David Herman
Isaac Bashevis Singer
David Herman | Isaac Bashevis Singer | 06.10.21
- Well happy birthday before we start! So,
Happy birthday Wendy!
[Wendy] Thanks Trudy.
Wendy, you must come on. You must come on at half past seven. It’s very important, all right?
[Wendy] I’ll be there, don’t you worry.
[Trudy] Happy birthday.
[Wendy] Thank you. Another year. Well you know what, it’s the start of the new month. It’s the start of a new month in the Jewish calendar. So tonight is a very small moon, new challenges and new opportunities.
And you’ve created a lot of them, lady.
Oh well I’m very excited. So I’m very sorry, we are very late today, ‘cause I couldn’t get on. So I just want to say hello again David and thank you once again for joining us. Thank you Trudy, thank you Judi, and over to you David. Thank you.
Thank you Wendy, and a very happy birthday to you in LA from me in London, and today I’m going to be talking about Isaac Bashevis Singer. And I’m going to start with a kind of who, where and when.
Firstly, who: Isaac Bashevis Singer was not born “Isaac Bashevis Singer.” He was born Yitskhok Zinger. Singer later used his mother’s name in his pen name, Bashevis, son of Bathsheba, Isaac Bashevis. He took on the Yiddish pseudonym Yitskhok Bashevis when he started to publish in Yiddish, in order to distinguish himself from his brother Israel Joshua Singer. Now less well known, but at the time when they were both young writers starting out, he was much the better known of the two writers. The name uses the possessive form of his mother’s name in Yiddish, Bathsheba. In America, where he started publishing in English after his brother’s death, he added his last name and became, finally, Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Secondly, where? Where’s he from? Anna Peikoff, I hope I’ve pronounced her name rightly, and Joan Lessing kindly alerted me to the following story: In April this year, the novelist Sigrid Nunez in the “New York Times” described Isaac Bashevis Singer as a Polish-American author, only in the “New York Times.” At the time, the introduction to the Wikipedia entry on Singer described him as a Polish-American writer. In Yiddish, the word “Jewish” appeared lower in the body of the text. Check now and you’ll see a different first line. “Singer is a Polish born Jewish-American writer.” This has led to the most almighty kerfuffle, as to whether Singer is primarily Polish or Jewish.
Third, perhaps most important of all, when did Singer make his breakthrough? When did he start to become famous? In 1953, Singer’s story “Gimpel The Fool,” which was originally written in Yiddish and published in Yiddish in 1945, was translated into English and it was the first major story of Singer’s to be published in English. “Gimpel The Fool” is set in a bygone era in an East European shtetl, like so many of his writings. And the tale is about Gimpel, a gullible man, a fool, who responds to a lifetime of betrayal and deception with childlike acceptance and complete faith. No matter what happens to him, he retains a steadfast belief in human goodness, even though other people in the village mock him and humiliate him, he accepts life as it unfolds with all its paradoxes; even enduring the constant and flagrant infidelities of his wife Elka.
Her deathbed confession that none of her children, none of their children were fathered by him, does not alter his love for the children. After she dies, Gimpel leaves his family and wanders from village to village as a storyteller. Years later, he waits for death, the one experience by which even he will not be fooled. In his memoir, “A Margin of Hope,” Irving Howe, who did so much to introduce Yiddish poetry and Yiddish prose and stories to American audiences, described how he first encountered “Gimpel the Fool.” “Whenever we reached a dry spell, Lezer,” that’s Eliezer Greenberg his collaborator, “Would whip out a goodie, something special I could not resist. And once he said to me, 'Sit still, be quiet, don’t interrupt,’ and started to read in the manner of a meditative lyric, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ‘Gimpel The Fool.’
It was a transforming moment. How often does a critic encounter a major new writer? Relishing my pleasure in Singer’s story, yet still intent upon clarifying the historical lines of the literature, Lezer said, ‘It’s very Yiddish, but it’s still not Yiddish.’ Years later I understood what he meant. Singer’s mastery of Yiddish as a literary medium was second only to that of Shalom Aleichem and his involvement with the pre-rationalist sources of Jewish folk tradition went deep. Nevertheless, the worldview out of which Singer wrote was strongly at odds with the 19th century humanism that has dominated Yiddish literature.
I inveigled Saul Bellow, not quite so famous yet, to do the translation. Bellow had a pretty good command of Yiddish, but not quite enough to do the story on his own. So we sat him down before a typewriter in Lezer’s apartment on East 19th Street. Lezer read out the Yiddish sentence-by-sentence. Saul occasionally asked about refinements of meaning and I watched in a state of high enchantment. Three or four hours and it was done. Saul took another half hour to go over the translation, and then excited, read aloud the version that has since become famous. It was a feat of virtuosity and we drank a schnapps to celebrate.” A number of things to say about “Gimpel The Fool” and this translation.
Firstly, it is the story that made Singer’s name in America. The publication of “Gimpel the Fool” in Partisan Review, then America’s leading most prestigious literary magazine, marked Singer’s breakthrough. And in the next few years he took off and entered the mainstream. Secondly, it was translated by Bellow at a crucial moment. Bellow was in transition from the thin, nervous first novels, “Dangling man,” 1944, and “The Victim,” 1947 to the extraordinary exuberance and vitality of “Augie March” in 1953. What if it had been translated in the 1940s by the Bellow of “Dangling Man?” Thirdly, it was translated just as Jewish American writing was taking off. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of the 1950s, the early, mid, well, the late 1940s, the early and mid 1950s, for Jewish American writing.
