Shosha

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

The telephone in the corridor outside my room never stopped ringing. Tekla no longer bothered to pick up the receiver – invariably the call was for me. The actors and actresses were bickering with each other, with Betty, and with David Lipman, who was threatening to quit. The secretary of the union raised new demands almost daily. The actors complained that the American millionaire had deceived them regarding their wages. The theater owner decided he had signed an unfair contract and would have to have more money. Sam Dreiman screamed at me until I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. If Jews were capable of such deceit and intrigue, he said, then Hitler was right.

  I tried to calm the spirits of the others, but I feared a nervous breakdown myself.

  The days passed in turmoil. I stopped talking to Shosha and Bashele. When I went to them for lunch, I sat at the table in silence. I even forgot to eat and had to be reminded that the soup was getting cold. At night after two or three hours’ sleep I awoke with my heart pounding, the pillowcase drenched in sweat. In my sleep, my own complications had mingled with the problems of the world. Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin wrangled about my play, and then went to war. Shosha attempted to defend me. I sat up and listened to the echoes of cries and mayhem that still lingered in my brain. My hair pierced my skull. I itched and scratched. I had wakened with a thirst, a gnawing in my intestines, a stinging in my bladder. My nose was stuffed and a shudder kept running down my spine.

  Day would be breaking, and I would still sit and take reckoning. I had accepted more money from Sam Dreiman than I had intended. I gave Bashele more for my meals and helped her with her rent as well. I had given Dora a loan I knew I would never get back.

  That night I fell asleep at three. At ten to nine, the ringing of the telephone woke me. Tekla poked the door ajar. ‘It’s for you.’

  It was Betty. She asked, ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘Yes, no.’

  ‘I had a terrible night. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, Sam is torturing me. He makes ugly scenes. He says such wild things I’m beginning to think he’s losing his mind. Yesterday, he drank maybe a half bottle of cognac. He shouldn’t touch it – he has a bad heart and an enlarged prostate.’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘To destroy himself and everything. He doesn’t want the play any more. Every second he gets a new notion. He made such a fuss you could hear him through the whole hotel. I want to remind you that we are rehearsing today. I have about as much strength to perform after last night as you have to dance on the roof, but I can’t leave things hanging in the air any longer. At times I’d like to pick myself up and run off to the ends of the earth.’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘Yes, me too. He’s become jealous all of a sudden. He seems to know about us!’ Betty said, changing her tone.

  ‘What does he know?’

  ‘He’s listening right now. I have to stop.’

  I stood by the telephone with the premonition that presently it would ring again. And so it did. I lifted the receiver and said, ‘Yes, Celia?’

  No one answered and I assumed I had been wrong, but after a while I heard Celia’s voice. ‘Have you become a prophet, or a gypsy?’

  ‘The Gemara says that when the Temple was destroyed God gave the power of prophecy to madmen.’

  ‘Is that what the Gemara says? You are crazy, but you are also committing literary suicide. I lay awake half the night worrying about you. Haiml sleeps like a log. The minute his head hits the pillow he begins to whistle through his nose and goes on until morning. But I keep waking up. At times it seems that you wake me. I hear you calling “Celia!” It’s all my nerves. One time it even seemed that I saw you in the doorway. Was it your astral body? There’s something not of the ordinary about you. My dear, Morris has read your play. Sam Dreiman gave him a copy. I don’t want to repeat what he said. I hear it’s no longer your play, everything’s distorted. Really, what’s the sense of it all?’

  ‘The sense is that I’m losing my senses.’

  2

  When I entered the theater for the rehearsal, coming in from the bright light I bumped against the seats and nearly tripped, but gradually I grew accustomed to the dark. I took a seat in the front row. Sam Dreiman sat two rows behind me. He coughed and grunted and mumbled to himself in English. Celia and Haiml were present, too. Critics aren’t usually invited to rehearsals, but I spotted one of them in the audience. In their articles, the critics often decried the state of the Yiddish theater and denounced young writers for allowing kitsch to dominate the stage and for not writing serious plays; yet I knew that they hoped my play would fail. They had launched a campaign against Betty Slonim. In the leftist publications they dubbed Sam Dreiman an American ‘all-rightnik’ and a ‘Golden Calf.’ Some theatrical writers pointed out that a mystic play about a girl who presided over Hasidic banquets with a veil over her face, preached the Torah to Hasidim, and was possessed by the dybbuks of a whore and a musician didn’t befit the tragic circumstances of Polish Jewry. What was called for were plays that reflected the dangers of Fascism and Hitlerism and the need of resistance by the Jewish masses, not dramas that brought back the superstitions of the Middle Ages.

