totally different in character. Zeitlin’s number-one passion was literature, especially religious literature and everything pertaining to it. My number-one passion was the adventures of love, the endless variations and tensions peculiar to the relations between the sexes.

  Zeitlin was well versed in Russian, Polish, Hebrew, French, and German literature, all of which he read in the original. He discovered writers and thinkers who had been forgotten with time or had never been recognized. For all his erudition, his poetry remained original. He mimicked no one, since he himself was often greater than those he studied. He was a faithful husband to his pretty but cold wife, whom he had married in an arranged match. He dedicated some of his poems to her. He was immensely grateful that a half-assimilated Warsaw girl, the daughter of a wealthy man, had agreed to wed him instead of some doctor or lawyer more suited to her personality. Oddly, she had a job in the burial division of the Jewish Communal Organization and she didn’t give up this somber post after the wedding or even after she had given birth to a son, Risia. She spoke Polish to the child, not the language in which her husband wrote. I rarely saw the couple together.

  There was an unwritten law among the wives of Yiddish writers and of the great number of so-called Yiddishists that their children should be raised to speak the Polish language. My brother’s wife was no exception. The husbands had to accede. Only Chassidim and the poor, especially in the small towns, spoke Yiddish to their children.

  My other friend, who was also Zeitlin’s friend, J. J. Trunk, was some twenty years older than I, the son of a rich man, an owner of buildings in the city of Lodz, and the grandson of a famous rabbi whom Trunk’s nouveau riche great-grandfather had arranged to marry his daughter.

  These two forebears, the merchant and the rabbi, waged a war within Trunk the man and Trunk the writer. Trunk had a good eye for people and situations. He also had a sense of humor. In later years he wrote a ten-volume set of memoirs, which are of great value as a document of Jewish life in Poland. He loved literature and he was virtually desperate to make a mark as a writer. But his writing lacked something that prevented him from achieving this. We, his friends, knew it. Chekhov once said about some Russian writer that he lacked those doubts that give talent gray hair. Trunk was and remained an amateur, albeit a gifted one. He was too cheerful, too gullible about all kinds of “isms,” too naïve to be a true artist. For the very reason that he came from a rich home he resolved to become a socialist. Yet even his socialism somehow didn’t agree with his character and he had constantly to justify himself to both his party comrades and to us, Zeitlin and me.
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  Trunk’s wife, Dacha, shared his heritage of wealth and manner. Generations of Polish Jews spoke from the couple’s lips. Their every word, every tone and gesture exemplified Polish-Jewish life-style, a Polish-Jewish naïvete. The husband and wife were as close as a brother and sister, and as distant as a brother and sister can sometimes be. He was fair, blue-eyed, stout. A boyish joy exuded from his eyes along with a youthful mischievousness. Dacha was lean, dark, and her black eyes reflected the vexation of the put-upon wife. Her only consolation in life was books. The Trunks had one daughter—a tall, slim, blond girl resembling the Polish aristocratic debutantes who rode horseback along Ujazdowe Allee and in Lazienki Park. It is perhaps no coincidence that during the Second World War this proud maiden converted and became a devoted Catholic. Her husband, a Christian, died during the Polish uprising in 1945.

  Yes, Zeitlin, Trunk, and I were close friends. We published our works in the same magazines and anthologies of which I, the youngest, was occasionally a coeditor. I often visited their homes. But as pressing as my need was, it never occurred to me to ask them for a loan. I had already become a member of the Yiddish Writers’ Club and even of the PEN Club, but I remained boyishly bashful and I never took any of my girl friends there. (Zeitlin never asked me about my private affairs. I did occasionally boast to Trunk of my alleged conquests.) The Trunks were both much older than I, and they considered me a half-crazy prodigy who was here one minute and vanished the next, like one of the demons or sprites I described in my stories. My brother also had given up trying to put my life into some kind of order. After he went to America, I became a riddle even to myself. I did things of which I was ashamed. I waged love affairs on several fronts. They all began casually and they all quickly turned serious and led me into countless deceptions and complications. I stole love, but I was always caught in the act, entangled in my lies, and I had constantly to defend myself, make holy promises, and take vows I couldn’t keep. My victims castigated me with the foulest names, but my betrayals apparently didn’t repel them sufficiently to get rid of me.

  2

  It was summer again and the heat engulfed Warsaw. Again I managed to have two residences—this time, one in Warsaw and one in the country, between Swider and Otwock. I still wrote for that Parisian Yiddish newspaper that was about to close, and from time to time I published a fragment of a story in The Express.

  I had moved out of Mrs. Alpert’s, but I had promised her and Marila to return at the first opportunity if the room was still available. At the same time I knew that I would never go back since at that time I had already obtained an affidavit to America from my brother and I was waiting for a tourist visa from the American consul. I had also applied for a foreign passport but it turned out that I lacked the required documents. I had a premonition that I would never leave Poland and that all my endeavors were for naught.

  The days were long in the summer. It wasn’t until ten o’clock that the last remnants of sunset vanished from sight. By three in the morning, the birds already commenced to twitter in my caricature of a dacha. My girl friend Lena and I both slept in the nude since our garret room was baked by the sun all day, roasting our bodies like an oven. It wasn’t until dawn that some cool breezes from the pine forests began to blow. The entire villa was one enormous ruin. The roof had holes, and when it rained we had to set up buckets to catch the water. The floor was rotted and infested with vermin. The mice had fled for lack of food. For the sum of one hundred and fifty zlotys, we had rented a room for the whole season. Actually, we had the entire house to ourselves, since no one else would move into this building. The doors to all the rooms stood open. The mattresses on the beds were torn, with rusted springs protruding. Occasionally, when the wind blew, the whole house shook as swarms of demons whistled and howled.

