Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  The bungalows of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Peter Kropotkin, and Emma Goldman closed one after the other. Zygmunt Salkin assured the members of the group that he and Lotte would go on working for the “new theater.” He had a briefcase full of papers and a head full of ideas and hopes, but deep inside we knew that it was all over.

  I had heard some shocking news. Several of the girls in the group had gotten pregnant and would have to get abortions. At that time, this was no easy matter. It cost a lot (five hundred dollars was a fortune) and it also represented a danger. The young men appeared even guiltier than the girls.

  The days had become cooler and shorter. The leaves on the trees began to yellow and I saw birds flying in flocks—probably on their way to warmer climates. The nights were colder and longer. I could not sleep and I went outside for a breath of fresh air. There was no more light coming from the bungalows and the sky was full of stars. God, or whoever He is, was still there, observing His Creation. A new theater? A new man? The old idolatry was here again. The stone and clay idols had been exchanged for a Gertrude Stein, a Picasso, a Bernard Shaw, an Ezra Pound. Everybody worshiped culture and progress. I myself had tried to become a priest of this idolatry, although I was aware of its falsehood. At its best, art could be nothing more than a means of forgetting the human disaster for a while. I walked over to the colony. It was silent as a cemetery. Most of those whose names the bungalows bore had departed this world, with its illusions, forever. Those who worshiped them would follow soon. I lifted up my eyes to the starry sky again and again as if in hope that some revelation might descend upon me from above. I inhaled the cold air and shivered.

  One day I got into Zygmunt Salkin’s car and he took me back to New York with Lotte. They must have quarreled, because both were silent. They did not even look at one another. After traveling for two hours or so, we stopped at a cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a piece of cake, and here Lotte and Salkin got into an argument in my presence. Lotte called Salkin a “phony.” She complained, as so many worldly women do, that because of him she had wasted her “best years.”

  3

  I had surrendered myself to melancholy and it had taken me prisoner. I did what it demanded—squandered my time on empty musings; on mental probes that could bring no benefit to me or to others; on searches for something I had never lost. I had presented creation with an ultimatum: Tell me your secret or let me perish. I stayed up nights and dozed by day. I knew full well that I should have called my brother but I had lost his phone number—an excuse for me to avoid seeing him and having to justify my lazy existence. It was quite possible that the editorial office wanted to tell me to stop sending in the weekly article, or maybe they had more work for me, but I hid from them in any case. As long as they kept sending me the check, I kept cashing it. I paid the five dollars rent and spent the rest on meals at the cafeteria. When the checks stopped coming, I could always commit suicide. Death had become a familiar thing for me. In my room I stepped on vermin. One moment there was a cockroach—winged, with eyes, a sense of hearing, a stomach, a fear of death, an urge to procreate. All of a sudden I squashed it with my heel and it was nothing, or perhaps turned back to the infinite sea of life which fashions a man from a cockroach and from a cockroach, a man.

