Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991)

This short story collection was published in 1988, when Singer was 75. It is his final published collection, though he went on to publish four more novels thereafter. Even though Singer lived in the U.S. for decades, he continued to write only in Yiddish. My love for these stories about older Jewish characters, mostly men, runs deep. A lot of the stories remind me either of my father or of my father's gin rummy cronies.

Singer wrote about passion, hope, frustration and folly, about the show more strange course that life could take, with clear, usually straightforward language, gentle humor and a great affection for humanity and for the human condition. Though much of Singer's earlier writing concerns both city and shtetl life in pre-World War II Poland (where Singer was born and lived until moving to the U.S. in 1935) and often features strong elements of Jewish mysticism, only two or three stories in this collection fit those categories. Mostly here we have older men in the U.S. and sometimes Europe or Israel, looking back on their lives and/or musing about human nature. Many of the tales intersperse storytelling with philosphising either by the narrator or another character. Often, there is no closure or culmination of plot in the standard sense: just, instead, a rambling tale of a life, or of one or two lives intersecting, which, when you turn the last page, simply stops short.

A couple of examples of Singer's humor and of his observational style: In one story a retired man, bored with his life of inactivity, meets a stranger in a cafeteria who soon is trying to entice him to buy a store and start a new business. Tempted, but worried that the exertion will be too much for him, the man asks, "Who should I start a new business for, my wife's next husband?"

But a bit more deeply, here are some passages from the beginning of the story, "House Friends:"

"We were sitting in the Cafe Piccadilly, Max Stein and I, and our talk turned to married women with lovers tolerated by their husbands. 'House friends' we used to call such men in the Yiddish Writers' Club. Yes, women--what else could we have talked about? Neither of us was interested in politics or business. . . . Max Stein, a frustrated painter, tried to make a drawing of me on a sketch pad, but without success. He said to me "One cannot draw you. Your face changes every second. One moment you look young, another moment old. You have peculiar tics. Even your nose changes from minute to minute. . . . Love is supposed to be an instinct, but what is instinct? Instinct is not blind, or what they call unconscious. The instinct knows what it wants and plans and calculates perfectly. It is often shrewd and prescient. Schopenhauer dwells constantly on the subject of blind will. But will is far from blind--the very opposite. The intellect is blind. Give me a cigarette."

Several of the stories consist of one person telling his life story to a listener. In "A Peephole in the Gate," a young man in pre-war Poland looks through the aforementioned peephole and sees his fiance making love to a janitor's son. In despair, he runs off to New York, thus being spared the Holocaust. Many years and twists and turns later, he is an old man, now called Sam, telling his life's tale to another old man on a cruise ship bound for Buenos Aires. After hearing the man's long and complicated life story, the narrator/listener goes back to the beginning of the man's tale . . .

"It may be," I said, "that if you didn't look through the peephole that evening you would never have gone to America. You and Eve and your children would all gave been burned in Auschwitz or tortured to death in some other concentration camp."

"Yes, I thought about that, too. One look through a peephole and your whole life is changed. You would still have been here at this table, but not with me. . . . What does all this mean? That everything is nothing but a miserable accident."

"Perhaps God wanted you to live and therefore he made you look into the peephole."

"Now, my dear man, you talk nonsense. Why should God want me to live while millions of other people are destroyed?"

Just before this passage, Sam has said, ". . . I had hoped that old age would bring me peace. I reckoned that after seventy a person stops musing about all petty things. But the head does not know how old it is. It remains young and full of the same foolishness as at twenty. I know that Eve is no longer alive. She mush have perished in the Nazi slaughter. Even if she were alive, she would be a tottering old woman by now. But in my mind she is still a young girl and Boleck, the janitor's son, is still a young boy and the gate is still a gate." show less

A handsome edition of two fabulist stories from IBS's collection Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, published by The Limited Editions Club and illustrated by Raphael Soyer (seven watercolours for "The Gentleman from Cracow" and four for "The Mirror", with 23 pencil studies in an appendix). The edition includes a signature page autographed by both author and illustrator, and is printed two-colour letterpress (?) throughout.