You have Bellow’s first novel in ‘44, Arthur Miller’s first major play in '47, Mailer’s first novel, “The Naked and the Dead” in '48. Miller’s great plays, “Death of a Salesman” in '49 and “The Crucible” in '53, Bellow’s “Augie March” in '53, Alan Ginsburg’s “Howl” in '56, and Malamud’s “The Assistant” in '57, and Philip Roth’s first book, “Goodbye Columbus” in '59. There is also a larger context which explains some of Singer’s growing appeal. Not so much in the fifties, but perhaps more in the 1960s and seventies. You get an extraordinary eruption of Yiddish writing in post-war Jewish-American culture. Yiddish was on the verge of extinction in post-war American writing, but then comes this remarkable nostalgia for the world of the shtetl.
In 1964, “The Fiddler on the Roof” opens for its enormous run on Broadway. In 1983, Roman Vishniac’s “A Vanished World” appears, a book of photographs of pre-Holocaust Poland. You get the Klesmer revival. Max Rudin, publisher of the Library of America, writes in a book called “Singer, An Album,” “The fictional world he created spoke movingly to the fears, longings and ambivalence about assimilation of modern Americans. It was a mix of nostalgia and loss. 'In this world of old Jewishness,’ writes Singer, ‘I found a spiritual treasure trove, I had a chance to see our past as it really was. Time seemed to flow backwards. I lived Jewish history, but also lost a vanished world.’” As in the title of Vishniac’s book. Bellow translated “Gimpel the fool” around the time he was writing “Augie March.”
Writing in an exciting new voice full of Yiddish inflections, constructions and expressions which spills over into his translation of “Gimpel the Fool.” This is absolutely crucial to the importance of “Gimpel the Fool” and Singers breakthrough, that it was translated by Bellow just as he was finding a new literary voice as a writer. If you think of some of the sentences in “Gimpel the Fool,” in Bellow’s version, “I had seven names in all: Imbecile, Donkey, Flax-head, Dope, Glump, Ninny and Fool. The gang laughed and hee-haw’d, stomped and danced and chanted a goodnight prayer, so I made tracks. I never want to start up with them.” Bellow or Singer? Singer via Bellow?
On the 30th of May, 1953, Bellow reviewed Shalom Aleichem’s “The Adventures of Motl, The Cantor’s Son” in the Saturday review. His review was called “Laughter in the Ghetto,” and he writes, “The most ordinary Yiddish conversation is full of the grandest historical mythological and religious illusions. This manner of living with all times and all greatness contributed, because of the powerless of the chosen to the ghetto’s sense of the ridiculous.” What did Bellow bring to the translation and what did he learn from it?
In a letter of the 12th of July, 1995, more than 40 years later, he wrote, “What was perhaps lacking in my own work back in the early fifties, was a full and satisfactory immersion in the Eastern-European Jewish subject matter. What was necessary in translating Gimpel, was a rich and complex English style. Singer had the one, I had the other.” But it was not a match made in heaven. Sounds it from Howe’s description, but it wasn’t. Bellow was not a fan of Singer’s by any means. He once wrote in a private letter, “Singer is like a Chinese stage manager supplied with props from the shtetl. In its final form, it’s ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ and Zero Mostel makes a third with Singer and Chagall.”
It is worth noting there are are only three references to Isaac Bashevis Singer in James Atlas’s biography of Bellow, and only one in volume one of Zachary Leader’s more recent 800 page biography and one in volume two of his biography. And for his part, Singer resented Bellow’s part in the success of “Gimpel the Fool.” “I think he cherished his eccentricities a little too consciously.” Bellow told a friend, “I was not one of those people who found them charming. I thought he was a conniving old gannef, a thief.” But whatever the relationship between Bellow and Singer, “Gimpel the Fool” introduced American audiences to a new world.
If you look at some of the features of “Gimpel the Fool,” small town, Yiddish speaking, Eastern Europe; a world of rabbis, pranksters, orphans and fools, cuckolds, gossips, grave diggers and village bakers, innocence and piety; but also evil spirits, spooks and dybbuks, the spirit of Evil, devils and magicians. One of the best Jewish-American literary critics, Adam Kirsch, when he reviewed the three volume Library of America edition of Singer’s stories wrote, “And most remarkable of all, was Singer’s ability to go on to producing fiction in a language of ghosts, stories dealing with a dead or dying world that was nonetheless living works of art.
No wonder that as a Yiddish writer after 1945, the only one known to most American-Jewish readers, Singer is regarded as and called upon to be a representative of the old world, a medium channelling a perished Yiddish culture. After all, wasn’t his work itself filled with mediums, ghosts and spirits, with dybbuks and demonic possession? All the paraphernalia of a vanished superstition. Where, but in Singer’s pages, was this lore kept alive?” It wasn’t just the storytelling, sorry, it wasn’t just the subject matter, it was also Singer’s storytelling. He said in an interview with “Paris Review,” the prestigious literary journal back in 1968. “I liked that a story should be a story. That there should be a beginning and an end, and there should be some feeling of what will happen at the end.