  Two seats away from me sat David Lipman and his wife, Estusia. She peeled oranges and handed sections to him. Because of a heart condition he required constant nourishment. He wore a velour jacket and a flowing tie. The whole play wasn’t being performed, merely individual scenes. Fritz Bander, portraying Reb Ezekiel Prager, the Hasid, declared his love for the Ludmir Maiden – Betty. Although I had told Bander time and again not to shout, he thundered away. In those places where he should have lowered his voice, he roared; and he whispered or skipped over those places where he should have been forceful. He swallowed words and improvised. He didn’t remember his lines and the prompter had to keep feeding him his speeches. Bander jumbled and fractured the quotations from the Gemara, the Midrash, and the books of the cabala. I had assumed that David Lipman, who was allegedly versed in these matters, would correct him, but he kept silent. He was in awe of Fritz Bander because he had performed in Berlin. Once in a while David Lipman made observations and indicated directions, but he ignored essentials and confined himself to petty details. Betty also had trouble with her lines. She made errors in her Hebrew and even in the Yiddish words. Some of the words she pronounced in a Polish accent, others in a Lithuanian. Where she was supposed to portray both the whore and the blind musician, she lost her bearings altogether.

  I sat slumped over, from time to time closing my eyes to lose sight of my disgrace. Betty might be critical of the trash of the American Yiddish theater, but she had adapted its mannerisms. I recalled my mother’s saying ‘words that walk on stilts.’ Curiously, when Betty spoke to me in private, her Yiddish was fluent and precise. As I gazed at the stage, I knew I had failed completely. My own mistakes were only too clear to me, but I had no idea how to correct them.

  The moment the lights went on, Sam Dreiman came charging at me. ‘We can’t put on this monstrosity!’

  ‘No is no.’

  ‘I sat there and didn’t understand what on earth they were babbling about, and if I didn’t understand it, you can’t expect anyone else to. I thought you were going to write in plain Yiddish.’

  ‘Dybbuks don’t speak a plain Yiddish.’

  Betty, Fritz Bander, and Gretel came up.

  ‘Betty darling, we’ll have to postpone the play!’ Sam Dreiman shouted.

  ‘Postpone? Until when?’

  ‘I don’t know when. I brought you here to be a success, not to have rotten potatoes heaved at you.’

  ‘Sam, don’t say that.’

  ‘Betty darling, the sooner you act on a mistake, the better. Forty years ago I put up a building in Detroit and in the midst of the construction it turned out that the plumbing and everything else wouldn’t work. I’d sunk a fortune into the project, but I ordered everything torn down and the building begun all
over again. If I hadn’t done this, I would have gone to jail. I had a friend, also a builder, and he put up a factory six flights high. Suddenly, while the building was filled with workers, it collapsed and killed seventeen men. He died in prison.’

  ‘Well, I knew it! I knew it all! The evil powers have started their tricks again. I’m through as an actress. My luck—’

  ‘Your luck, sweetheart, is as bright as the sun in the sky!’ Sam Dreiman hollered. ‘You will perform in Warsaw, in Paris, in London, and in New York. The name of Betty Slonim will light up Broadway in huge letters, but in a drama that the world wants to see, not in some crazy farce for insane cabalists. Mr Greidinger, I don’t want to be cruel, but what you’ve given us is unfit for the public. Betty, we’ll get another play. He isn’t the only writer in Warsaw.’

  ‘You can put on all the plays you want, but without me,’ Betty said. ‘This is my final card. With my luck, if you put on a masterpiece it would fail. It’s all my fault! Mine! Mine!’