"The Gentleman from Cracow"
Initially I thought Gentleman was show more inspiration for Jagger's lyric to "Sympathy for the Devil" (I learned later that's The Master and Margarita), which belief persuaded me to pick up the book. While the titular gentleman does have a similar profile, Singer's storytelling is more curious and distancing than culturally insightful. Gentleman is broken into five parts, each introducing separate pieces which only come together in the final section, the moral lesson ultimately failing to resonate. Evidently the villagers of Frampol always had made do without turning to outsiders bearing gifts, and Singer admonishes them against ever accepting help from suspicious benefactors out of Cracow, no matter the gentleman's largesse, no matter how grim things may be in Frampol. It's easy to see an allegory for the Holocaust, yet for me the story never works on its own, making such connections feel strained.

"The Mirror"
This story also paints Cracow as symbolic home of sinful behaviour, and in premise and tone is the more interesting of the stories here. Partly this has to do with the invented society of demonfolk, and narration provided by an imp. The story's trappings are amusingly sardonic: a virtual parade of named demons and devils, offhand hints at mischief they attempt to sow among good people, and the imp's gambit of installing himself in a mirror so as to bring about the downfall of Zirel, a motherless daughter. Two references to the German language as demonically suspect provided a nice touch. As with Gentleman, however, the story in the end is unpersuasive except as cautionary tale: anyone, but especially women, living outside the communal rhythms of work and leisure is doomed to hellfire, and we are all better off remembering it.

Both stories seem intended as parables, with character motivations out of step with modern sensibilities, even when published in the 1950s. The odd tone and plot choices are their chief attraction, in the way Kafka's stories are baffling. While I suspect the anachronistic moral posture is deliberate, ultimately Singer's storytelling doesn't work for me, and I won't seek out the other stories in Gimpel the Fool. show less

We are in Poland, this time in the later decades of the 19th century. The novel begins just after an 1863 uprising by the Polish nobility against what had become ongoing Russian rule has ended in humiliating disaster. With this nationalist movement quashed, Poland instead turns to business, and the modern world begins seeping into Poland: mines, factories, railroads begin appearing. For Poland's Jews, the period is one of liberalism. In the town of Jampol, one of the insurrectionists, Count show more Wladislaw Jampolski, has been banished to Siberia, and a Jew, Calman Jacoby, has managed to win the right to lease the count's large landholding and manor house. He judiciously allows the count's family to continue living in the manor house, in order to avoid offending the local Poles, and he begins making money growing and selling crops on the land and, in particular, selling timber to be used as railroad ties. So begins our tale, with Calman at the center of what becomes a whirlwind of cultural and religious change and the personal crises and moral choices, both good and bad, of an expanding group of characters.

Calman himself is an observant Jew. He expects his children to stay within that community and some do. But the Jewish community as a whole does not stand apart from the modernism taking hold in Poland, and Calman, to his woe, has lived to see a growing divide among Poland's Jews: those who demand adherence to the old ways, and those who look westward with approval at the assimilation of the Jews of France, Germany and elsewhere. To them, the exotic, "Asiatic" dress, the standing apart from Polish society as a whole, is a self-defeating lifestyle of superstition, destined to bring down further antisemitism on all of their heads. To the traditionalists, antisemitism is a constant, sure to come in future waves however they're dressed and however they worship. Faith in God and loyalty to the commandments is the only path. Calman's children, as they grow to adulthood, more or less split down the middle of this divide. One of his daughters goes so far as to run off with the count's son. But the world of the Polish nobility is on no more solid ground than the world of the Hassids. In the meantime, socialism, Zionism, nihilism, anarchism and more are debated and sometimes adopted. The roles of women in this world are changing as well. Although this topic is not made specific, the limitations faced by The Manor's female characters, and the extremely unsatisfactory choices they're forced into, become an undeniable theme of the novel.