And to this rule I keep today, I think that storytelling has become, in this age, almost a forgotten art. To me, a story is still a story where the reader listens and wants to know what happens. If the reader knows everything from the very beginning, even if the the description is good, I think the story is not a story.” But was Singer a traditionalist or a modernist? No one should cast Singer as the voice of naive tradition. He was a sophisticate. Before arriving in America, he’d already translated Dostoevsky and Knut Hamson, the Norwegian writer, into Yiddish. He was formed, as we’ll see in a moment, by the literary world and Avant-Garde of inter-war Warsaw.
It’s also worth noting that Gimpel and Singer were both orphans, with no parents and no home, but also no literary parents and no literary home. By the time “Gimpel the Fool” was first published in Yiddish in 1945, immediately at, just at the end of the Second World War, Singer found out that his mother and younger brother Moishe had both been killed. His father was already dead, his brother was already dead. But isn’t just a biological fact or a fact about his family. It’s also perhaps as important in some ways, certainly thinking about Singer as a writer, who were his literary parents? What was his literary home as a writer when he was writing “Gimpel the Fool?”
And just to give this another kind of twist, Singer provided a kind of literary home and was a kind of literary grandfather to a much later, younger generation of Jewish American writers. Not so much Bellow and Roth and Malamud, but people like Rebecca Goldstein and Jonathan Safran Foer. “My Jewish dreams,” Rebecca Goldstein said in 1997, “At least sometime take me backward in time into a past in which the texture of Jewishness was more richly felt.” A past in which the texture of Jewishness was more richly felt. “This world of angels, demons and flat flying rabbis, Cabala, dybbuks, felt more authentically Jewish.”
As a world and as a time to a younger generation of Jewish American writers in the 1990s and two thousands, not so much to British or European writers, but to American writers, it spoke very much. There was a realisation as Steve Stern said, “What’s lost is lost, you can’t get there from here. At this late date, what can hearkening back to the archetypes result in, but pale imitation, distant echoes of a once joyful noise? All the traditional means of transcendence have had their day.” And Rebecca Goldstein again: “None of us writing today can be a Jewish writer in the same sense that Isaac Bashevis Singer was.” “None of us writing today can be a Jewish writer in the same sense that Singer was.”
You could say that no young Jewish artist’s work in the 1990s could be a Jewish artist in the same way that Chagall was. There was another sense, of course, among this new generation that they hadn’t lived. The big dramas are elsewhere, other people’s experiences. Let’s go back to the beginning of Singer’s life and the beginnings of his career. His parents married in 1889. They had six children, two daughters died very young of scarlet fever. The first child was Hinde Esther Singer, also a writer. The second child was Israel Joshua Singer, also a writer, and Singer’s father was serving as a rabbi when Singer was born, in a small town in Poland.
Singer was born Yitskhok Singer in this Polish village, northeast of Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire; the third surviving child of Bathsheba Silverman and Pinchos Menachem Zynger. His father was a Hasidic rabbi from a family of distinguished rabbis, and his mother was the daughter of a rabbi. Her family were opponents of Hasidism. Then in 1906, his brother Moishe was born. The last of the children. The family had to move because of hard times and increasing tensions with the local community and the father became head of the Yeshiva and Singer began to attend Cheder.
The family moved to Warsaw in 1908 when he was a small child. His father presided over a Beth Din, or rabbinical Court, where he acted as a rabbi, judge and spiritual leader in the family’s home; an unheated three room apartment on the second floor. A three-room apartment for six people. Most of the residents were poor and some were involved in petty crime or prostitution. Singer attended a series of Cheders and serves as a messenger and collector of donations for his father. And this is the world of his later book, “In My Father’s Court.” But his older brother, who left home at 18 in 1911, when Singer was still a small child, he began to fall out with his parents. He was secular had no patience, increasing impatience, with his parents religious orthodoxy.
And the sister, Esther, also left a year later. She married a diamond cutter and moved to Antwerp. In 1915, the German troops occupied Warsaw during the first World War, and Singer, his mother and Moishe moved to her hometown, a traditional shtetl where his mother’s brothers had followed his grandfather as rabbis. This was a hugely influential moment for Singer. He was no longer a small child. This was his first experience of the traditional shtetl. He said, “The kind of Jewish behaviour and customs I witnessed, were those preserved from much earlier time. In this world of old Jewishness, I found a spiritual treasure trove. I had a chance to see our past as it really was.”
His father stayed briefly in Warsaw, then returned to Radzymin and worked for the town’s rabbi. In 1918, Isaac’s older brother moved to the Soviet Union where he got married. In 1921, Isaac Bashevis went to Warsaw to attend a rabbinical seminary, but was unhappy, poor, and often hungry. In 1921, his older brother, I.J. Singer, was contacted by Abraham Cahan, then a hugely influential figure in the world of Yiddish publishing in New York. And he was the editor of the New York Yiddish Daily, “The Forverts,” and Singer became a correspondent. Not Isaac Bashevis, but I.J. Singer, became a correspondent for the newspaper, reporting on his travels to Galicia throughout Poland and then once again to the Soviet Union. And he met Cahan.
And it was through Cahan that I.J. Singer moved to New York. In the meantime, 1923, Isaac Bashevis Singer moved back to Warsaw. He had a very itinerant childhood and adolescence. And there’s a very interesting interview with Philip Roth interviewing Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer in the New York Times book review, that was later republished in one of Roth’s Best and most underrated books, “Shop Talk” in 2001. And Roth asked Bashevis Singer about literary Warsaw between the wars. “The Jewish writers who were writing in Polish,” said Bashevis Singer, “Were all leftist or considered leftists by the old Polish writers who looked upon these Jewish writers as intruders.