  On my long walks through New York, I passed fish stores and butcher shops. The huge fish that yesterday was swimming in the Atlantic now lay stretched out on ice with a bloody mouth and blank eyes, fare for millions of microbes and for a glutton to stuff his potbelly with. Trucks stopped before the butcher shops and men came out carrying heads, legs, hearts, kidneys. How frivolously the Creator squandered His powers! With what indifference He disposed of His masterworks into the garbage! He wasn’t concerned with either my faith or my heresy, my praises or my blasphemies. Someone had warned me not to drink from the tap in my sink since this could give me all kinds of sickness, but I burned with thirst in the nights and I gulped from the rusted sink till my abdomen grew as taut as a drum. I bought half-rotted fruit in the street and stuffed myself on it, worms and all. I stopped shaving daily and went about with a stubble, with scuffed shoes and a stained suit. Like other bums, I picked up newspapers and magazines in the garbage cans. The scientists kept on discovering new particles in the atom, which was becoming more and more of a complicated system, a cosmos in itself, full of riddles that were to be solved in the future. More evidence came out that the universe is running away from itself, a result of an explosion that took place some twenty billion years ago. Substance and energy swap roles. Causality and purpose appear more and more like two masks of the same paradox. In Soviet Russia countless traitors and enemies of the people were purged and liquidated, among them Yiddish poets who had published long odes to Comrade Stalin. According to the reviews in the book sections of the newspapers and journals I read, new and remarkable talents emerged each month, each week, each day in a deluge of genius in the United States and all over the world. Small and isolated as the Yiddishist coterie was, it raved and ranted about its achievements in literature, in the theater, and mainly in helping to bring about the redemption of the peasants and workers everywhere. There was nothing I could do but stew in my own gloom. Like the universe, I had to run away from myself. But how? And where? When I was a cheder boy I once did a thing which I always regretted. I caught a fly, put it into a little bottle with a few drops of water and a crust of sugar, stopped it with a cork, and threw it into a cellar where the janitor of our building kept broken furniture, rags, useless brooms, and similar garbage. Why I committed this ruthless act I never knew. Now I have become this fly myself, doomed to expire in darkness, a victim of a power that played games with frail creatures. All I could do was cry out to the heavenly cheder boy, “Why did you do it? How would you feel if some supercelestial cheder boy would do the same to you?” I was beginning to ponder a religion of rebellion against God’s indifference and the cruelty of those whom He created in His image.

  The Chassidic rabbis whose books I once studied used to write down rules of conduct for themselves, as well as for others, on slips of paper which they called tsetl koton and I did the same, often in rhyme, so that they would be easy for me to remember. I fantasized about building temples of protest, study houses where people would contemplate and reminisce about the various misfortunes God has sent to humans and animals. The Book of Job would become their Torah minus God’s answer to Job and the happy ending. I dreamed of a humanism and ethics the basis of which would be a refusal to justify all the evils the Almighty has sent upon us in the past and which He is preparing to bestow upon us in the future. I even played with the idea of nominating a new group of protesting prophets or saints, such as Job, Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Von Hartmann, Otto Weininger, Bashkirtsev, and some others who rejected life and considered death the only messiah. I remember calling those who flatter God and kiss the rod with which He smites them “religious masochists.”

  4

  Outside, the autumn rain poured. Inside the office buildings on Nineteenth Street the lights were on all day long. The headlights of the passing trucks glared in the fog. I was too lazy to go out so I ate a combination of breakfast and lunch of stale bread and half-rotten bananas. On that evening I put on my shabby overcoat and went to Steward’s Cafeteria on Twenty-third Street. I had paid my rent for the week and I was left with a dollar and forty-five cents. The cafeteria was half empty. At the buffet I bought a vegetable plate, a cup of coffee, and a dish of stewed prunes. Looking for a table where somebody had left a newspaper I found more than I expected: the New York Times and the Daily Mirror. I ate and fantasized. I was taking revenge for Dachau and Zbonshin. I gave back the Sudetenland to the Czechs. I founded a Jewish state in Jerusalem. Since I was the ruler of the world, I forbade forever the eating of meat and fish and made hunting illegal. I was so busy bringing order to the earth that I let my coffee get cold. I counted my change and decided to spend another nickel for a second cup of coffee. On the way back with my coffee, I dis
covered the Sunday Forward on another table. Because the typesetters always made so many mistakes in my column, “It’s Worthwhile Knowing,” I was not in a rush to turn to the page on which it usually appeared. Instead, I read the Jewish news. Even though the Communists in America denied it vehemently, it was clear that Stalin had liquidated not only a number of generals and such leaders as Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Rikov in his purges, but scores of Yiddish writers as well. A correspondent who had just returned from the Soviet Union reported that the number of victims of Stalin’s purges had reached eight million. Hundreds of thousands of kulaks had died in their exile in Siberia. The “enemies of the people” were sentenced in mass trials. A lot of Communists who had come to the Soviet Union to help build Socialism were sent to work in the gold mines in the North, where the strongest man could not endure longer than a year.

