Without a Manchester childhood devoted to the consumption of English schoolboy novels, without a period of rejection of, or at least indifference to, parental heritage, without a phase of passionate allegiance to “universalism” (the kind that de-Judaizes)—without, in short, having brought himself up as an ideal Englishman—Samuel could not have taken on Toynbee, or the principle of the “gentleman,” or the opponents of the Zionist idea. If Moses, nurtured in Pharaoh’s palace, was as much polemicist as lawgiver, it was because he knew the priests who administered the idols firsthand, and knew how to beat these royal magicians at their own game. And the case for Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist and boulevardier, is of course open and shut: the modern State of Israel was founded on the tongue of an imaginative polemicist. Maurice Samuel did not come from so far over on the other side—he is closer to his Uncle Berel the tailor than he is to the English playing fields—but for a time he traveled toward the allure of what he later called “the brilliance and attractiveness of . . . a frivolous world,” and he was drawn in that direction early enough to understand profoundly, and from the inside, what it was he ultimately opposed.
“He was the teacher of a generation,” the people who were in his audiences say of him, remembering the rigorous lectures—they were not entertainments—and the remarkable radio dialogues with Mark Van Doren. “He is my teacher,” his readers say, preserving both the sense of individual possession and the present tense—readers’ privileges. But both memory of the lectures (corruptible though instructive) and familiarity with the books (continuing and renewable) offer finally a static sort of homage if they address themselves only to Samuel as teacher. It will not do—not simply because, unlike a teacher, he did not primarily intend to shape any of us. Sitting rapt among his hearers, observing how (in those “question periods” that follow public lectures) he did not suffer fools gladly, I was struck, even then, with the recognition that he hardly cared whether his voice touched fools or gods. He was grappling not with us but with certain footholds, difficult to ascend to, just above his line of sight; impossible to posit rationally that the footholds are there. That strange wrestling in a small space with the scholar of Yale remains a paradigm of Samuel as writer, thinker, imaginer. What he was after was the Idea that would separate itself out from all other ideas, as a single hammer can go to work on all the flanks of so many stones; the stones split, the hammer beats on. He neither wrote nor spoke wholly for our sake, as prophets and teachers and maggidim do. Instead, much of it was for the sake of that hammer—the one that knocks to pieces idols and other well-made falsehoods. Polemicist’s hammer: steadily it breaks, just as steadily it builds.
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Appeared as the Foreword to The Worlds of Maurice Samuel: Selected Writings (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1977).
I. B. Singer’s Book of Creation
Some time ago, when Isaac Bashevis Singer first mounted the public platform to speak in English, he was asked whether he really believed in sheydim—in imps and demons, ghosts and spirits. The response, partly a skip and partly a glint, followed considerable playful pondering and ended in a long shrug: “Yes and no.” The rebuke of an imp guarding secrets, one might judge—-but surely a lesser imp, capable mainly of smaller mischiefs: the knotting of elflocks in the audience’s hair, perhaps.
Years pass; the astonishing stories accumulate; the great Nobel is almost upon Singer, and the question reliably recurs. Now the answer is direct and speedy: “Yes, I believe there are unknown forces.” This is no longer the voice of a teasing imp. Never mind that its tone clearly belongs to an accustomed celebrity who can negotiate a Question Period with a certain shameless readiness; it is also a deliberate leaning into the wind of some powerful dark wing, fearsomely descried.
Whether the majesty of the Nobel Prize for Literature has since altered Singer’s manipulation of this essential question, I do not know. Nevertheless the question remains central, though not quite so guileless as it appears. Should we believe that Singer believes in the uncanny and the preternatural? Is there ever a trustworthy moment when a storymonger is not making things up, especially about his own substance and sources? Doesn’t an antic fancy devoted to cataloguing folly always trifle with earnest expectation? And what are we to think of the goblin cunning of a man who has taken his mother’s given name—Bashevis (i.e., Bathsheba)—to mark out the middle of his own? Singer’s readers in Yiddish call him, simply, “Bashevis.” A sentimental nom de plume? His is anything but a nostalgic imagination. Does the taking-on of “Bashevis” imply a man wishing to be a woman? Or does it mean that a woman is hiding inside a man? Or does Singer hope somehow to entangle his own passions in one of literature’s lewdest and nastiest plots: King David’s crafty devisings concerning the original Bathsheba? Or does he dream of attracting to himself the engendering powers of his mother’s soul through the assumption of her name? Given the witness of the tales themselves, we are obliged to suspect any or all of these notions, as well as others we have not the wit of fantasy to conjure up.