They were quite good writers, though not great writers. They were called Jews by the adversaries, by those who did not like them. This was always the eternal reproach. ‘What are you doing Mr. Tuwim, with your Hebrew name writing in Polish? Why don’t you go back to the ghetto with Israel, Joshua Singer and the others?’ That is the way it was. No writer here would say to Saul Bellow, or to you, meaning Philip Roth, ‘Why don’t you write in Yiddish? Why don’t you go back to East Broadway?’” and Isaac Bashevis Singer began frequenting the Warsaw Penn Yiddish Writers Club and worked as a proof reader for the next 10 years for the Yiddish Journal, , and wrote regularly for it and published his first review in 1924 and published his first short story in 1925.
And then in 1928, his father died and Bashevis Singer had started having an affair with a woman called Runya. And she gave birth to their son Israel Zamir. And at this stage, this is around the time when Israel Joshua Singer moves to New York where he works for Forverts and he published three novels after his arrival in the United States. And it’s a curious thing, he was, both in Warsaw and in the 1930s New York, regarded as the major writer of the Singer family. And had he not died so prematurely in 1944, of a heart attack, it is possible that he would’ve gone on to become also a famous writer.
1930s were not a good time to build a major reputation as a Yiddish writer. And then in 1935, Isaac Bashevis Singer moves to New York for various reasons, to flee from antisemitism in Poland, which was already very pronounced, to get away from his first wife Runya and his son Israel, who went to Moscow and later to Palestine. And to be close to his brother, who was significantly older and as I say, much more famous, better known. So he settles in New York where he worked for the Yiddish language newspaper Forverts, and as a journalist, he signed his articles with the pseudonym Warszawski, meaning “from Warsaw.” And he writes numerous reviews and stories as a freelance writer, but still not really well known.
And then in 1938, his first work is translated into English, an excerpt from his novel “Sotn in Goray,” “Satan in Goray,” and it appears in an anthology, “Jewish Short Stories of Today.” Edited by his nephew Morris, Esther’s son, she has moved to London with her son Morris, who becomes Morris Keen. And the collection also includes stories by Israel Joshua Singer, Esther and Morris Kreitman, her husband published as Martin Lee, as well as Isaac Bashevis Singer, so its a real family operation. Published by Faber, which is quite an astonishing thing. He becomes, I.J. becomes an American citizen.
And in 1939, Isaac Bashevis meets Alma Haimann Wassermann, a married German-Jewish refugee. She divorces her husband in 1940 and marries Isaac Bashevis Singer. And they lived together for the next half century until his death. She worked for many years in various New York department stores and initially they moved into a small apartment in Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, and then they moved to Manhattan in 1941 on the upper West Side, West Hundred and Third Street. And that’s pretty much where they lived during their entire married life.
In later years he bought a place in Florida and they would go for the winters in Florida, but in most of the year they lived on the Upper West Side. And and then in 1943, he publishes three major works in America in response to the Holocaust. He’s heard, of course, what’s happened, what’s happening in Warsaw and in Poland. And the first response is the translation of “Der Sotn in Goray,” “The Satan in Goray,” together with four new stories. Secondly, he publishes an essay, “Problems of Yiddish Prose in America,” published in Yiddish, and his critical essay, thirdly, “Regarding Yiddish Literature in Poland,” which appeared in the major Yiddish monthly in New York.
There was a whole wide Yiddish publishing scene, monthlies, dailies, weeklies, it’s impossible to imagine today. In his first four news stories, Bashevis introduced for the first time a demon narrator, as though human speech had now become inadequate to describe human evil. In the special issue of , Bashevis’ essay criticised the themes chosen by Yiddish writers in Poland and the inadequacy of the Yiddish language to create convincing modern characters and narratives, arguing instead for return to the hidden treasures of age old folk culture in their natural vernacular. And in his essay on the problems of Yiddish writing and Yiddish literature in America, he went even further, arguing that since the Yiddish language in America had become obsolete, it could no longer realistically depict contemporary American life, but should instead renounce the present in favour of the past, by recording and preserving the destroyed world of Eastern Europe.
You can see where this is leading, these two essays on the problems of Yiddish literature, both in his homeland in Poland and in his new homeland in America, where he is just become a new citizen, are both about whether Yiddish can capture the modern world of Warsaw or the modern world of New York. And whether really, instead, Yiddish writers should look to the past, world of the traditional shtetl, of religion, of rabbis, of superstition. And this became a significant moment for Singer. In a very interesting review in the TLS in 2004, Michael Andre Bernstein wrote, “The Jewish life was simply not representable in Yiddish, there were no terms for many of the basic routines of even the most Jewish-centered daily existence.
Unlike the shtetler, the Yiddish that Singer heard in the new world struck him as an already marginal language, whose users needed an ever-increasing influx to conduct their daily affairs. Yiddish literature, Singer said, is a product of the European ghetto with all its virtues and faults. And it can never leave that ghetto without becoming a caricature of a language. The better Yiddish prose writers avoid writing about American Jewish life. Through his language, the Yiddish writer is bound to the past. Any attempt to push our language into the future is in vain.