  Lena and I had grown accustomed to the evil powers. They scampered over the stairs at night, opened and slammed doors, moved furniture. Even though Lena considered herself a hundred percent atheist and mocked me and my writings about the supernatural, she confessed that she had glimpsed phantoms in the corridors. At every opportunity Lena quoted Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin, yet she was afraid to go to the outhouse at night and she used a chamber pot. The reason she gave was that the outhouse was overgrown with weeds and snakes lurked there. We were given a kerosene lamp by the owner, but we seldom lit it, since the moment a light came on, moths, gnats, and other insects entered through the broken windowpanes. Huge beetles emerged from holes and cracks in the floor. I covered the vat of water I brought in each day from the pump, else dozens of drowned creatures would be found floating there in the morning.

  I had inherited Lena from Sabina. They were close friends for a time. They had even spent several months together in Pawiak Prison, in the women’s section nicknamed “Serbia.” There, in their prison cell, they had fallen out because Sabina had become a Trotskyite while Lena continued to swear allegiance to Comrade Stalin. Lena had been released on bail and was supposed to stand trial, which had been scheduled months before, but she had jumped bail because new witnesses had been found for the prosecution and she would surely have been sentenced to many years imprisonment.

  She had come to me in Warsaw requesting a night’s sanctuary because she was, as she said, surrounded by police spies. I had only one narrow iron bed in my furnished room and she slept with me not just that one night, but for more than two weeks. She called me a capitalistic lackey even as she clamped her lips onto mine. She complained that my mystical stories helped to perpetuate fascism, but she tried to translate some of them into Polish. She swore to me that she had undergone a gynecological operation that had rendered her sterile, but she was already in her fifth month that summer. She said that she wanted to have a child by me even if the world were destroyed the next day. She assured me that the ultimate struggle between justice and exploitation was coming and, if truth triumphed, she wouldn’t need my support. I could go to America if I wanted to escape the unavoidable day of revenge by the Polish masses. The revolution would reach there as well.

  It was empty talk. Actually, she wandered through the ruin I had rented like a caged beast. She didn’t have a penny and was in danger of being arrested. Lena came from a Chassidic household. Her father, Solomon Simon Yabloner, was a follower of the Gora Rabbi. He had driven his daughter from the house when she got involved with the Communists. He observed a period of mourning over her, as did her mother, three brothers, and two sisters. Solomon Simon was known as a strong-willed fanatic. When his children did something that displeased him, he struck them, even after they were married. In the Gora study house at 22 Franciszkanska Street, it was said that Solomon Simon had defied even the Rabbi himself. Lena (her true name was Leah Freida) told me that she would sooner hang herself than go back home to her reactionary clan. She was tall for a girl, dark as a gypsy, flat-chested as a man. Her hair was cut short. A cigarette always dangled between her full lips. She didn’t trim or tweeze her thick eyebrows. Her pitch-black eyes exuded a masculine resoluteness and the frustration of one who, due to some biological error, has been born into the wrong gender. She was anything but my type. She had confessed lesbian tendencies to me. For me to associate with such a woman, and to become father of her child, was an act of madness. But I had already accustomed myself to my queer behavior. For some reason unknown to myself, this wild woman evoked within me an exaggerated sense of compassion. Although she said at every opportunity that I need assume no responsibility for her and that I was free to do as my heart desired, she clung to me. She was a coil of contradictions. One day she swore eternal love to me. The next day she said that she wanted to become pregnant because the court would be inclined to be more lenient with a mother. Now that she was a Trotskyite, she hadn’t the slightest urge to do time for having served Stalin.

  Our room had a wooden balcony that was rotted and sagging from years of rain and snow. Each time I stepped out onto it I had the feeling it was about to collapse under me. From there I could see the r
ailroad tracks and the pine woods as well as the sanatoriums where thousands of consumptives slowly gasped out their lungs.

  That summer only a few of my sketches were printed in The Express and the checks from Paris were delayed for so long that I had lost count of how much was coming to me. Years ago Lena had learned the trade of corsetmaking but for that you needed a special sewing machine, fishbone, scissors, and other paraphernalia.

  Our possessions in our refuge consisted of a pot, a pan, some tin cutlery, and several books. The handyman of the villa, a Russian named Demienty, was a drunk. He supplied us with the buckets with which to catch the water when it rained. His wife had left him for another Russian. The landlord had stopped paying him wages. When Demienty wasn’t lying drunk, he roamed through the woods with a rifle shooting hares, rabbits, birds. Someone had told Lena that Demienty ate cats and dogs. The villa was due to be demolished soon and used as a site for a sanatorium.

  Lena and I both lived for the present. In order to get through the day—and sometimes the miserable nights as well—I fantasized that I was already dead, one of those legendary corpses which, instead of resting in the cemetery, leave their graves to reside in the world of chaos. I had described such living dead in my stories and now in my imagination I had become one of my own protagonists. Since I was a corpse, I told myself, what need had I to worry? What could happen to me? A corpse could even afford to sin.

  As I stood on the balcony that night I figured out my plans for the day. I had no real reason for going to Warsaw and spending the few zlotys for the fare, but I had to see the few people with whom I was still connected in this worst of all worlds. No one in Warsaw knew my Swider address. I had no telephone. I never saw a letter carrier enter this has-been villa. Perhaps the check from Paris had come? Maybe there was an answer from the American consul? Maybe there was a letter from Joshua waiting? It was too early to dress and I went back to bed. Lena was awake too. She was sitting on the edge of the bed smoking a cigarette. For an instant I could see her naked body in the glow of its tip. She asked, “What time are you dashing to Warsaw?”