Isaac Singer

From Philosopedia

Isaac Bashevis Singer (21 November 1904 - 24 July 1991)

Singer, a Yiddish writer who was born in Radzymin, Poland, a village near Warsaw that then was part of the Russian Empire and was populated mainly by Jews.

His sister, Hinde Ester Singer Kreytman (1891-1954), became a Yiddish-language novelist and short story writer. His brother, Israel Joshua Singer, also became a noted writer.

Their father in 1907 headed a Yeshiva and, when it burned down, the family moved to a Jewish quarter of Warsaw in 1908 where his father acted as a rabbi. In 1917, because of the hardships of World War I, Singer moved with his younger brother and mother to her hometown of Bilgoraj, also a traditional Jewish village.

Singer studied in Warsaw and emigrated to the United States in 1938. He worked as a journalist for the Jewish Daily Forward, becoming a citizen in 1943. His journalistic work was signed "Isaac Warshausky" and his creative work "Isaac Bashevis."

Singer's novels and short stories are about the Jews of Poland, Germany, and America, and he combined his psychological insight with dramatic and visual impact. In 1978, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Critics generally credit him with being unsurpassed as a writer in Yiddish.

What shocked many was his inclusion of stories about homosexuality between yeshiva boys, transvestite Hasids, and corrupted rabbis lured by Lilith and Satan. As a result, some Yiddish-oriented critics became increasingly infuriated with him and accused him of pandering to non-Jewish tastes as well as being indifferent to social factors. Martin Seymour-Smith has written of Singer,

• Beyond pointing out that he really is devoted to Yiddish (he thinks 40% of the value of his books is lost even in the translations made under his guidance), and that his predicament is unenviable; it is difficult to comment on their strictures: most readers must judge him as they find him: in English translation. Here, and especially in the realm of the short story, he is a major writer: we do not feel that he panders to our tastes but that, on the contrary, he enriches both our knowledge and our imaginations. The tension in his work is between the old and the new. He is a rabbi at heart, but he is a realist and while he knows of this conflict, he will not entirely give up his sense of the poetry of the old, even though he knows this involves social obscurantism. His imagination is anchored to the shetl, to the ghetto-life of old Poland; his point of view is, in Jewish terms, that of the "Enlightenment." He knows that the shetl was socially unenlightened - unacceptable - but remembers its desperate and often joyous coherence. Beyond implying the relevance of Yiddish, his work has little "message." He describes his vanished people, driven by or in fear of demons, in realist modes.

In an interview with Encounter (February 1979), Singer claimed that although the Jews of Poland had died, "something - call it spirit, or whatever - is still somewhere in the universe. This is a kind of feeling, but I feel there is truth in it."

The Tombstone Typo

Singer, when 50, died of a heart attack. He was buried in New Jersey, according to Elisabeth Bumiller. Bumiller described what happened:

Why did the author of Gimpel the Fool, who wrote such farcical stories about the ambiguities of sex and death, end up buried in suburban New Jersey, in a tree-bordered but casually kept grave site within view of an encroaching subdivision? Yet another was the family's incredulity that Singer, described by his son as a Jewish Casanova, was laid to rest three gravestones away from the man, Walter Wassermann, from whom he stole his second wife. That woman, Alma Singer, who died in 1996, now lies next to Singer, but within feet of Mr. Wassermann - a woman buried between her first and second husbands.

If this were a Singer short story (The Reencounter comes to mind), Walter and Isaac would continue to glare at each other in death, through the yew bushes. They hardly got along in life, so it's kind of ironic that they're neighbors in death, said Alma Singer's grandson, Stephen R. Dujack, who, like the rest of the family, first noticed the proximity of the graves at what he called Singer's 1991 funeral from hell.

(When the Singer limousine was departing the Beth-El cemetery in Paramus, N.J., it was stopped at the gate for nonpayment of the plot. Mr. Dujack offered his credit card, but Beth-El did not take Visa; Mrs. Singer had to write out a check for $3,026 on the spot.)

The typo [which listed him as a "Noble" laureate] was discovered a year later, in the summer of 1992, at the unveiling of the gravestone in Beth-El before family and friends. Roger Straus, a founder of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Singer's publisher, was horrified, and immediately pulled Mrs. Singer aside. "I said 'This is awful, what are we going to do?' " he recalled. Mrs. Singer responded, he said, that "Noble" was "an acceptable alternative."

The tombstone typo was corrected in 1997.

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER COMES BACK FROM DEAD AS THE ANTI-THEIST

That was the headline for a front-page story in The New York Observer by Ron Rosenbaum (8 January 2007 about Florence Noiville's biography: Isaac B. Singer: A Life. Noiville, a journalist and literary critic for Le Monde, has written books on Greek and Roman mythology and a biography of Paul Faucher.

Saying that this is a time when militant atheists like Richard Dawkins believe that God is a "delusion" whereas believers abound who adhere to the idea of a just and loving deity, Rosenbaum writes about "the two Singers and the four views of God."