And he insisted that American Yiddish writers must find their proper subject in the vital diaspora of Russian and East Europe, though this way of life is vanishing, if it is not already vanished without a trace.” it is an extraordinary moment. 1943, when already Warsaw is being destroyed, the Jewish population of Poland is being destroyed, the Jewish population of the Soviet Union is being destroyed. Those are two of the great centres. And by then, Lithuania of course, was part of the Soviet Union by 1943. So that’s the third great centre of Eastern European Yiddish literature and culture. And these are being destroyed. And Singer is observing this from the safety of New York and wondering what is the future in that case of a Yiddish literature and indeed of the Yiddish language itself.
If there are no Yiddish readers left, what can a Yiddish writer write about? “Concerning Yiddish literature in Poland,” that essay insists that the attempt to create a secular, politically-engaged Yiddish writing had failed. “Modernising intellectuals lacked all regard for the values that had sustained life in the ghetto and given it significance. Yiddish writing in Poland had lost its foundation. It had become Godly without a God, worldly without a world.” This was an enormous turning point for Singer in his sense of his identity as a writer. His sense of writing in Yiddish, what that would mean.
In 1944, on February the 10th, Israel Joshua Singer died of a heart attack at the age of 51. And has been, really, ever since then in the shadow of his more famous, younger brother. And this decade between 1944 and 1954 was a terrible time for Bashevis Singer. Israel Joshua died in ‘44, he hears of the deaths of his mother and his brother, Moishe, in 1945. They’d escaped to the Soviet Union during the war, but had then been caught and deported to Kazakhstan where they froze to death working in a labour camp in Kazakhstan. And then his sister, Hinde Esther Kreitman, also a well known novelist at that time, died in 1954.
So in that decade from 1944 to 54, his brother, both his brothers and his sister and his mother all died, all surviving members of his family. So it is hardly surprising that “Gimpel the Fool,” initially published in Yiddish in '45 just after the death of his brother, of his older brother Israel Joshua Singer, is about an orphan, because Isaac Bashevis Singer, the members of his family, all the rest of his family died during that decade. In 1947, he sailed to Europe with his wife Alma, and they visited England where he saw his sister Esther for the last time.
And it is noteworthy that in 1950, “The Family Moskat,” his first novel to be published in English was dedicated to his older brother Israel Joshua. “To me, he was not only the older brother, but a spiritual father and master as well.” And for the first time in 1950, his name appears as Isaac Bashevis Singer. His breakthrough came first with “Gimpel the Fool” as we’ve already seen, but all through the fifties, that opened the floodgates for Bashevis Singer. And it’s 10 years since he wrote those essays on whether Yiddish writers had a future either in Poland or in America. And then suddenly, 10 years after that, his career just explodes and takes off. In '53 “Gimpel the Fool” appears in “Partisan Review,” in the Bellow translation.
In 1954, that translation of “Gimpel the Fool” and the first English publication of “The Little Shoemakers,” another story, appear in “A Treasury of Yiddish Stories” edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg. Partisan Review publishes, in addition to “Gimpel the Fool,” “From the Diary of One Not Born” and includes “Gimpel the Fool” in its anthology, “More Stories in the Modern Manner.” In 1955, he serialises his memoir of his Warsaw childhood, later translated as, “In my Father’s Court,” in Forverts over seven months and he makes his first visit to Israel. His story, “The Wife Killer,” is published in the Jewish American magazine, “Midstream”.
In 1957, his first book of stories in English appears, “Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories.” And he has stories which appear in Commentary, and “Shadows On the Hudson” is published in Yiddish twice a week in Forverts. “The Magician of Lublin” is published in English in 1960 and “The Spinoza of Market Street,” his second book of stories, is published in America in '61 and published in the UK in '62. And stories start to appear in mass circulation American magazines, such as “Mademoiselle,” “Esquire” and “GQ.”
So in that space of eight years, suddenly he has been transformed from an obscure Yiddish writer who really is not known at all outside the Yiddish speaking readership in New York, and specifically of Forverts literary periodical. And suddenly from that he is appearing in well-known American literary publications like Partisan Review and Commentary, who were both, which were both really very eminent in, in the 1950s, to magazines such as Mademoiselle, Esquire and GQ. And in nineteen sixty-four, his third collection of short stories is published.
He’s now with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the leading most prestigious American publishers who later published Philip Roth and Susan Sontag. And he had fiction published in Harper’s, Vogue and the Saturday Evening Post. And he wrote an appreciation of Shalom Aleichem for the New York Times. And in 1965, he’s reviewed for the first time, the New York Review of books by Ted Hughes in an article called, “The Genius of Isaac Bashevis Singer.” And then the year after that, “The Selected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” edited by Irving Howe are published.
So really during just barely over a decade, he has become one of the major writers in America and certainly on the east coast of America. And then of course in 1978 comes the ultimate accolade, he wins the Nobel Prize. And as he says in his speech, the Nobel Lecture in 1978, “The high honour bestowed upon me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language. A language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics; a language that was despised by both Gentiles and by emancipated Jews.
There are some,” he concludes, “who call Yiddish a dead language. But so is Hebrew called for 2000 years. Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and cabalists, rich in humour and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all. The idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity.”
And then in the year after that, the first biography comes out and the first film based on a Singer story, “The Magician of Lublin,” directed by Menahem Golan. And his collected stories are published in 1982, and “Yentl,” the final accolade, “Yentl” with Barbara Streisand, Mandy Patinkin, and Amy Irving comes out in 1983. And that is really the moment at which he has become, the Nobel Prize and “Yentl” with Barbara Streisand. Those are the two moments that have really sealed his reputation, And he died on July the 24th of 1991, buried at the Beth El Cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey. And new stories have continued to come out.