Accordingly, nearly every one of the forty-seven stories in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer is a snail-whorl narrative grown out of similar schemings, impersonations, contrivances, devices, and transmutations. The story of David and Bathsheba is, without fail, one that Singer’s plot-fecundity might have churned up, though it would likely be a demon that dispatches Uriah the Hittite. The story of a woman taking on the semblance of a man, Singer has in fact already invented, in “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” a remarkable fable about a girl who lusts after scholarship. In “The Dead Fiddler,” coarse Getsel, in the form of a dybbuk, hides inside a woman, causing the delicate Liebe Yentle to swig and swear. As for the acquisition of names that confer eccentric or arrogant ambitions, there is Zeidel Cohen, a descendant of the exegete Rashi, who prepares to become Zeidlus the First, Pope of Rome; and Alchonon the teacher’s helper, a plain fellow who succeeds in passing himself off, in “Taibele and Her Demon,” as the lecherous Hurmizah, step-nephew of Asmodeus, King of the Demons.
On one flank Singer is a trickster, a prankster, a Loki, a Puck. His themes are lust, greed, pride, obsession, misfortune, unreason, the oceanic surprises of the mind’s underside, the fiery cauldron of the self, the assaults of time and place. His stories offer no “epiphanies” and no pious resolutions; no linguistic circumscriptions or Hemingwayesque self-deprivations. Their plenitudes chiefly serve undefended curiosity, the gossip’s lure of what-comes-next. Singer’s stories have plots that unravel not because they are “old-fashioned”—they are mostly originals and have few recognizable modes other than their own—but because they contain the whole human world of affliction, error, quagmire, pain, calamity, catastrophe, woe: things happen; life is an ambush, a snare; one’s fate can never be predicted. His driven, mercurial processions of predicaments and transmogrifications are limitless, often stupendous. There are whole fistfuls of masterpieces in this one volume: a cornucopia of invention.
Because he cracks open decorum to find lust, because he peers past convention into the pit of fear, Singer has in the past been condemned by other Yiddish writers outraged by his seemingly pagan matter, his superstitious villagers, his daring leaps into gnostic furies. The moral grain of Jewish feeling that irradiates the mainstream aspirations of Yiddish literature has always been a kind of organic extension of Talmudic ethical ideals: family devotion, community probity, derekh erets—self-respect and respect for others—the stringent expectations of high public civility and indefatigable integrity, the dream of messianic betterment. In Singer, much of this seems absent or overlooked or simply mocked; it is as if he has willed the crashing-down of traditional Jewish sanity and sensibility. As a result, in Yiddish literary circles he is sometimes viewed as—it is the title of one of these stories—“The Betrayer of Israel.”
In fact, he betrays nothing and no one, least of all Jewish idealism. That is the meaning of his imps and demons: that human character, left to itself, is
drawn to cleanliness of heart; that human motivation, on its own, is attracted to clarity and valor. Here is Singer’s other flank, and it is the broader one. The goblin cunning leads straight to this: Singer is a moralist. He tells us that it is natural to be good, and unholy to go astray. It is only when Lilith creeps in, or Samael, or Ketev Mriri, or the sons of Asmodeus, that evil and impurity are kindled. It is the inhuman, the antihuman, forces that are to blame for harms and sorrows. Surely these imps must be believed in; they may have the telltale feet of geese—like Satan, their sire—but their difficult, shaming, lubricious urges are terrestrially familiar. Yet however lamentably known they are, Singer’s demons are intruders, invaders, no true or welcome part of ourselves. They are “psychology”; and history; and terror; above all, obsessive will. If he believes in them, so, unwillingly but genuinely, do we.
