Old Love

By YAEL GOLDSTEIN

Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka to Passions
By Isaac Bashevis Singer
Edited by Ilan Stavans
899 pages. Library of America. $35.

Whenever I pick up a book by an acknowledged literary master I ask myself the same question: what would I think if I found this in the slush pile? If these were the pages of an unpublished writer, submitted cold to a publishing house, would their merit leap out at me? Isaac Bashevis Singer always provokes this line of questioning in me with particular force. I have an awful suspicion that what I’d think as I read through Singer’s stories is that I loved them, but that my loving them was a personal quirk, the effect of some combination of my upbringing, my interests, my mood at the moment. In fact, even reading through this volume of his collected works, one of three put out by the Library of America to celebrate the centennial of a writer now wholly appropriated by American cultural pride, I still found a small voice in my head exclaiming, "Other people like this too?"

There’s a long tradition in this country of mistaking Singer for a slightly naïve story-weaver. Writing about Singer’s collection Short Friday in The New York Times, the reviewer Orville Prescott dismissively remarked that, "Those unfamiliar with the folklore of Polish Jews may find that the chief interest of some of these stories is anthropological." In a way, you might say that Singer is almost too good for his own good. The naturalness and transparency of the writing lulls us into thinking that he is functioning as a conduit for a lost world and lost people, more of a chronicler than an artist. Particularly because of the miracle of his dialogue, we get fooled into thinking that his voice is simply the voice of the time and place he's showing us, modulating slightly if the story takes place in the Old World or the New, but never calling attention to itself. To pull out just one of the innumerable examples of remarkable back-and-forth littering this volume: at the end of the story "Lost" the pseudo-Singer narrating the story suggests that the previous fiancé of a man’s missing wife was a demon, who has now reclaimed her. The man objects, “But he had an aunt in Poltava,” to which the pseudo-Singer replies, “A demon’s aunt is also a demon.”  

I think another reason I have a hard time internalizing that Singer is not just an idiosyncratic taste of mine is what I’m tempted to call the "grandma factor." Reading lines such as "True I had no valuable possessions that a robber might want, but New York was full of maniacs" (from "Shloimele") or “The supermarket itself was a place only the devil could have invented," (from "The Key"), it’s hard to believe I’m reading the work of a Nobel laureate and not a letter scrawled by someone in a housecoat. And though my grandmother could never have carried us from urination to Kant in three seamless sentences, Singer’s interweaving of the highest and lowest of human functions makes it hard not to think of him as a slightly embarrassing family member: “If I drink, I have to urinate. I have prostate trouble, and as it is I must get up several times during the night. In the dark, Kant’s categories no longer apply," he writes in "A Friend of Kafka." Then there is the strange looseness of many of Singer’s stories, which in its most extreme form—in stories like "The Primper" or "A Quotation from Klopstock"—can mean launching into a whole new narrative one paragraph before the end of the story. True, this looseness often has the almost supernatural quality of translating, ultimately, into an impression of even greater tightness, but it takes some reflection to realize this.

It is usually around the time that I (re)realize the crafted structure within the ramblings that I also (re)realize how foolish I’d been to think I was reading pleasant bubbe meises and anthropological detailing, when really I was being subtly manipulated by a monumental artist. Because, of course, all these voices of the past are Singer, transmitting his obsessions, his hopes, his subjective and twisted memories and inventions. Probably there was such a person as the shtetl layabout Meyer Eunuch, who pops up frequently in this volume, telling tales of the supernatural to a rapt childhood version of the author, and who Singer describes as one of those the Talmud calls “sometimes sane, sometimes insane.” Certainly there was such a person as Aunt Yentl, who narrates many of Singer’s demon-filled stories, never betraying the slightest doubt that there is a dybbuk who lurks behind the outhouse, a lantuch hauling firewood for the women next door. But neither of these people, we have to assume, were as obsessed with the sinfulness and addictive euphoria of sex, the fluidity of the rational and irrational, the sane and insane, the natural and supernatural, or with the vagueness of boundaries in general, as these stories would convey. It is Singer who was obsessed with these themes, and so the image of shtetl life we get from him is really an image of one man’s intricate mental landscape. To see how Singer utilizes the purely personal and idiosyncratic to create a world so convincing it hides his creativity is to know his consummate artistry.

Discussion Question

Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote countless short stories—some of which have become classics of the form. Everyone has his or her own favorite. What is your favorite Singer tale? What do you love about it? Why do you think others should read it? >>