Jewish Renaissance just published the previously untranslated story “Trio” just earlier this year in January, and then in 2004 came another major accolade that Bashevis Singer’s collected stories were published by the Library of America in three volumes. That’s something like two and a half thousand pages of very, very single space small print. And the three volumes are called, “Gimpel The Fool to The Letter Writer,” “A Friend of Kafka to Passions,” “One Night in Brazil to the Death of Methuselah.” And accompanying this, was something called, “Isaac Bashevis Singer, an Album,” also published by the Library of America, a book of photographs of Singer and his world and tributes by Jonathan Safran Foer, Cynthia Ozick and Roger Giroux and Francine Prose; leading figures.
And so the real turning points, I would say, in Singer’s career are coming to Warsaw, becoming a central figure in the Warsaw avant garde, literally seen between the walls, leaving Warsaw after just over a decade to rejoin his brother Israel Joshua in New York in the mid 1930s, the deaths of all the surviving members of his family between 1944 and the mid 1950s, the translation of the story “Gimpel The Fool” by Saul Bellow, its publication in the major literary publication, Partisan Review, and also I should add again those two very important essays in 1943, where he reflects on the situation of Yiddish.
And it is interesting, Bellow, as I said, did not respect Singer, did not like him as a person. Calling him a “Ganef” was an interesting choice of words. For Bellow, Singer was too sentimental, like Chagall, and like Zero Mostel and “Fiddler on the Roof.” He belonged to a sentimental and ultimately phoney Yiddish culture or evocation of Yiddish culture, which Bellow had no time for. Roth, I wouldn’t say liked Singer, but it’s very interesting, if you read this interview in the collection “Shop Talk,” where he’s primarily asking about Bruno Schultz, who was a Jewish writer, who wrote, crucially wrote in Polish, not in Yiddish, and who was murdered during the Holocaust by a Nazi officer who just shot him in the street.
And Roth became very interested in Bruno Schultz and he wanted to ask Singer about the Warsaw and Polish literary scene, which was where Schultz had really grown up and where Isaac Bashevis Singer had also grown up. And it was interesting that Singer had taken a very different path and was very interested in the question of why would Schultz have written in Polish when Singer and his brother and indeed his sister had all written and published in Yiddish.
And there was also, incidentally I should mention, a famous and wonderful short story by Cynthia Ozick, who is a key figure in the whole, in all the literary debates about Yiddish writing in America. And it’s called “Envy, or Yiddish in America.” And it is all about, it’s based on Singer and it is all about a Yiddish writer, Edelshtein, who is desperate to become famous. And there is one figure who is based on Singer, who is famous, and all the other Yiddish writers in the, it’s more a novella really than a short story.
All envy the Singer figure. They all want to be translated, they all want to know how to become famous like the Singer figure. And of course the sad truth is, that none of them were, and it’s an interesting question about 1940s, 1950s, 1960s Jewish Yiddish writing and culture in general about who became famous and who didn’t. And why they didn’t. And very often we focus on who became famous, Pinter, Arnold Wesker briefly, and in America, of course Arthur Miller, Bellow, Roth, Malamud, although Malamud is probably less well known now to younger readers, I would imagine, than the others. Mailer, Heller, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and what choices allow them to become the sort of famous, well-known writers, and why it was easier for Jewish American writers to become better known than it was for Jewish British writers during, or playwrights or artists during the 1950s and sixties.
So these are all sort of large and interesting questions, I think. And certainly if you have any questions about those or anything else about Singer, I’d be happy to do my best to answer them and I’ll open up your questions.
Q: “Where in Poland was he born?” Says Sonia A: Now, Zinnya I think might be your name? I do apologise if I’ve mispronounced your surname, but Sonia, so he was born in a small town in Northeastern Poland. And really, he spent his, I would say Sonia, that he spends his life in Poland, moving between small shtetls where his father had a job as a rabbi, and Warsaw, and particularly literary Warsaw where he moves in 23, so till the mid thirties and where his brother was. So he sort of follows his brother to Warsaw and then he follows him to New York.
And perhaps it’s that sort of moment during the First World War, when his mother and his younger brother Moishe and he moved to this small town which had been his mother’s hometown, And that was his first encounter, really, with the world of the shtetl, the world of the small, traditional, religious Jewish community that basically became his subject in New York of all places. That’s what he wrote about. Or, that’s what he became famous for writing about. So, it was Northeastern Poland, Northeastern, small-town Poland.
And Romaine writes, “Singer’s book 'Shadows Across the Hudson,’ was translated by the South African professor Joseph Sherman. This book of is about Jews in postwar New York.” That’s absolutely true and he did write about Jews in post-war New York as well. And that was published posthumously. And I think it was, I think it is nevertheless fair to say that the stories and the books that really made his name were the ones based in these small towns, in rural Poland, in a world that was vanishing or had vanished after he had, when he came to write these stories. And that perhaps adds to the pathos and I think it is absolutely crucial, the context in which they were received and became popular, was a moment when that kind of world of Yiddish kite suddenly began to appeal to a younger generation, which absolutely was not the case when he arrived in New York in the 1930s, or during the 1940s, or during the 1950s.
