I CAN IMAGINE HIM SITTING IN HIS SMALL STUDY PORING OVER short stories and demons, intent on observing how rational calculations can be upset by the unpredictable details of life. Isaac Bashevis Singer would have celebrated his 100th birthday in July 2004, no doubt resembling a venerable Old Testament prophet, the kind of figure he revered, even if they could make no sense of life or find any satisfaction in a partial truth. Singer, meanwhile, seemed in his later years to have become less of a prophet and more like one of his benevolent and terrible demons, with pointed ears, a Mephistophelean smile, bald pate and sharp, beady eyes.
One of his assistants once said that she had never seen his shadow and was certain therefore that he had metamorphosed into a literary demon. Despite the delirious nature of this assertion, I do not think Singer ever received a greater compliment. In his lifetime Isaac Bashevis Singer constructed a narrative opera in the vanished – or rather exterminated – language of Yiddish. A mélange of Hebrew, Polish and German, capable of complicated sounds and hybrid meanings, Yiddish is the language of exile composed of the phonemes of the Diaspora. Theodor Herzl, a founder of the Zionist movement, imagined an Israel where all languages could be spoken, since all of them belonged to the Hebrew patrimony – except for Yiddish, which Herzl considered the language of the ghetto, of marginality, a language created to enable the excluded to communicate. In short, a grammar of shame. For Singer – and for huge numbers of Jews in exile – it was not like that at all.
He left for the United States in 1935 to escape Nazi persecution, and thereafter chose not to write in English but in Yiddish, opting for the language of the shtetl, the villages of Jews in Eastern Europe. His choice was not determined by a love for the past – because he had been suckled on Yiddish – nor did he keep in touch with his Polish homeland (in fact, he never wanted to see it again). Singer was interested in using the dregs of a civilization condemned to constant exile, a language capable of communicating the entire baggage of the Talmud and holy texts through popular speech. He wanted to use the language of cultivated plebeians who consulted with God, the language of the rabbis of small Polish, Romanian and Hungarian towns. Yiddish gave Singer access to the ironic mythology of the Hasidic community, while also allowing him to create an entirely new one. His pages are a florilegium of images and stories transformed from the Hebrew tradition. The Torah and Zohar, for him, were not just holy texts and religious references but symbolic labyrinths he used to interpret the trials of daily life. Singer managed to create an anarchic teleology where the relationship with God and the Law is defined by breach, error, heresy and continual reflection, leading man to an impossible message, an invisible key, the essence of truth.
Judaism is more than a faith. It is – as the author himself states – “a compromise between God and demons”, and the novel Satan in Goray is a unique expession of it and a masterpiece.
The novel tells of an historic event that took place in seventeenth-century Poland when the Jewish community was turned upside down by the fiery words of Sabbatai Zevi, a Messianic prophet. After all the persecutions, the exile, misery, torture and pogroms, Sabbatai Zevi proclaimed the imminent arrival of absolute goodness to the Jewish people – the Messiah redeemer. “Everyone wholeheartedly prepared to follow the Messiah, abandoning their homes in exile for the utopia of the Land of Israel.” Singer writes about the small and tough little town of Goray, and the largest and most fascinating heresy that affected millions of Jews from Eastern Europe and the Near East. According to Sabbatai Zevi, you had to indulge in the basest human instincts: you had to transgress, spit on the sacred texts, reject the Talmudic precepts, refuse all authority, loosen the knot of the family, reject your children, repudiate your faith, drive yourself into the most abject squalor possible – so that a new world could be unleashed from the abyss, a world that would be reconciled and pure. Perfection would rise out of the truly abominable. Sabbatai Zevi condoned a period of errors in order to precipitate a period of justice and total happiness. Soon, however, people discovered that Sabbatai Zevi was a false Messiah. He did not have the Messiah within him, nor was he able to lead the Jews to liberation. He betrayed himself and his delirious dream of redemption.
Singer was fascinated by the false Messiah; even though he himself was the kind of intellectual who abhorred subversion, he was well aware of the positive and useful power of infraction on the Law. He knew that a code existed so that it could be broken, and thanks to this dialectic it was possible constantly to create and eviscerate the world.
Satan in Goray was written while Singer was still in Poland. It feels like an extra chapter of the Bible that has been hidden away by the last custodian of an unconfessable truth. Even though Sabbatai Zevi was not a real Messiah, those who followed him continued to pursue the dream of redemption, because even greater than the Creator is the notion of creation itself.
