|
COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was still alive when I began working at the Forward in 1990, though he no longer came into the office to deliver the stories and articles and serialized novels that the paper had published in Yiddish for more than fifty years. By then, he was dying in Florida, his mind erased by Alzheimer's disease. But it was possible to uncover traces of his presence.
"Of course I knew Singer," an old typesetter told me, in answer to my eager questions. "He was a pornographer!" This typesetter, an Orthodox Jew and a survivor of several concentration camps, added that he often took it upon himself to edit out the more licentious passages of Singer's prose. What's more, he boasted, when the paper moved from its Lower East Side location to Thirty-third Street and Park Avenue, he had gathered up a manuscript of "Enemies, A Love Story" and thrown it into a dumpster.
Then there was the woman claiming to have been Singer's longtime mistress--one of many. She was peddling a tell-all manuscript that promised astonishing revelations and that I deeply regret not having photocopied.
And there were the Yiddishists, tiny men in ties and woollen vests, who explained to me that I. B. Singer wasn't half as good a writer as I. J. Singer--I. B.'s older brother, Israel Joshua--who had died in 1944. In their view, Bashevis--as I. B. Singer was known to his Yiddish readers--wasn't really a Yiddish writer at all, just an Anglicizing panderer who, through cunning and longevity, had snookered an ignorant American readership into believing that his concocted shtetl stories were the real thing. For years, the widow of a well-known Yiddish writer used to call me at the Forward to tell me that Singer had stolen her husband's Nobel Prize. And all the while, as if to stick it to his critics, Singer himself kept popping up. In the years following his death, in 1991, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published "Scum," "Meshugah," "The Certificate," and the monumental "Shadows on the Hudson"--more novels than many living writers publish in an entire career.
Singer would have celebrated his hundredth birthday this year, on July 14th. And if he inhabits that inevitable gray zone that follows the death of a major writer, he has already managed to perform so many literary miracles that, to use a heretical metaphor, his ultimate canonization seems assured. To coincide with the centenary, the Library of America will publish three volumes of Singer's stories, each volume almost a thousand pages. It is the first time the august series has featured a fiction writer whose works were originally produced in a language other than English.
Singer was a master of so many modes that it is difficult to think of him as a single writer--as befits an artist who used multiple pseudonyms and whose stand-in characters have multiple lovers and sometimes even multiple wives. He was a high modernist who perfected the simple folktale and the not-so-simple folktale. He wrote sweeping historical sagas, intensely personal novels of self-discovery, and at least one scathing political parable. Along with the novels, and hundreds of short stories, he wrote many volumes of memoir artfully blended with fiction. Late in life, he launched an enormously successful career as a children's-book author, and he developed an interview style that became a kind of cosmic standup comedy: "Of course I believe in free will. I have no choice."
Singer was a humorist steeped in tragedy, a post-Holocaust chronicler who often wrote as if the Holocaust hadn't happened, a Jewish writer at war with the Jewish culture he memorialized, and, most remarkable of all, a Yiddish master who became one of the great American writers of the twentieth century.
Singer was born in Leoncin, Poland. Like the narrator of his novel "Shosha," he was "brought up on three dead languages--Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish." He would not have thought of them as dead, of course, any more than the Poles around him would have viewed Polish as dead, or doubted the existence of their homeland, despite the fact that Poland had been partitioned in the late eighteenth century and no longer appeared on maps.
Singer's town was under Russian rule, and his father, a rabbi, refused to learn Russian--he considered books in that language unclean. Pinchas Mendel was therefore only a quasi-legal rabbi, which seriously hampered his ability to make a living. A mystic of deep piety who would leave the family for weeks at a time to study, dance, and pray with his rebbe, Pinchas Mendel was untroubled by his financial straits and, like a Hasidic Mr. Micawber, kept assuring the family that something would turn up, possibly even the Messiah. This seems to have been a lifelong source of exasperation for Singer's mother, Batsheva, whose father was himself a renowned rabbi--though he was a rationalist and viewed Pinchas Mendel as a feckless schlemiel.
Batsheva's father was also a man of powerful religious conviction who woke daily at 3 a.m. and wrote Torah commentaries till...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