The atheists are on the offensive, Rosenbaum observes, citing Dawkins's The God Delusion, which debunks the conventional monotheistic notion of God, the one that supplies no alternative answer to the question of how the universe came into being or Why is there Something instead of Nothing? And Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon attempts to reduce religion and spirituality to a byproduct of evolutionary biology.

Writes Rosenbaum,

• [Critics so far] have failed either to grasp or to articulate the seriousness of Singer's position, its centrality to him and his work, and the significance it has for the atheism/theism debate. None has seen fit to give a name to Singer's Third Position in the debate. So I will: It's not atheism, not theism, but rather anti-theism, a provocative, profoundly different stance from either of the others. Simply put, contrary to the atheists, Singer believes in a God, but, contrary to the theists, he doesn't believe in a just, loving or merciful God; he believes in a God who doesn't deserve worship, a God who deserves our condemnation.

Noiville, he states, fails to see this but does advance the growing case

• that there were Two Singers - and Two Songs, you might say. There was the Original Yiddish Singer and the Easy-Listening English Singer, you might say. . . . The Original Singer was "the familiar warm-and-fuzzy Fiddler on the Roof Singer that brought him an international audience. . . [b]ut then there's the other Singer, Singer the Yiddish writer, the Singer before Singer bowdlerized himself in the course of "supervising": the translations of his works from Yiddish into English. The Original, Yiddish Singer was engaged in a bitter, blasphemous battle with God. The kind of strife he frequently sought to smooth over, self-censor in the English translations of his works.

As for Shadows on the Hudson, the first of his novels that was translated without his "supervision," Rosenbaum observes

• we got more of a sense of the raw anger at God, the bitter imprecations, the struggle that ravaged him and his characters.

Noiville describes a 1978 interview in which Singer he explains what his views had been as far back as the 1920s. Singer's 'ethic of protest,' a philosophy that would be his to the end

• . . . the point was to show God that he [Singer] disapproved of the way He ran the world, disapproved of His silence and absence of compassion. . . . Singer insists that because God is evil, man should behave in a moral way . . . 'to spite God.' "

Noiville quotes from another obscure interview, one done in 1978 but first aired on Swedish TV in 1985, in which he says,

• I often say to myself that God wants us to protest. He has had enough of those who praise Him all the time and bless Him for all His cruelties to man and animals. . . . I have written a little book which I call Rebellion and Prayer, or The True Protester//. It was written at the time of the Holocaust. It is a bitter little book, and I doubt that I will ever publish it. Yes, I am a troubled person. . . . If I could, I would picket the Almighty, with a sign: 'Unfair to Life.' "

Theodicy, the view that if something bad occurs it is because God may have allowed it and is evidence of God's mysterious ways. Singer would find that theodicy borders on idiocy.

Errol Morris, the director of The Fog of War, points to a fourth alternative to theism, atheism, and anti-theism: recognition of the Infinite Mediocrity of God. So if God exists,

• one does not have to walk around muttering about God's failures the way Singer evidently did. One can consider him a kind of Divine Schlemiel who tried His best but just didn't do a good job of Creation. Whose "best of all possible worlds" just wasn't very good at all - not because He was deliberately bad, demonic in the way that some Gnostic sects have portrayed the Creator, but rather because He was just divinely mediocre, supremely inept.

Singer's Gimpel the Fool relates how the Jews, like Gimpel, are always putting their faith and trust in God's goodness, and His special care for them, in the same way that Gimpel the Fool puts his faith and trust in his cruel neighbors and untrustworthy wives - all of whom conspired to make him miserable, although he steadfastly refused to blame any of them.

Morris's' notion of the "infinite mediocrity of God" has given rise to Rosenbaum's interpretation of Gimpel the Fool as suggesting, well, that God Himself is a Gimpel.

Selected Works in English

* The Family Moskat (1950)

* Satan in Goray (1955)

* The Magician of Lublin (1960)

* The Slave (1962)

* The Fearsome Inn (1967)

* Mazel and Shlimazel (1967)

* The Manor (1967)

* The Estate (1969)

* The Golem (1969)

* A Friend of Kafka, and Other Stories (1970)

* Elijah The Slave (1970)

* Joseph and Koza: or the Sacrifice to the Vistula (1970)

* The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China (1971)

* Enemies, a Love Story (1972)

* The Wicked City (1972)

* The Hasidim (1973)

* Fools of Chelm (1975)

* Naftali and the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus (1976)

* A Little Boy in Search of God (1976)

* Shosha (novel)|Shosha (1978)

* A Young Man in Search of Love (1978)

* The Penitent (1983)

* Yentl the Yeshiva Boy (1983) (basis for the movie Yentl)

* Why Noah Chose the Dove (1984)

* The King of the Fields (1988)

* Scum (novel)|Scum (1991)

* The Certificate (1992)

* Meshugah (1994)

* Shadows on the Hudson (1997)

Singer, who in New York City was sometimes called "the magician of West 86th Street," also wrote short stories and stories for children.

(See Martin Seymour-Smith, Who's Who in Twentieth Century Literature. D. T. Max's New York Times review of the Noiville book cites Singer's having abandoned his 5-year-old son and the child's mother in Poland but critiques the book only as being a "short new book" that "has plenty of pleasures.