_The Mendele Review_: Yiddish Literature and Language (A Companion to _MENDELE_) ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 03.015 10 September 1999 Rosheshone Double Issue 1) Yiddish Matters: From the Editor (Leonard Prager) 2) Review Essay: What's the Corpus? Bashevis / Singer and the Search for His Work -- A Review of Five Recent Books (Joseph Sherman) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 10 September 1999 From: Leonard Prager Subject: Yiddish Matters -- The Bashevis Canon The radical divide between the Yiddish Bashevis and the English Singer has long been evident to many, though how the critical split would be treated by Bashevis/Singer scholars has been uncertain. At an international Bashevis conference at University College, University of London in 1993 -- continuing a theme raised earlier at a Yiddish conference at Oxford in 1979 -- several speakers stressed the need to define the Bashevis canon. Two of the authors whose books are reviewed in this issue of the TMR and many of those who took part in the recent Bashevis Singer conference in Austin, Texas, participated in that London conference. The Texas conference ably continued a line of investigation opened much earlier. 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: 10 September 1999 From: Joseph Sherman <071Jos@muse.arts.wits.ac.za> Subject: What's the Corpus? Bashevis / Singer and the Search for His Work -- A Review of Five Recent Books, Part One What's the Corpus? Bashevis / Singer and the Search for His Work: A Review of Five Recent Books, Part One by Joseph Sherman Lester Goran. _The Bright Streets of Surfside: The Memoir of a Friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer_. (Kent and London: Kent State University Press, 1994). xiv + 176, illus. Janet Hadda. _Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life_. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). x + 243, illus. Dvorah Telushkin. _Master of Dreams: A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer_. (New York: William Morrow, 1997). xiv + 350, illus. Agata Tuszynska. _Lost Landscapes: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland_. Translated from Polish by Madeline G. Levine. (New York: William Morrow, 1998). viii + 184. Israel Zamir. _Journey to My Father, Isaac Bashevis Singer_. Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav (New York: Arcade, 1995). x + 240, illus. Part One Sometimes there is value in pausing before reviewing important books. "Some books are to be tasted," says Francis Bacon, "others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested" ('On Studies', 1605). Taken together, the volumes reviewed here complement one another, and deserve reflection in one another's light. I am glad therefore not to have rushed from cursory glance to superficial remark. Between 1994 and 1998, five different books about the life of I. B. Singer have appeared: one a full-scale scholarly biography, three, in different ways, memoirs of personal relationships, and one a journey of discovery by a young Polish journalist. All offer valuable insights into the character of a writer who, for better or worse, in the most striking way, made normally indifferent general readers aware of the Yiddish language and the Jewish world that language expressed. In attempting to assess the significance of these books, the chief question must surely be: How do they help us to understand the work of this erratic writer, who continues to excite the same conflicting responses as much after his death as he did throughout his long life? What, in other words, is the value of biographies of literary figures? That we know so little about the life of Shakespeare is often bemoaned. Would a more scrupulous recording of the minutiae of his life add to our understanding of his work? The New Criticism, so popular in academia some forty years ago, rigorously denied that it would, insisting, with the monomania characteristic of doctrinaire schools of literary criticism, that the personal lives of writers were unimportant, and that their texts alone were the proper objects of study. Nowadays we are aware of the cramping narrowness of this approach, and value biographical information for its capacity to open wider literary insights. If we knew more about Shakespeare's life, particularly from accounts by his contemporaries, we could probably solve the vexed mystery of the Sonnets, for example. A book long celebrated as the greatest literary biography ever written is Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ (1791). Where does its merit lie? Surely not merely in faithfully recording Johnson's table-talk and eccentric habits. Its true worth is its capacity to set before us a three-dimensional living figure, all his imperfections on his head, who steadily articulates the supremely ethical tenets that everywhere inform Johnson's magisterial body of work. What Boswell does is to open a massive door into the great scholar's mind. Comparing the five books under review here, it is doubtful whether the Boswell treatment was quite what Singer had in mind for himself when he encouraged his devoted factotum Dvorah Menashe Telushkin: "It is good you are writing everything down. He did this, Bosvell [sic], for the famous Johnson. You vill [sic] write