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The rest is Commentary...
Every month, Commentary explores a key Jewish thinker or writer, with a brief biography, an introduction to their major works, and suggestions for further reading. Enjoy!
Author of the Month for July
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Isaac
Bashevis Singer
This month ( 24th July, to be exact), is the centenary of the birth of one of the most extraordinary novelists of the twentieth century. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978, his novels recreate a world forever lost to us, in all its vivid spiritual and bawdy reality. Using traditional forms, Singer creates a bridge between the past and the present, exploring many of the major issues of our century. |
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"When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer."
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born Icek-Hersz Zynger in Leoncin, Poland. His father was a Hasidic rabbi.When Singer was four the family moved to Warsaw, where his father supervised a beth din, or rabbinical court. Singer was supposed to became a rabbi himself. But it was not to be. He attended Yeshiva, but soon dropped out to participate in a Yiddish literar magazine.
In 1935 Singer joined the staff of the Jewish Daily Forward as foreign correspondent. To flee from anti-Semitism, Singer moved in 1935 to the United States, parting from his first wife, Rachel, and son, Israel, who went to Moscow and later Palestine. He settled in New York, where he worked for the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts. He married in 1940 Alma Haimann, a German émigré, who worked for many years in a New York department store. In 1943 Singer became an American citizen. The first collection of his stories in English, Gimpel the Fool.
Throughout the 1940s, Singer’s reputation began to grow among the many Yiddish-speaking immigrants. After the near destruction of the Yiddish-speaking peoples in the Holocaust, Yiddish seemed a dead language. Though Singer had moved to the United States, he believed in the power of his native language and knew that there was still a large audience that longed for new work, work that would address the lives and issues of their his. In 1950 Singer produced his first major work, The Family Moskat - the story of a twentieth century Polish Jewish family before the war. He followed this novel with a series of well-received short stories, including his most famous, Gimpel, The Fool.
By the 1970s, he had become a major international writer.
After World War II there were few Yiddish writers remaining and Singer was
not only a vocal proponent of Yiddish writing, but the major figure in
Yiddish letters. Throughout the 1970s he wrote dozens of stories that were
eventually collected into books, and published in Yiddish and English as
well as many other languages. He branched out, writing memoirs and
children’s books as well as two other major novels set in the twentieth
century, The Penitent (1974) and Shosha (1978). The same
year as his publication of Shosha, Singer won the Nobel Prize in
literature. For many, this award was bittersweet in that it brought
worldwide attention to an important language at the same time it seemed to
signal the language’s demise.
For most of the last 14 years of his life, Singer was
assisted by Dvorah Telushkin, who wrote about their relationship in her
book Master of Dreams (1997). Singer died on July 24, 1991.
Essential Reading
"Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity."
"His language was Yiddish - the language of the
simple people and of the women, the language of the mothers which
preserved fairytales and anecdotes, legends and memories for hundreds of
years past, through a history which seems to have left nothing untried in
the way of agony, passions, aberrations, cruelty and bestiality, but also
of heroism, love and self-sacrifice." The Nobel Committee
(His
writing) "appears to include everything - pleasure and suffering,
coarseness and subtlety. We find obstrusive carnality, spicy, colourful,
fragrant or smelly, lewd or violent. But there is also room for sagacity,
worldly wisdom and shrewd speculation. The range extends from the saintly
to the demoniacal, from quiet contemplation and sublimity, to ruthless
obsession and infernal confusion or destruction. "
- The
Nobel Committee
Although Singer's works are best known in their English
versions, he wrote them all in Yiddish. Singer collaborated with many
distinguished translators, among them Saul Bellow. Singer's novels are realistic in social and natural
detail, but reveal spiritual truths and magic beyond everyday life. Passions and crazes are personified in Singer as demons,
spectres,
ghosts and all kinds of infernal or supernatural powers from the
rich storehouse of Jewish popular imagination. These demons are not
only graphic literary symbols, but also real, tangible beings -
Singer, in fact, says he believes in their physical presence.
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Enemies: A Love Story "When
you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself." £10.95
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In which the protagonist Herman Broder escapes death in the Holocaust. He settles in Brooklyn and learns after a new marriage, that his first wife has also survived and come to America...
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Satan in Goray "Doubt
is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters." £10.95
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As a novelist Singer made his debut with Der Sotn In Goray (Satan in Goray), which was published in Poland in 1932. It was written in a linguistic and rhetorical style imitative of mediaeval Yiddish book of chronicles. The story was loosely based on the events surrounding the 17th-century false messiah Shabbatai Zvi, and painted a portrait of messianic fever.
It takes place in the 17th century, in the confusion and the sufferings after the cruel ravages of the Cossacks, with outrages and mass murder of Jews and other wretched peasants and artisans. The people in this novel, as elsewhere with Singer, are often at the mercy of the capricious infliction of circumstance, but even more so, their own passions. The passions are frequently of a sexual nature but also of another kind - manias and superstitions, fanatical hopes and dreams, the figments of terror, the lure of lust or power.
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In
My Father's Court
"For
those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and
wonderful treasures are in store."
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Singer's father was a rabbi, a spiritual mentor and
confessor, of the Hasid school of piety. His mother also came from a
family of rabbis. The East European Jewish-mystical Hasidism combined
Talmud doctrine and a fidelity to scripture and rites - which often merged
into prudery and strict adherence to the 1aw - with a lively and sensually
candid earthiness that seemed familiar with all human experience. Its
world, which the reader encounters in Singer's stories, is a very Jewish
but also a very human world.
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Zlateh the Goat "I
did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the
chickens." £14.95
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With wit and whimsy, Maurice Sendak illustrates seven tales about the legendary village of fools, Chelm. Silly, outrageous, and sometimes poignant, the stories reflect the traditions, heroes, and villains of middle European folklore. The devil makes an appearance more than once, as do the ever-so-foolish yet highly revered Elders of Chelm.
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Stories
for Children
"We
write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too,
are serious children."
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The Slave
"We
have to believe in free will. We have no choice"
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Singer returned again to the 17th-century in a love story about a Jewish man and gentile woman, whose relationship is threatened by their different backgrounds. This novel..."appears to include everything - pleasure and suffering, coarseness and subtlety. We find obstrusive carnality, spicy, colourful, fragrant or smelly, lewd or violent. But there is also room for sagacity, worldly wisdom and shrewd speculation. The range extends from the saintly to the demoniacal, from quiet contemplation and sublimity, to ruthless obsession and infernal confusion or destruction. " - The Nobel Committee
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Love
and Exile
"Life
is God's novel. Let him write it."
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An autobiographical trilogy, including A Little Boy in Search of God; A Young Man in Search of Love and Lost in America. Throughout focuses mostly on Singer's Hasidic upbringing in Poland and his subsequent rebellion against it.
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Collected Stories "I
don't invent characters because the Almighty has already invented
millions. Just like experts at fingerprints do not create
fingerprints but learn how to read them."
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The forty-seven stories in this collection, selected by Singer himself out of nearly one hundred and fifty, range from the publication of his now-classic first collection, Gimpel the Fool, in 1957, until 1981. They include supernatural tales, slices of life from Warsaw and the shtetls of Eastern Europe, and stories of the Jews displaced from that world to the New World, from the East Side of New York to California and Miami.
Previous
Authors of the Month
Cynthia Ozick
Also
Recommended:
Chaim Grade
Saul Bellow
Chaim Potok
