I Like Ike

The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer Volume II: A Friend of Kafka to Passions.  Library of America.  856 pp. *****

Back in the days when Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories appeared in the New Yorker, I never missed one.  It was a thrill to read the work of a man who wrote so vividly, who seemed at home in the ancient as well as the modern world, and who wrote about demons, ghosts, and dybbuks as readily as he wrote about human beings.  I’d never come across another writer like him, and sought out his novels too, but there was something special about the stories.

I actually met the man, in the late seventies or early eighties.  I was writing my first novels and working part time at the Duke Chemistry Library; I had to take vacation time to go see him, and had to get the work done, so I took just an hour.  He’d appeared in Page Auditorium the evening before, and I’d been there for that.  When I got to the old Gothic Bookshop—which was a smallish bookstore—the place was packed, and I faced an important question: would he set up in the back or the front of the store?  If I chose wrong I’d never have time to get my books signed, though I would at least see the man.  For once in my life[1] I chose correctly, and was maybe tenth in line.  There sat the man himself, dressed in his characteristic suit and tie.  I handed him one book and said, “This is for Beth,” my first wife, who was also a big fan.  Then I handed him another.  “This is for David.”  He signed it and said, “Thank you, David.”[2]

It’s a rather different experience reading him in these Library of America volumes.  The three LOA volumes include ten separate volumes of stories plus some uncollected ones, 2544 total pages.  I began with the very first volume, Gimpel the Fool and other stories, then moved to Volume 2 of the LOA set, which contains A Crown of Feathers, which I’d always thought of as my favorite Singer story.  Not sure I would say that now; there are too many candidates.  But the feeling of reading him in volume like this (and I’ve read only four full books of stories, perhaps 1,000 total pages) is to realize that he had the most fertile imagination of any writer I can think of.  It was as if he could meet a person briefly, or see him on the street, and immediately spin out a story.  The writing is uniformly vivid and intense.  It rarely falters.

I knew a little of the man’s life, but as usual the Library of America chronology fills in the gaps.  Singer was the son of a Hasidic rabbi in Poland, and grew up in a small town, along with a brother and sister who also became writers.  I.B. studied briefly to be a rabbi, but neither son fully accepted the faith in which they were raised; they both began to read more worldly writers and to write themselves.  Israel Joshua, his brother, made his way to America first, and published several huge multi-generational novels.  He also became associated with the Jewish Daily Forward in New York.  At some point he let his brother know that, if he could get to the United States, he could get him work at the Forward, and that was enough to make Singer want to leave Poland, where his father had moved to an even smaller town where the people were even more rigid about religious practice.

What I’d always heard in the past was that, when he first got to the U.S., Singer felt so disoriented and ripped from his roots that he couldn’t write for seven years, though he’d been a boy wonder in Poland, already publishing stories in his twenties and even writing a first novel, Satan in Goray.  He also worried about writing in Yiddish, which in his new country seemed to be a dying language, though of course it was very much alive at the Forward, and in Coney Island, where he came to live.  But it doesn’t seem that Singer wrote nothing, only that he stopped writing fiction.  He had several different careers at the Forward, one as a reviewer of books and plays (he also did a fair amount of translating through the years), one as a kind of self-help writer, on subjects like How to Overcome Shyness (a condition which he himself suffered from), and as a fiction writer.  The fiction lagged for a number of years, but he did the other kinds of writing, under different pseudonyms.

In 1940, when he was 36, he married an older divorced woman named Alma Wasserman.  She found work as a buyer in various department stores, and for years was the primary support of the family.  His marriage may have stimulated his fictional gene, but another important marker in his life was Israel Joshua’s death of a heart attack in 1944.  Singer seemed to have lived in the shadow of his older brother, and flourished after he died.  In 1945 he published the first of the stories that would make him famous, Gimpel the Fool.

Singer was not a traditional man of faith, but it hardly seems correct to say he was not religious.  He described his religion as “private mysticism,” which didn’t accept a particular faith but also didn’t reject anything.  He seems as comfortable writing about 18^th century rabbis in Eastern Europe as about 20^th century Jews in New York; the two worlds were completely alive for him.  The way he’d lived in Poland was centuries old.

If you pick up the volume A Crown of Feathers—which won the National Book Award in 1974 (along with, of all things, Gravity’s Rainbow)—you see the two sides of Singer’s art immediately.  The title story, which opens the volume, tells the story of a young woman in Poland named Akhsa who is much sought after but cannot make up her mind about various suitors.  Her grandmother encouraged her to be picky—“She would look at a boy proposed by the marriage brokers and say, ‘He has the shoulders of a fool,’ or, ‘He has the narrow forehead of an ignoramus’”—but the grandmother eventually dies, though she continues to make her opinions known posthumously.  Akhsa turns away a Jewish man at the altar, shaming her grandfather, eventually converts to Christianity and marries another man, then repents, goes back to her old religion, and seeks out her original suitor.  The whole time she is haunted by the spirits of her dead grandparents, whose wishes continue to conflict.  I don’t mean that she thinks about these people.  They actually appear to her.

“A Day in Coney Island” tells the story of a young writer—guess who—as he is trying to make his way in this country.  He too has various romantic conundrums; women constantly fall for him, though the reader can’t help picturing the bald and rather cadaverous looking young I.B. Singer.  He’s worried about money, about visa problems, but the community in Coney Island treats him like a prince, despite the fact that he’s months behind in his rent.  He finds that the Forward has accepted a piece he wrote—the $300 fee ends all his financial woes (those were the days)—and suddenly everything seems to go his way: change pours out of the pay phone he used, the cafeteria manager won’t accept his money for lunch; the woman he’s having a secret affair with shows up at the cafeteria.  Coney Island seems as haunted as 19^th century Poland.

People who knew Singer and said that the man wrote constantly (as he must have), even though he also found time to walk miles every day, feed pigeons in New York, hang out in cafeterias, which he seemed to love, and help with the translating that moved his stories from the Forward—where they always appeared first—to the New Yorker, where they found fame and eventually earned him a Nobel Prize.  His ultimate religious practice, I would say, was writing itself.  That was a faith he never lost.

[1] After all the times I’d chosen the wrong line at the A&P.

[2] Singer was one of two people I met who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  I’m accepting guesses as to who the other one was.