And to understand Singer’s imps is to correct another misapprehension: that he is the recorder of a lost world, the preserver of a vanished sociology. Singer is an artist and transcendent inventor, not a curator. His tales—though dense with the dailiness of a God-covenanted culture, its folkways, its rounded sufficiency, especially the rich intensities of the yeshiva and its bottomless studies—are in no way documents. The Jewish townlets that truly were are only seeds for his febrile conflagrations: where, outside of peevish imagination, can one come on the protagonist of “Henne Fire,” a living firebrand, a spitfire burning up with spite, who ultimately, through the spontaneous combustion of pure fury, collapses into “one piece of coal”? Though every doorstep might be described, and every feature of a head catalogued (and Singer’s portraits are brilliantly particularized), parables and fables are no more tied to real places and faces than Aesop’s beasts are beasts.
This is not to say that Singer’s stories do not mourn those murdered Jewish townlets of Poland, every single one of which, with nearly every inhabitant, was destroyed by the lords and drones of the Nazi Gehenna. This volume includes a masterly memorial to that destruction, the broken-hearted testimony of “The Last Demon,” which begins emphatically with a judgment on Europe: “I, a demon, bear witness that there are no more demons left. Why demons, when man himself is a demon?” And sums up:
I’ve seen it all . . . the destruction of Poland. There are no more Jews, no more demons. The women don’t pour out water any longer on the night of the winter solstice. They don’t avoid giving things in even numbers. They no longer knock at dawn at the antechamber of the synagogue. They don’t warn us before emptying the slops. The rabbi was martyred on a Friday in the month of Nissan. The community was slaughtered, the holy books burned, the cemetery desecrated. The Book of Creation has been returned to the Creator. . . . No more sins, no more temptations! . . . Messiah did not come for the Jews, so the Jews went to Messiah. There is no further need for demons.
This tenderness for ordinary folk, their superstitions, their folly, their plainness, their lapses, is a classical thread of Yiddish fiction, as well as the tree trunk of Singer’s own hasidic legacy—love and reverence for the down-to-earth. “The Little Shoemakers” bountifully celebrates the Fifth Commandment with leather and awl; the hero of “Gimpel the Fool,” a humble baker, is endlessly duped and stubbornly drenched in permanent grace; the beautiful story “Short Friday” ennobles a childless old couple who, despite privation and barrenness, turn their unscholarly piety into comeliness and virtue. Shmuel-Leibele’s immaculate happiness in prayer, Shoshe’s meticulous Sabbath meal, shine with saintliness; Singer recounts the menu, “chicken soup with noodles and tiny circlets of fat . . . like golden ducats,” as if even soup can enter holiness. Through a freakish accident—snow covers their little house and they are asphyxiated—the loving pair ascend in death together to paradise. When the demons are stilled, human yearning aspires toward goodness and joy. (Singer fails to note, however, whether God or Samael sent the pure but deadly snow.)
In Singer the demons are rarely stilled, and the luminous serenity of “Short Friday” is an anomaly. Otherwise pride furiously rules, and wild-hearted imps dispose of human destiny. In “The Unseen,” a prosperous and decent husband runs off with a lusty maidservant at the urging of a demon; he ends in destitution, a hidden beggar tended by his remarried wife. “The Gentleman from Cracow” corrupts a whole town with gold; he turns out to be Ketev Mriri himself. In “The Destruction of Kreshev,” a scholar who is a secret Sabbatian and devil-worshiper induces his wife to commit adultery with a Panlike coachman. Elsewhere, excessive intellectual passion destroys genius. An accomplished young woman is instructed by a demon to go to the priest, convert, and abandon her community; the demon assumes the voice of the girl’s grandmother, herself the child of a Sabbatian. A rabbi is “plagued by something new and terrifying: wrath against the Creator,” and struggles to fashion himself into an atheist. Character and motive are turned inside out at the bidding of imps who shove, snarl, seduce, bribe, cajole. Allure ends in rot; lure becomes punishment.