There was none of that culture, none of that interest in Klezmer music, in certain kinds of Jewish food, in learning Yiddish, in going to the old Jewish neighbourhoods of Central-Eastern European cities, Not least of course because it was so difficult to go to these places. You can now fly very cheaply, well, after Covid finally recedes, you’ll be able to fly again very cheaply to cities like Krakow and go and visit the Old Jewish District. And that became a real tourism centre after “Schindler’s List” in particular. So the combination of the new fascination with the Holocaust, from the 1980s and nineties onwards, and the fascination with the old Yiddish culture of East Eastern Europe, those gave Singer a kind of audience that he couldn’t possibly have imagined, as a young writer when he was setting off.
Monty says, “I.B Singer gave his Nobel prize acceptance speech in Yiddish. Months later, the BBC asked if he is surprised and happy to have won the Nobel Prize, his reply, ‘How long can I be surprised? How long can I be happy?’” Yes, it was also, it was much debated. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978 and it was much debated whether, a few years earlier, whether he and Bellow should be jointly awarded the prize. Bellow beat him to it. Roth, of course, famously was never awarded the Nobel Prize. If you are remotely interested in either of the two huge biographies that have just come out about Philip Roth, one of them, well both of them, but especially the Blake Bailey biography spend an an awful lot of time musing about why Roth wasn’t awarded the Nobel Prize.
There was a famous line, when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize, and by then it was quite clear that Roth was never going to be awarded the Nobel Prize, when Bob Dylan was, Roth famously said, “Why not Peter, Paul or Mary?” Which showed his contempt, really, and I think it was Cynthia Ozick when, what’s it called? “Sabbath’s story”? The novel about Mickey Sabbath, when that was published, she said, she wrote, now this really, this is the moment when finally the Nobel Committee in Sweden should get their act together and give him the prize. But they never did, they absolutely hated him. So sorry, let me just find, but you’re absolutely right, Monty. It was an extraordinary moment for an old man writing in a language, I mean, no one else has won the Nobel Prize writing in a language that really, was read by so few people by then. So let me see if I can just, Judi, I wonder if you’d be kind enough to help me get onto the next page.
[Judi] What’s happening? Where, I dunno where you’ve read, because the first question was from Sonia saying, “Where in Poland was he born?”
[David] That’s right. And I’ve read the first page, which is the first four.
[Judi] Okay, so you should just be able to go down a few, there’s a little grey bar on the side, which you can just drag down to get to the next.
Ah, okay, hang on. Where’s that going? No, I’ve lost that. It was there a moment ago and is not,
[Judi] Where did you get to
[David] Oh, there we go. OK. Right. Romaine says, “‘Shadows across the Hudson’ was written as a series for Forverts, the Yiddish newspaper. That is absolutely true and most of Singers fiction actually appeared initially in that Yiddish newspaper. And Sorelly writes, ”‘Shadows on the Hudson’ is set in New York City in the late 1940s and details the intertwined lives of a circle of prosperous Jewish refugees, from gloomy upper West side apartments to the pastel,“ perhaps, no, to the pastel. That’s right, "Yiddish Resorts of Miami. Singer covers the territory of America during the aftermath of the Holocaust in this impressive, expansive novel.” Thank you very much for that excellent summary.
And Fanny Bernstein writes, “My sister and I had the privilege to sit in Stockholm’s Academica agenda, when Bashevis Singer received the Nobel Prize for literature. When he read a short paragraph in Yiddish, saying he knew nobody would understand, but he wanted the public to listen to the sound of the Yiddish language. We laughed, of course. Afterwards, we met him for a few minutes and a second time at an event organised by the local Jewish community. Will never forget his speech and jokes.” Well that is wonderful to have been there for that.
And Monty says, “Bellow was a nasty piece of work.” Well, okay, I think that, let’s leave the personal side aside for a moment. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, but I think he was not the only person to feel that there was, Bellow was not the only person to feel, that there was a sentimental and possibly exploitative side to Singers nostalgia for that vanished world. But then, of course, Bellow and Roth both came really under attack in the 1980s and nineties from a younger generation of Jewish American writers, like Rebecca Goldstein, like Nathan Englander, like Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, who like Steve Stern, who were more interested in their Jewish roots and felt that Bellow and Roth were insufficiently interested in their Jewish roots, either in Yiddish literature, or in the world of earlier Jewish American literature, or indeed of Eastern Europe.
And it’s no coincidence at all that Jonathan Safran Foer’s first breakthrough novel, “Everything is Illuminated,” is about a young American who goes to the Old Pale to find out the mysteries of his family’s past. And it’s no coincidence that Nathan Englander’s first breakthrough book is a book of short stories, which I’ve read from the first story about the murder of the Yiddish poets in 1952. They were looking for what they felt was a more authentic kind of Jewish literature and a more authentic kind of Jewish life and experience. And I think they felt very strongly, and this really is manifest in their work, in Nicole Krauss’ two major novels, in Jonathan Safran Foer’s two major novels, in Englander’s best known work. You know, I think they really felt that this, that they had grown up in, at a time when there were no great historical dramas of the kind that some of the East European writers had grown up with, and the Singer himself had grown up with.