your memoirs one day." (Telushkin, p.2). The evidence all these books present is that as he aged, Singer grew obsessional about a definitive biography -- but one to be written by himself. Despite having published three volumes of what he termed "fictionalised autobiographies," despite having reworked the same tired old events of his early life into whining and wearisome novels like _The Certificate_ (posthumously published in English in 1992), he was convinced "that there was something of himself, a solitary Jamesian 'great, good place' where lay truths about himself that only he knew" (Goran, 163). In the end, however, as Goran came to believe from his bruising friendship, "[Singer] reached into what he thought was hidden and discovered nothing there. And he shrank from the spectacle of his golden city ruined and finally empty" (Goran, 165). The dominating question preoccupying serious scholars of Singer's work today was posed at a conference, held at the end of February 1999 at the University of Texas at Austin, where some twenty Yiddish scholars of Singer's work probed the relationship between "The Real Bashevis and His Creation -- I.B. Singer". This fundamental contradistinction is therefore a major concern of Janet Hadda's carefully researched "life." Hadda puts into clear perspective the irritatingly familiar rage of a considerable number of Yiddish writers against Bashevis. The veteran Yiddish journalist and publicist Heshl Klepfish [Heszel Klepfisz], indeed, is still fuming: "I never wrote about Singer. That's filth. ... Singer fantasizes. ... My father didn't commit all those filthy acts that religious Jews, even rabbis, do in Singer. ... My family were ... decent, worthy of respect ... not the types you find in Singer: degenerates, abnormal, sick people" (quoted in Tuszynska, 116-117). Dispassionately, Hadda identifies the need of some Yiddish writers and critics for a taxonomy of Yiddish writing, and the stubborn, wholly unqualified assertion that Bashevis's brother was a "better" writer. To contemporary eyes, those Yiddish critics who reviled Bashevis's work present the sad spectacle of a clique that is afraid to believe that all literature, in every language, is integrally part of world culture. >From the moment the English version of _The Family Moskat_ (1950) emerged modestly enough in American bookstores under the imprint of his brother's English publishers Alfred Knopf, the howls of outrage began. As Bashevis began attracting a growing body of readers among the non-Jewish majority, he was rejected by some of the leading voices of what was left of contemporary Yiddish writing. The final insult for the latter came when he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Chaim Grade spoke for the majority of them when he greeted the news with the lament that this recognition was "a great tragedy for the Jewish people" (Hadda, 172). At the same time, as Hadda is at pains to show, among the "goyim" I.B. Singer's public image evolved into an elfin figure from a vanished world, endowed with saintly virtue and possessed of mystical truths. He presented himself as a gentle old man feeding pigeons in New York's parks, a witty speaker at innumerable venues, and a becomingly modest recipient of dozens of honorary doctorates. His detractors denounced this image as a fabrication designed to curry favour with the uninformed and sensation-seeking. Singer's millions of fans, however, most of whom knew little of Yiddish literature and less about Jews, revered him as an icon. Information brought to light after his death has now compelled us to reassess this old conflict of views; to wonder whether, after all, there is more than a little truth in the contention that "[Bashevis] is a cynic above all, a very smart, very witty cynic. And he laughs at his readers. He doesn't respect them. But he knows how to give them what they are looking for" (quoted in Tuszynska, 154). How are we to get some idea of the "real" Bashevis, to understand what motivated his work in both Yiddish and English? How would such an understanding, if we could have it, aid in revaluing what he produced? Anecdotes about him, either favourable or unfavourable, are not much help unless we have some framework within which to place them. Janet Hadda's study admirably provides it. Her book received mixed reviews when it first appeared -- some I read bewailed the author's "psychobabble"; others detected a perverse "feminist" bias. Neither of these putative defects are even vaguely apparent to readers who approach her book with some knowledge of Bashevis/Singer's work, knowledge Hadda herself abundantly possesses. Furthermore, her qualifications and experience not only as an informed scholar of literature but also as a practising psychoanalyst give her a unique perspective from which to examine the driving forces behind a writer who was simultaneously a rigid political conservative and a non-observant Orthodox Jew, a tormented exile from his real home, Jewish Poland, and consequently a guilt-ridden survivor of the Holocaust, a hack journalist and a gifted teller of tales, a hater of American values and an opportunist with a shrewd eye on American chances, an author dependent upon translators for his commercial success yet resentful of all of them, a