I don't want to give the idea that Singer's presentation here is devoid of sympathy and even love for the ways and tribulations of the observant Jews. Indeed, his portrayal is laced strongly with affection and understanding. The storyline is a tapestry, or perhaps labyrinth is a better description, of interrelationships between members of the old world and the new, the Jewish society and the Polish Christians, interwoven amongst and strengthened by family, marriage, business and religion. The old world's concerns are offered with as much detail as those more modern leaning. This is a vivid picture of a complex society at a tipping point, full of memorable characters. And of course Singer was writing, and we are reading, within the context of hindsight. In the end, modernization did not save the Jews of Europe.

Here is a good example of the issues Singer is dealing with. Ezriel, Calman's son-in-law, has mostly left the old ways and is studying at university to become a doctor:

"Ezriel had had great hopes that progress could be achieved through education. Yet knowledge itself turned out to be extremely precarious. The entities which were said to constitute matter seemed to have almost magical properties. Moreover, the various materialistic theories, and Darwinism in particular, had put almost all values in jeopardy: the soul, ethics, the family. Might was right everywhere. Man's ancient beliefs had been bartered for the telegraph. But what could Ezriel do about it? For him the old traditions were already destroyed. He was left with nothing but examinations and dread. He had forsaken God but he was dependent upon all kinds of bureaucrats. He had made a mistake, Ezriel felt. But what exactly had been his error? How could it be rectified? As he lay in the darkness, it occurred to him that the young man who had been found hanging in an attic room in the Old City and whose dissection Ezriel had witnessed must have had much the same thoughts as he was having now."

Here's one more quote I like a lot, one that shows more accurately the range of human emotion and reverence for the natural world that Singer displays through the novel, as Calman, about a third of the way through the story, contemplates his situation:

"Calman sighed. He heard his grandson, Shaindel's Uri-Joseph-Yosele, awake and cry. Burek, the dog, barked. The cows in the stall rubbed their horns against the door. The spring was a warm one, and after two years of drought there were signs that the coming harvest would be fruitful. The winter crops had sprouted early, rain and sunshine had been plentiful: the life of the soil was as unpredictable as the life of man. Scarcity followed plenty. When the earth seemed to have grown barren, the juices of life flowed through her again and she blossomed once more. Who could tell? Perhaps God would still grant Calman some comfort."

When I first began reading The Manor, I wasn't particularly enamored. But the more I read, and the more the branches of Singer's story reached outward, the more absorbed I became, and in the end I can say it's a book I recommend highly. show less

This is a delightfully sad book that deals with promiscuity, money, loneliness, extroverted insensitivity, and theology - quite the combination. Published in 1960 but set in late 1800s Poland, and translated from Yiddish, it reads like a risqué nineteenth century novel. Milton Hindus' 1960 review in the New Yorker does a much better job at capturing the essence of the novel, and I like the idea that the hero, the magician and escape artist Yasha Mazur, "escapes into a prison" of his own show more making. But I was constantly reminded of Epictetus' idea that nothing is either good or bad, except our own choices. Who hasn't lived to regret the choices of the past, when all seemed so banal until the banal things we didn't know we cherished were compromised by our own stupidity? Yasha exemplifies the chaotic choices of the extroverted introvert, and gives us a glimpse into the damage that one can cause in the pursuit of pointless selfishness. It is all well and good to read such things when one has finally calmed the hell down. If only one could travel back to their selfish younger selves and hand them a bag full of books to read. But life isn't like that, and no doubt my selfish younger self would have spat in my face. Yasha does that to almost everyone, and like all selfish people, punishes himself so badly that he punishes the few remaining people who still love him, gaining fame through his sagacity earned at the expense of others. At the end of the novel, I was hoping that Yasha would see the light, but no. Selfish prig. Without giving too much away, I read up on "anchorites"last year and the concept makes my skin crawl. But in a way, Yasha gets his just deserts. We can learn from Singer that our choices, rather than our circumstances, are right or wrong. We can learn from Yasha what our life could be like if we pursue selfishness to its logical conclusion. show less