  ‘It’s mine, too,’ Sam Dreiman said. ‘When he brought us the first two scenes and I read them, I saw at once that this wasn’t for us. I thought it might be fixed, but not everything can be fixed. It’s like that building – the foundation was poorly laid at the start. I fired the architect and began with another. I’ll do the same thing right now.’

  ‘You can do it, but without me.’

  ‘With you, Betty darling, only with you!’

  Seven

  1

  At this time, the logic of my pride was that nothing remained to me but to hide from all those involved with me and my profession. I still had over one hundred dollars from Sam Dreiman’s third advance – money that I must pay back if I were not to consider myself a thief. My calculations turned around this sum, which was worth about nine hundred zlotys. According to the agreement with the man from whom I sublet my room on Leszno Street, I had to give a month’s notice before I moved out, and I certainly did not intend to break this agreement. I considered suicide, but that would be possible only if I could take with me those who had hung all their hopes on me. Meanwhile, I had to be careful with every penny. I stopped sleeping on Leszno Street, which saved me the expense of paying for a taxi when I went home late in the evening. On the bed in Bashele’s alcove I covered whole sheets of paper with figures. The publisher for whom I had translated some German books owed me money, but I was far from sure that he would ever pay it. I was working for the literary magazine, but weeks passed without my getting a penny from them. I reminded myself that about three million Jews lived in Poland and managed to make a living somehow. I did not fool Bashele. She knew my situation. I had promised to marry her daughter but we had never set a date. They would not send out warrants for my arrest if I should disappear. Judging by the way Hitler occupied one territory after another and the Allies sat back and did nothing, there was no hope for the Jews in Poland. But running away and leaving at bay those who were dear to me was not in my nature.

  Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw reported that the play Sam Dreiman, the American millionaire, had been planning to produce had been canceled. The Yiddish theater season began on Succoth and there was not time for him to find a new play. They also mentioned that he was negotiating with a playwright in America. Of The Ludmir Maiden, a journalist wrote in the humor section that it could not be produced because it was possessed by a dybbuk. Leizer the watchmaker read all these stories of my failure to Shosha and Bashele.

  In the month of August, a strong heat spell hit Warsaw. When I was a boy, almost no one on Krochmalna Street took vacations and went to the country in the summer. Only the wealthy and rich did this. But times had changed. Workers were now given vacations and they went to Miedzeszyn, Falenica, and even to Zakopane in the mountains. The workers’ unions had summer colonies in Karwia at the Baltic Sea in the ‘corridor’ that divided East Germany from West Germany and that Hitler vowed to take back. I heard that Feitelzohn stayed a few weeks in Jósefow with Celia and Haiml. I had spoken to Tekla on the telephone and she told me that Celia kept calling me. Tekla asked why I hadn’t come home for so long. She also asked for my telephone number and the address where I was staying so that she could tell people how to get in touch with me. I said I was busy with work and didn’t want to be disturbed. Even Tekla knew that my play had fizzled. She heard it from Wladek, who read about it in the Polish Jewish newspaper Nasz Przeglad.

  During the day I seldom left the apartment on Krochmalna Street. My old bashfulness had returned to me, with all its complications and neuroses. Some tenants of No. 7 knew me. From Leizer they had heard about me and my love for Shosha. They had also read of my forthcoming play. The girls used to watch from the windows when I passed with Shosha on the way to the gate. I was ashamed before these girls now and imagined that they laughed at me. I even avoided going to the outhouse during the day. The heels of my shoes were worn down, but I could not pay to have them fixed. My hat was faded and stained. I would put on a fresh shirt and a few hours later it would be soaked with sweat, and dirty. The little hair left on my head began to fall out. When I wiped the perspiration from my skull, I found red hair on my handkerchief. I had begun to have all kinds of mishaps around the house. Bashele would give me a glass of tea and it would slip from my hands. Each time I shaved, I cut myself. I kept losing my fountain pen, my notebook. Money dropped from my pockets. In my mouth a molar began to loosen, but I could not afford to go to a dentist. Anyway, what did I need a dentist for, since my weeks or days were numbered?