Q: Now, Rodney Stanger, I hope, again, I hope I’ve pronounced your surname correctly, Rodney, asked, “Did Bellow express if Singer was helpful to him as a writer? It sounds like Singer offered a link for modern Jewish writers with the past. Wonder if they acknowledged that.” A: Well, no, they didn’t acknowledge it. And the truth is the past that, Bellow was interested in the past and Roth was very interested in the past, but they were interested in the Jewish-American past. They were not really interested, by and large, in the world of Jewish East Europe. So Bellow was very interested in the world of the tenements of Chicago and New York. And Roth was very interested in Newark, New Jersey where he’d grown up and in the world of the suburbs around Newark. And that, they felt, was their world and that was the past they were interested in. And they didn’t really think that Singer had anything to offer to them. I think it’s fair to say. And I’m sure there was also, I think I said this a little bit in my talk the other day about Yiddish writing, that after the war, that there was a sort of big issue between a lot of Jewish American writers as to who was more authentically Jewish than whom. And Bellow did speak Yiddish, and could read Yiddish and could translate Singer. And he, and that generation of Jewish literary critics that included Alfred Kazin, and, not, definitely not Lionel Trilling, because he certainly couldn’t read Yiddish, Irving Howe, that they grew up speaking Yiddish and they could read Yiddish and for them Yiddish literature was very important and their Jewishness was very important. And in a way that it wasn’t really for Norman Mailer or Joseph Heller or Susan Sontag, although they were all Jewish.
So I think there was a real problem. Singer sort of posed a problem that I’m not sure they entirely, that people like Bellow and Roth and Malamud, I’m not sure came clean about. So, and there was competition, who would win the Nobel Prize? Bellow won it, Singer won it. Malamud never did, Roth never did. Yes, Roth never did. You know, so this was, this was competition, not just for big prizes, but also for who would be remembered by posterity, who mattered, who were the big guys, who were the big guys on the block. These were all very important questions for these people. They were very competitive and they talked about this and wrote about this in their letters endlessly. And it’s one of the most interesting parts of the new biographies of Philip Roth and of Saul Bellow.
Now, sorry, let me just see if I can find, Paula S: “Please comment on his brother I.J Singer. So different and yet so important.” And well, indeed, very different and so important. And right from the beginning, right from when he was about 18, Israel Joshua really fell out with his parents over their strict religious orthodoxy. He was fascinated by the Soviet Union, this was just immediately after the revolution obviously, he spent three years in the Soviet Union. He then went to early 1920s Warsaw. And you know, if you were a betting person, you would’ve put your money on I.J. Singer, not his nebbish-er brother who was more interested in continental writing like Dostoevsky and Knut Hamsun and Maupassant. And Israel Singer, well, we don’t know. We can’t even speculate what would’ve happened if he hadn’t died of a heart attack at 51 in 1944. And he never managed to make the breakthrough. He was writing for Forverts, as was his younger brother. His younger brother, Isaac Bashevis, looked up to Israel Joshua hugely. He dedicated two of his novels to him. He was an enormously important person in his life.
And it seems as if their father was a very difficult, stern, strict man who neither, Israel Joshua and indeed Esther found him unbearable and in the end, both left Poland to get away from him. And Esther to Antwerp and then to London, and Israel to the Soviet Union, and then after Warsaw to New York. And they found him very, very difficult. And I think Isaac Bashevis, therefore, saw in Israel Joshua kind of father figure that he desperately needed, and also a very eminent and distinguished writer, who opened the path for Isaac Bashevis, first in Warsaw and then in New York. That was one of the main reasons he went to New York, was to be with his brother. And it’s interesting that it’s after his brother’s death that he starts to find his own path, so to speak. And he manages during that decade, between the 1953 with the translation of “Gimpel the Fool” and the early sixties, he manages in that decade to break through into the mainstream in a way that Israel Joshua never did. The very good British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair wrote his PhD at the University of East Anglia on the three literary Singers; Israel Joshua, Isaac Bashevis, and on Esther Singer, then Kreitman. And it is a sort of fascinating relationship between the three. Now,
[Trudy] David?
[David] Yes?
David, can we just take two more questions because we
[David] Absolutely!
Are on again at half past seven. Thank you.
Of course, absolutely.
Cheryl, “I grew up in the Bellmore on West 86th Street on the Upper West side. Zero Mostel lived in the building, but moved soon after we moved in. And I.B. Singer definitely lived,” yes he did, “in there in the late sixties, seventies. I would see him walking the courtyard at night and he did not want to be bothered. If I said hello he was not happy to respond.” Well, I’m sorry he was not happy to respond, but a wonderful building to live in for both of you.
Justin Schneider, final question.
Q: “What is the future of Yiddish, outside of the Ultra-Orthodox communities?” A: That is a really, really good question. At the moment I would have to say I don’t think it’s in great shape, the future of Yiddish. It really went through a revive in the eighties, nineties. But I think at the moment, outside of certain wonderful literary archives and Yiddish centres in America, and of course, as you say, in the Ultra-Orthodox communities in Brooklyn and in Stanford Hill and in Macher, it really is not in great shape. That revival that happened in the eighties and nineties seems to have gone downhill. I can’t account for that and perhaps we can return to that another time.
So my apologies for holding you all up. I know Trudy will be speaking to you all very shortly at 7:30 about Israeli, and that will be a wonderful treat for everybody.
David, let me thank you for an incredible trilogy and of course we’ll be asking you to come back later on with more fabulous lectures. So David, thank you. You can see from the response how much everyone’s got out of it, so.
Thank you so much, Trudy.
[Trudy] Enjoy your evening.
And you and you, and thank you all for all your fascinating questions.
[Trudy] Bye.
[Judi] Thank you everybody, see you all later. Bye-bye.