Singer wrote in Shadows on the Hudson, “God needs the help of human beings to bring the cosmic drama to a beneficial ending.” Literature thus becomes a divine instrument, capable of linking together worlds within the only world we can know, which (even without exploring Leibniz) we recognize as the world we are forced to inhabit. Gimpel, the legendary character in the story “Gimpel the Fool”, recognizes that “this world beyond is altogether imaginary, alright, but it is a close relative of the real one.” And precisely because of this relationship, the only thing to do is consider the force of imagination as a founding force of reality.
The story of Gimpel is quite simple. When he was a child, people played tricks on him. His friends from school, townspeople, adults and children alike – everyone teased Gimpel for being gullible, and that’s how he ended up with the nickname “Fool”. Gimpel is hoodwinked not because he is stupid, but because he believes that “everything is possible, as it is written in the Sayings of the Fathers”. Even as an adult he is duped: he is tricked into marrying the most dishonest woman in town, who pretends to love him but then says she doesn’t. In the meantime, she gives birth to six children fathered by other men. But Gimpel does not harbour any ill will towards her – he loves his wife, the children that are not his, and his neighbours. He helps those who betray him. The Rabbi even gives him some advice: “It is written: it is better to be stupid your whole life than evil for an hour.”
But temptation finds its way into even the best of hearts. Gimpel, a baker, is tricked by the Spirit of Evil, who tells him there is no God in the world beyond, only “a deep bog”. The Spirit of Evil tells Gimpel to get his own back on everyone for all the jokes he has had to put up with. He is to mix, instead of water, a bucket of his urine which he has collected over the course of a day into the flour. Gimpel suffers a moment of weakness and makes the foul bread, but immediately afterwards has doubts. He buries the bread, abandons everything and, in order to make amends, decides to become a mendicant and wander from town to town telling stories. This is how he prepares for death. “No doubt, the world beyond is entirely imaginary, but once it is removed from the real world, when the time comes, I will go with joy.” Gimpel says yes to life.
Gimpel the Fool seems to be Isaac Bashevis Singer’s reponse to Melville’s Bartleby or Coetzee’s Michael K. In these tales the “no” men are beaten by the “yes” idiot. The schlemiel (which means “fool” in Yiddish) is the one who rejects shrewdness and calculation and who lives by being who he is. And so, at the cost of being insulted, Gimpel became a paladin. A “no” would have been a vote for silence. And, for Singer, silence is the worst option. It is a prison, and it does not do justice to the sublime versatility and the filthiness of being in the world.
Singer did not follow Adorno’s maxim, according to which after Auschwitz there is no room for poetry. Nor did he approve of Paul Celan’s suicidal leap into the Seine. Nor did he believe, as did Primo Levi, that if there was Auschwitz then there cannot be a God. Even though he lost his mother and his younger brother to the Holocaust, Singer cultivated the human voice as a form of resistance to hatred, which (in keeping with Spinoza) he believes incapable of generating anything other than good.
In Singer’s novels, this is how the Yiddish world continues to live on despite being erased by the long night of the Shoah. The writer always had difficulty making reference to his own personal family tragedy. He kept everything inside him like an ulcer, with no hope of healing.
The short story “The Manuscript” shows what literature can mean to people in desperate times. A group of Jews who had lived in cities now erased by bombs and are awaiting deportation ask Menashe to organize a literary debate, because “that’s the way people are: a few moments before dying they have all the desires of the living”.
In Singer’s writing, literature is a kind of howl. He does not write about deportation and extermination to show the dark side of man. He knows what the human beast is and he represents it touchingly through the creation of two demons: Shidda and Kuziba pray with all their might for protection from the monster that is man.
When you read Singer, you end up getting attached to the demons. As Guiseppe Pontiggia wrote, “We might not believe in sprites, little people or demons, but we believe in Singer’s dybbuks.” Little people and demons are the product of an imagination that reality produces when nothing is as it seems. Demons are neither rational rebels nor cultivators of the abominable. They are different. They come from Yiddish culture and are considered evil because they are interested in forging a new path, one that is opposed to the Law. Sometimes they play tragic jokes, as in the story “The Black Marriage”, where an innocent daughter of a Rabbi gives birth to the son of a demon. There was no crime. No-one needed to be punished. And no prayer can save her. No gesture can justify the act or comfort the young mother. Here again, the imaginative powers of humans to love in spite of everything allows people to find meaning in tragedy by transforming it into a sweeter form of existence. Demons also always refer to children: “It’s necessary to remind them from time to time that there are still mysterious forces at work in the universe,” a character says in “In the Court of My Father”. Demons are an emblem of an unchartable world without poles, a world where there is no backwards or forwards. One must live in its chaos, where every law is necessary and fair, as well as arbitrary and superfluous. The chaotic circularity is reflected in the mirror that apparently only shows what is in front of it. This mirror represents the privileged instrument of demons to make themselves invisible: “Everything that is hidden gets revealed. All secrets long to be discovered. All loves pine to be betrayed. All that is sacred must be profaned.”