  I had brought with me a few of the books in which I always sought solace whenever there was a crisis in my life – which was often. This time I couldn’t find a trace of comfort in them. Spinoza’s ‘substance’ had no will, no compassion, no feeling for justice. He was a prisoner of his own laws. Schopenhauer’s ‘blind will’ seemed to be more blind than ever. Of course there was no hope for me in Hegel’s Zeitgeist or in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Payot’s Education of the Will was addressed chiefly to students whose wealthy parents paid for their board and tuition. Coué’s and Charles Baudouin’s patients had homes, professions, well-to-do families, accounts in the banks. I sat on the edge of the bed all day long and let perspiration run over my hot body. Shosha sat near me on her little stool and talked to me or to herself. Occasionally she spoke to Yppe. For some reason Bashele frequently left the house. Shosha would ask her, ‘Mommy, where are you going?’ And Bashele would say, ‘Where my eyes carry me.’

  Now that I had failed for everyone to see, I realized that the failure was my own fault. Instead of working on the play, I had spent hours with Shosha every day. Even though Betty kept warning me that the work on the play was of the highest importance, she made me go with her to museums, to cafés, on long walks, and sabotaged all my plans for work. I should have gone with her in the evenings to see serious plays from which I could learn about the construction of a drama. Instead, she took me to see silly Hollywood movies from which there was nothing to be learned. I wasted precious hours discussing Yiddish literature in the Writers’ Club, playing chess, and telling jokes. I even squandered time with Tekla, listening to her complaints about her mistress and her stories about the village where she came from, her unloving stepmother, and of Bolek, to whom she was betrothed and who had left her to go to work in the coal mines of France. Our conversations always ended by our falling down on the bed together. I wasn’t really awake in those months. My laziness, my passion, and my empty fantasies had kept me in a hypnotic amnesia. Now I could hear my mother saying, ‘No enemy can do to a man as much evil as he does to himself.’

  ‘Arele, what are you thinking about?’ Shosha asked me.

  ‘Nothing, Shoshele. As long as I have you, there is still some sense to my life.’

  ‘You will not leave me alone?’

  ‘No, Shoshele, I will stay with you as long as I live.’

  2

  At night I lay awake for hours. From the heat I continuously ran to the sink to drink water and then I had to urinate. Bashele
had put a chamber pot under my bed and it soon became full. I stood without any clothes before the window of my alcove – a little window with four panes – and let the breeze that came into the courtyard once in a while blow over me. I looked at the few stars that could be seen moving slowly from one roof to the other. Though I had nothing to expect on earth when the Nazis arrived except starvation and concentration camps, perhaps there was some spark of hope in the heavenly bodies? However, from the popular books about astronomy which I had read, I knew that the stars consisted of the same elements as the sun and the earth. If other planets were inhabited by living creatures, their conditions could be like those on earth: struggle for a bite of food, for a secure place to lay one’s head. I was overcome by a rage against creation, God, nature – whatever this wretchedness was called. I felt that the only way of protesting cosmic violence was to reject life, even if I had to take Shosha with me. The animals and the insects did not possess such a choice.

  But how would I accomplish this, actually? If I were to throw myself out the window of my room on Leszno Street, I would risk remaining alive with possibly a broken spine. If I were to fling myself under a trolley or a train, I might end up without feet or arms. Should I get rat poison and slowly burn out my insides? Should I hang myself and burden those who loved me with arranging my burial? After much brooding I decided that the best way to end it all would be to throw myself into deep water, where I would molest no one and would even help the fish with a meal. The Vistula was too shallow in the summer. Every day the newspapers wrote about ships that got stuck in the sand. The only way of doing it right would be to go to Danzig or Gdynia and board a ship that sailed the Baltic. A travel agency was advertising a cruise to Denmark for which no foreign passport or visa was necessary. The price was reasonable. It was enough for the passenger to show a Polish inland passport. The trouble was, I didn’t possess even this kind of document. In the process of moving from one furnished room to another with my books and confusion of manuscripts, I had lost my draft card, my birth certificate, and all other proof of my citizenship. I would have to travel to the village where I was born and bring to the City Hall witnesses who could attest to the day of my birth or my circumcision feast. The archives of births and deaths had burned down in the German bombardments in 1915. With all my anxiety I had to laugh. I needed to go through a lot of red tape to be able to commit suicide.