  I was drinking and shaking my head over the news. How could Jewish novelists, poets, and party leaders, grandchildren of our pious ancestors, defend such evil?

  I was now ready to face the mistakes in my column. I found the page, but my column wasn’t there. Instead, there was a long recipe for meat kreplach. They had stopped my column!

  The cafeteria had emptied out. The lights were switched off and on to signal closing time. I paid my check to the cashier and returned to Nineteenth Street. It was still raining and in the four blocks between Twenty-third and Nineteenth street. I got drenched. I walked up the four flights to my room. It was too cold for the cockroaches to come out from their holes in the linoleum. There was no choice but to undress and go to bed. The blanket was thin and I had to put my feet into the sleeves of a sweater to warm them. I had turned out the ceiling light and was lying still. I fell asleep and dreamed. In the middle of the night someone knocked at my door. Who could it be? I had been told that Nazis lived in this building and I was afraid that someone might want to kill me. I looked around for something with which to defend myself. There was nothing except two wire clothes hangers.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “It’s the night man.”

  The night man? What would a night man want in the middle of the night? I wondered. Aloud, I said, “What’s wrong?”

  “There is a cable for you.”

  “A cable? For me? So late?”

  “The super gave it to me to give to you, but I forgot.”

  I rolled out of bed naked and fell to the floor. I got up, stripped the sheet off my bed and draped myself in it. Then I opened the door.

  “Here.”

  And a black man handed me a cable.

  I wanted to give him a nickel, but he didn’t have the patience to wait and he slammed the door.

  I tore open the cablegram and read:

  STUCK IN ATHENS WITH CHILD. SEND MONEY AT ONCE.

  LENA.

  There was an address included that sounded Greek.

  What kind of madness is this? I asked myself. Send money at once? This minute? What was she doing in Greece?

  I threw off the sheet and glanced at my wristwatch. It had stopped at a quarter past five. Was it still today, or was it already tomorrow? It didn’t matter either way. In Athens of all places … The rich uncle from America would send a check for $100,000, like in the trashy play at the Scala Theater. I felt like laughing, drinking the rusty water from the faucet and urinating. I stood for a while by the sink staring, as if seeking the means to fulfill all these three needs simultaneously. Then I went over to the window, opened it, and looked out into the wet street, its black windows, flat roofs, the glowing sky, without a moon, without stars, opaque and stagnant like some global cover. I leaned out as far as I could, deeply inhaled the fumes of the city, and proclaimed to myself and to the powers of the night:

  I am lost in America, lost forever.

  Author’s Note

  While Love and Exile is basically autobiographical in style and content, it is certainly not the complete story of my life from childhood to my middle thirties, where the book ends. Since many people I describe are still alive, and for a number of personal reasons, I had to change names, dates, and, in some exceptional cases, the course of events. Actually, the true story of a person’s life can never be written. It is beyond the power of literature. The full tale of any life would be both utterly boring and utterly unbelievable.

  In the author’s notes to parts of this work, I call the writing spiritual autobiography, fiction set against a background of truth, or contributions to an autobiography I never intend to write. However, if I am given more time, I may try to continue this work in the same manner for the sake of some interested readers and perhaps for a potential biographer who may need help in devising my life story.

  As a believer in God and His Providence, I am sure that there is a full record of every person’s life, its good and bad deeds, its mistakes and follies. In God’s archive, in His divine computer, nothing is ever lost.

  I.B.S

  THE BEGINNING

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  First published in the United States of America by Doubleday and Company, Inc. 1984

  Published by The Noonday Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1997

  Published in Great Britain by Penguin Classics 2012

  A Little Boy in Search of God copyright © Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1975, 1976

  A Young Man in Search of Love copyright © Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1978

  Lost in America copyright © Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1981

  Love and Exile © Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1984

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ISBN: 978-0-241-35042-3