Singer considered himself a passionate believer, yet he was also fascinated by rebellion. In fact, the function of the rabbi (the career Singer was pushed towards as a young boy) is to raise doubts about all the Laws until they are keenly observed. In the story “The Butcher”, for instance, Yoine Meir is chosen by his community to slaughter the animals that are to be eaten. Poor Meir is obsessed with the guts of the animals, the look in the eyes of the calves, the birds’ feathers – and even if the Torah says, “You cannot be more merciful than God,” he wants to be and he claims to be. He chooses to reject a God that makes animals suffer. If there is the possibility of love, there is also the possibility of heresy and sin. Singer’s characters are an essential part of everything: they all exist to the same degree, and when they are not inhabited by fear and religious submission, they can be elevated to interlocutors with God in a direct dialogue.
Singer was a diligent student of Spinoza and his Ethics. He particularly admired the Dutch philosopher for having endowed his pages with the fresh breeze of life and the possibility of error. Ethics, according to Singer, is a continual invitation to live life as an adventure, to confront the powers of reason and sense. Emblematic of this is his sublime short story “The Spinoza of Market Street”. In this story, Spinoza’s Ethics become standard procedure for the life of Doctor Fischelson, who “found comfort in thinking that he, though a man of no importance, being created of the mutable substances of the absolute infinite, was nonetheless a part of the cosmos and made of the same celestial bodies; as he was part of the Divinity, he knew that he could not altogether perish.” Fischelson, who spends his life studying the Ethics, considering it a sort of medication for rational and sombre perfection, loses all control one night because of the beautiful Dobbe the Black. His passions end up taking the place of the austere rationality that he had spent his life cultivating. “Forgive me, divine Spinoza. I have become a fool,” Fischelson says to himself. Sexuality is one of Singer’s constant obsessions. It is an explosive force, capable of nullifying all good intentions and resolutions and throwing every last rational plan into crisis.
Sex throws off those who believe that moral reasoning is capable of governing every aspect of life, including hormones and hunger. Yentl, a student at the Yeshiva, a secondary school for Talmudic studies, suddenly discovers sexual ambiguity in everything he sees and hears. He has an almost ungovernable desire to turn towards the only thing that his reason has not yet fully mastered: the passion of bodies. Yentl loses to sex, as do all of Singer’s men and women who attempt to arrest their susceptibility to the magic of amorous attraction, which is obviously not a force one can oppose. Claudio Magris once wrote, “With the impartiality of an epic poet, Singer reveals the whole range of amorous experiences, from conjugal idylls to nauseating laziness.” But sex and carnal passion also become untameable forces that manage to eternalize life against conceit and contrition. For Herman, the protagonist of the story “The Letter Writer”, “The idea of raising children seemed like an absurdity: why prolong the human tragedy?” Singer agreed with Herman and with Schopenhauer, the other philosopher besides Spinoza who guided his life as a writer and perhaps also as a man.
Singer knew, however, that the rational non-life cannot do battle with the diabolical folly of carnality. You can decide not to give life, but you cannot deny people the choice of living out their hell on Earth. You cannot deny them pain, anguish and misery. Passion and love do not follow a plan; the stories of Singer show that sexuality just happens without paying attention to what it will be and what it was. Baudelaire wrote: “The singular and supreme voluptuousness of love consists in its certainty to cause pain. And man and woman know from birth that in evil lies all voluptuousness.” The idea of existing, of being, the desire to drink from the well of life in a spasmodic search for an illusory meaning and for forgotten origins is characteristic of a man in exile.
Singer manages to make the Diaspora a major element in Jewish literary and human experience. Only from the damnation of the margins can one enter into the heart of the human condition. Questions about existence surface when there is no homeland, when there is no constitution or patriotism, when there is lawlessness. A tense dialogue with God makes the journey more interesting than the destination, since the destination represents the end of universality and of one’s thoughts, like a Job without a burden, or the way, when a dream actually comes true, it ends up being nothing more than a shadow of itself. The stories and the novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer follow in the wake of the human Diaspora as it wanders in search of an ultimate reconciliation and a utopia of happiness that exists only for as long as it is being sought, and that imagines seeing it in the infinite and concrete realm of thought.
The pig dreams of acorns, not pearls.