This phantasmagorical universe of ordeal and mutation and shock is, finally, as intimately persuasive as logic itself. There is no fantasy in it. It is the true world we know, where we have come to expect anguish as the consequence of our own inspirations, where we crash up against the very circumstance from which we had always imagined we were exempt. In this true world suffering is endemic and few are forgiven. Yet it may be that for Singer the concrete presence of the unholy attests the hovering redemptive holy, whose incandescence can scatter demons. Yes, I believe in unknown forces.
Not all the stories in this collection emerge from the true world, however. The eerie authority of “The Cabbalist of East Broadway” is a gripping exception, but in general the narratives set in the American environment are, by contrast, too thin. Even when intentionally spare—as in the marvelous “Vanvild Kava,” with its glorious opening: “If a Nobel Prize existed for writing little, Vanvild Kava would have gotten it”—the European settings have a way of turning luxuriantly, thickly coherent. Presumably some of these American locales were undertaken in a period when the fertile seed of the townlets had begun to be exhausted; or else it is the fault of America itself, lacking the centrifugal density and identity of a yeshiva society, the idea of community as an emanation of God’s gaze. Or perhaps it is because many of these American stories center on Singer as writer and celebrity, or on someone like him. It is as if the predicaments that fly into his hands nowadays arrive because he is himself the centrifugal force, the controlling imp. And an imp, to have efficacy, as Singer’s genius has shown, must be a kind of dybbuk, moving in powerfully from outside; whereas the American narratives are mainly inside jobs, about the unusual “encounters” a famous writer meets up with.
The Collected Stories is supplied with a sparse Author’s Note (misleadingly called an Introduction on the book jacket), but it is unsatisfyingly patched, imbalanced, cursory; anyone trusting imps will fail to trust the Note. Apparently Singer thinks fiction is currently under a threat from “the zeal for messages.” I wish it were possible to list every translator’s name, from Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, Dorothea Strauss, Mirra Ginsburg, and Joseph Singer to the less renowned Ruth Schachner Finkel, Evelyn Torton Beck, Herbert Lottman, Rosanna Gerber, Elizabeth Schub, and all the rest. It is interesting that there are so many, and that there are always new ones. Singer has not yet found his Lowe-Porter or Scott Moncrieff. Still, the voice is steady and consistent, as if there were only one voice; undoubtedly it is the imposition of Singer’s own. After all these years, the scandalous rumors about Singer’s relation to his changing translators do not abate: how they are half-collaborators, half-serfs, how they start out sunk in homage, accept paltry fees, and end disgruntled or bemused, yet transformed, having looked on Singer plain. One wishes Singer would write their frenzied tale, set it in Zamość, and call it “Rabbi Bashevis’s Helpers.” In any event, his helpers cannot reach the deep mine and wine of Singer’s mother tongue, thronged (so it was once explained to me by a Tel Aviv poet accomplished in Hebrew, Yiddish, an
d English) with that unrenderable Hebrew erudition and burnished complexity of which we readers in English have not an inkling, and are permanently deprived. Deprived? Perhaps. The Collected Stories, when all is said and done, is an American master’s Book of Creation.
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The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981). Published in The New York Times Book Review, March 21, 1982.
The Phantasmagoria of Bruno Schulz
Thirty-five years ago, Bruno Schulz, a fifty-year-old high-school art teacher in command of one of the most original literary imaginations of modern Europe, was gunned down by a Jew-hunting contingent of SS men in the streets of an insignificant provincial town in eastern Galicia. On the map of Poland the town hides itself from you; you have to search out the tiniest print to discover Drogobych. In this cramped crevice of a place Schulz too hid himself—though not from the Nazis. Urged on by a group of writers, the Polish underground devised a means of escape—false papers and a hiding place. Schulz chose to die unhidden in Drogobych. But even before the German storm, he had already chosen both to hide and to die there. He knew its streets, and their houses and shops, with a paralyzed intimacy. His environment and his family digested him. He was incapable of leaving home, of marrying, at first even of writing. On a drab salary, in a job he despised, he supported a small band of relatives, and though he visited Warsaw and Lvov, and once even went as far as Paris, he gave up larger places, minds, and lives for the sake of Drogobych—or, rather, for the sake of the gargoylish and astonishing map his imagination had learned to draw of an invisible Drogobych contrived entirely out of language.
Art and Ardor Page 26