millionaire who remained demeaningly stingy. What are we to make of all this? Janet Hadda makes a great deal. Where Hadda's book is particularly persuasive is in its detailed probe of Bashevis's upbringing in an appallingly dysfunctional family. Hadda usefully -- though perhaps a little too uncritically -- draws on Bashevis's memoir _Di mishpokhe_ (serialized in _Forverts_ between 2 February 1982 and 4 February 1983 when Bashevis was nearly eighty years old), significantly never translated into English. Singer, of course, writes endlessly about himself, and is often at his most sterile, repetitive and boring when he does so. Among many other brazenly ignorant assertions about a modern literature he read little and understood less, Singer castigated Proust for the very solipsism in which he himself indulges to tedious excess, without any of the delicacy, subtlety or finesse of Proust. From his self- absorption, Proust produced a masterpiece; from his own, Singer produced mounds of material for the biographer seeking to understand why he wrote at all. And Hadda finds much that is revealing. The mismated parents of the four Singer children -- three of whom, in different ways, became distinguished writers -- created, through personal friction exacerbated by grinding poverty, a home environment that traumatized their children. As Hadda points out, "despite his attempt to emphasize the beauty of Krochmalna Street and its inhabitants, especially his father, Yitskhok was faced with the same issues that had occupied Israel Joshua and Hinde Esther in their recreations of the past. ... how to tolerate the pain and loneliness of parental neglect" (Hadda, p. 46). Bashevis spent a lifetime idealizing his parents, but his praises can now be seen both as expressions of guilt at having survived, and as weaving dreams about what might have been rather than recording what actually was. To this emotional conflict and its effect on Bashevis's oeuvre, Hadda gives deserved weight: "Over time, the stories assumed such power that [Singer] confused them with reality. ... [he] understood that his compulsion to write stemmed from misery" (Hadda, 66). In addition to anatomizing the parental burden Singer had to bear, Hadda convincingly identifies the two most formative influences on Bashevis's creativity. The first, with all its ambivalence, was that of his elder brother Israel Joshua, which Bashevis himself repeatedly acknowledged, especially after his brother's premature death in 1944. Hadda's study counterpoints Bashevis's fraternal encomiums with his intense sibling rivalry, stressing what Bashevis always denied: "In 1944, he experienced an artistic dream together with a personal nightmare: he got the upper hand in his struggle with the gigantic influence of his brother, but he did so literally over Israel Joshua's dead body" (Hadda, 108). We may now suspect that the posthumous praise he lavished on his brother's memory was also an act of expiation, called forth by another kind of guilt. The second major influence, however, is not widely recognized, and in pinpointing it Hadda makes a seminal contribution to our understanding of that area in which Bashevis's work achieved its greatest notoriety -- his portrayal of women. This was the turbulence of his sister Hinde Esther, a deeply disturbed woman as cruelly abandoned by her family in adult life as in childhood and adolescence. Suffering from what Hadda diagnoses as a "type of epilepsy known as partial complex seizures" (Hadda, 43), desperate for love in a family where neither parent was capable of offering it, Hinde Esther turned to her brothers, becoming "the source of warmth and affection for the rest of the family ... little Yitskhok vividly recalled his sister's uninhibited and passionate displays of feeling" (Hadda, 42). But her physical and psychosomatic illnesses caused violent mood swings, and her epileptic seizures were terrifying, so that "Yitskhok was ... raised in constant awareness of bizarre and unexplained behavior." This combination, Hadda persuasively concludes, "caused lifelong complications for Yitskhok in his associations with women: he forever oscillated between attraction and loathing, fascination and terror, cordiality and aloofness, friendship and rancor." (Hadda, 45). As proof of Hadda's assessment, we learn from another source that as late as 1981, during the fraudulent "classes" he gave at the University of Miami, Singer -- who always spoke so freely of his powers as a lover -- had to be moved from an informal discussion group to a more conventional classroom arrangement so that "he could be seated somewhat back from the awareness of pressing femininity round our long table that disturbed and provoked him" (Goran, 53). This discordance intensified with age, plunging to its rawest depths during the last fifteen years of his life, when Dvorah Menashe Telushkin came to work for him. The pain of this experience is the substance of Telushkin's memoir which, while often elegiac in tone, barely disguises the hurt she evidently continues to feel. In her opening chapter, a scene she sets in the Singer apartment she has helped to clear after Isaac's death, Telushkin utters the book's keynote protest: "Did you abandon everyone? ... Was this the theme of your life? The sole purpose? Are you happy now that you have managed to deceive every human being you ever touched?" (Telushkin, 12). This reproach can be levelled at every one of Singer's major characters, all of whom emerge from these new source materials as endless reworkings of Singer's own life. Perhaps that is why Singer kept on deriding Proust: not only to get a cheap laugh from the uninformed, but also as unconscious self-exposure. Singer stands revealed as a writer defined by the Holocaust, one who spiritually never left Poland, and whose abiding concern after 1945 was to memorialize a destroyed world. As a result, most of his major works after _Der sotn in goray_ (1935) can be read as fictionalised "yisker-bikher" ('memorial books'). His thematic range, as those who have read all his published work will readily testify, is extraordinarily narrow, moving from a brilliant recreation of a lost world to a hack retelling of what purport to be other survivors' stories indifferently transformed into what are at best anecdotes, at worst unstructured "mayses," poorly rendered into cliche-ridden English, and published only to underprop a talent seriously on the wane after 1970. That Singer was almost wholly ignorant of modern literature -- obvious from his deplorably shallow quips about Modernist masters like Joyce -- is testified to by Goran (p.49); his son Israel Zamir records that when his father was testing him out to see if he would do as a cheap Hebrew translator, Bashevis asked him if he had "read any Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Adam Mickiewicz, Knut Hamsun, Kafka" (Zamir, 100). This is basically where Singer's reading of European literature begins and ends, and even there we find interminable gibes that "Kafka was a genius, but one Kafka in a century is enough." Of other art forms Bashevis knew nothing and cared nothing; his cultural world is bleakly summed up as "[t]he hermetically sealed world of Isaac Singer -- complete and airless, no art or architecture in it, no room in it for anyone else's fiction or music or film ..." (Goran, 56). From such severe limitations Bashevis undoubtedly created some works of genius, but only the winnowing of time will properly determine which these are. For the time being, we must try to discover what exactly Bashevis did in fact write. To assist this search, these new sources give us a startling picture of Singer's view of translations, and the work of those translators and editors on whom his international accessibility, and hence his fame, so greatly depended. Since current scholarly re-evaluation of Singer's oeuvre centres on the relationship of Yitskhok Bashevis the Yiddish writer to the English author Isaac Bashevis Singer, this area repays examination in some detail. As early as 1967, only fifteen years after Singer had started attracting an English readership, his son records that he and his father went to New York's 92nd Street YMHA to hear a lecture by that year's Hebrew Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon. Singer's remark about Agnon, whose work he knew well, is highly revealing: "Too bad there aren't any translators so his books could be distributed widely" (Zamir, 118). Evidently this was not the fate Singer had in mind for his own work. Here Hadda's study again provides essential information. As is well known, Singer's most important introduction "to American readers who could appreciate him was the 1952 appearance, in the prestigious _Partisan Review_, of 'Gimpel the Fool,' masterfully translated by Saul Bellow" (Hadda, 130). Bellow, Hadda reveals, was initially reluctant to take on this task, but was pressed into it by Eliezer Greenberg, then collaborating with Irving Howe on their celebrated collection of Yiddish stories in English. Bellow's translation was a superb success -- a happy combination of the best talents of two Yiddish-speaking Jewish writers who both later won the Nobel Prize. This, it turns out, was precisely the trouble: "Long after the success of 'Gimpel,' when the two met at a social gathering, Bellow asked Bashevis why he had never been invited to translate additional stories. Bashevis replied that if the works were greeted with acclaim, 'they'll say it's you, not me.' ... Many years later, on the occasion of his Nobel award, Bashevis would stoop to mock Bellow, a fellow laureate and the very man who, although eleven years younger than Bashevis, had nonetheless managed to 'put him on the map' of English-language literary life" (Hadda, 130-131). Here is the clearest illustration of Singer's paranoid churlishness in respect of his translators. Privately he knew he depended on them, but publicly he was unwilling to concede them any significance. [end of Part One] _____________________________________________________ End of _The Mendele Review_ 03.015 Leonard Prager, editor Subscribers to _Mendele_ (see below) automatically receive _The Mendele Review_. Send "to subscribe" or change-of-status messages to: listproc@lists.yale.edu a. For a temporary stop: set mendele mail postpone b. To resume delivery: set mendele mail ack c. To subscribe: sub mendele first_name last_name d. To unsubscribe kholile: unsub mendele ****Getting back issues**** _The Mendele Review_ archives can be reached at: http://www2.trincoll.edu/~mendele/tmrarc.htm