The Ethics of Scum

By KEN GORDON

Scum
By Isaac Bashevis Singer
Translated by Rosaline Dukalsky Schwartz
228 pages. Farrar Straus Giroux. $19.

Shalom, yelodim. Today we will be discussing Scum. Not the nasty green stuff that lives in fetid ponds, but the human variety, as defined by our friend Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose centenary we are celebrating right now.

Scum?

Well, yes. It's a novel. Originally published in Yiddish under the delightful-sounding title Shoym, and then transposed into the key of English by Rosaline Dukalsky Schwartz in 1991, Scum remains one of the most interesting books you'll ever read about Jewish prostitutes and thugs.

Jewish prostitutes and thugs?

Well, yes. These characters are perhaps not your relatives, friends, neighbors, or congregants, but they were quite close to the heart of I. B. Singer himself. In a 1976 interview with Philip Roth, Singer said that some critics thought him anti-Semitic because he wrote about the Judaic underworld. To which he responded, "Shall I write about Spanish thieves and Spanish prostitutes? I write about the thieves and prostitutes that I know."

Singer doesn't seem an overt scum-cursing moralist. In fact, the author takes a somewhat sympathetic view of his underworld characters, a number of whom exude charm and flamboyance (they know how to crack a joke and to enjoy the finer things: cheese buns, chopped herring, rye bread, sexual congress).

The book is set in Warsaw in 1906, and our hero is a 47-year-old fellow named Max Barabander. Max, who was born and raised in Poland and later moved to Buenos Aires, is on leave from his marriage. He and his wife Rochelle haven't been the same since their 17-year-old son Arturo died 10 minutes after complaining about a headache. Rochelle, once a woman of erotic wiles, a former prostitute, is now merely miserable, and she sends Max off to other women. Max, for his part, has become impotent, and so he travels in search of a cure—to Berlin, to Paris, and, when we meet him in the opening of Scum, to Warsaw.

We like Max, a successful businessman who "had recently extricated himself from almost all his dirty business dealings" and had become something of an upstanding citizen in Argentina. Yet, as Singer writes, Max "never lost his underworld mentality. He had fantasies about great robberies, counterfeiting rings, and get-rich-quick schemes. After he had broken with his disreputable friends and became a member of the Burial Society, which admitted only the most respectable community members, he still couldn't stop dreaming of shady deals." It's possible, in fact, that what pulled Max back to Warsaw was the desire to act on those dreams of his, to shake off his responsibility and free himself from his domestic unhappiness. On returning to the disreputable Krachmalna Street—the very street Singer grew up on—he does many bad things, including:

1. pretending his wife is dead
2. committing adultery
3. conspiring with a woman named Rezyl Kork to turn a nice Jewish girl, Basha, into a prostitute
4. violently attacking Basha in a hotel room
5. killing Reyzl

Of course, when he’s not out sinning, Max throws around all sorts of money, but it’s clear that these acts of tzedaka are mainly occasions for Max to show off his New World wealth.

The most interesting scene in the book occurs at the end, when Max, in a fit of paranoia, murders Reyzl. While it’s somewhat forced—two of Max's romantic liaisons conflict and he spins into a homicidal rage—the moment has real power. Why? His murderous actions are really about the contamination of evil, a popular theme in Jewish literature. "As the biblical stories of Lot and Korach remind us, evil tends to be a more powerful influence than good," writes Joseph Telushkin in The Book of Jewish Values, adding, "While Lot apparently did not exert a morally uplifting influence on his neighbors in Sodom, they apparently left their mark on him." The Sodom of Warsaw's Krochmalna Street is just too much for Max, and we watch in fascination as he breaks down.

Max goes to Reyzl's apartment and discovers that she’s with her long-term boyfriend, the local gang leader Shmuel Smetena, who rests enfeebled by a stroke. Reyzl tries to diffuse Max's anger with reason—

You came to me and I was straight with you. If you want to become respectable, that's not my fault. We got together, we agreed, and I thought things were ready to roll. Shmuel was already worn out and now he's finished. This is a house, not a hospice. It's plain and simple. If you'll wait a few days, I'm yours and you can do with me what you will.

—and then she tries to seduce him. You can almost see Max starting over with Reyzl, a strong, if not-quite-ethical character, but instead of following Reyzl’s plan, he produces a gun and pulls the trigger.

The murder is reported in an oddly passive manner ("Suddenly there was a shot and Reyzl screamed. He could smell the stench of gunpowder"), as though Max were possessed by some sort of dybbuk. But perhaps we can see this as a situation in which Max finally takes responsibility for himself. Could be that he came to Warsaw to punish himself for a life full of sinful thoughts and actions (plus, he felt horribly guilty about Arturo’s death). It's interesting to note that Max has a recurring dream, in which he's thrown in jail and prisoners glare silently at him. In fact, this is how Singer ends his novel: "He, Max, had come to Warsaw to perpetrate all this craziness for only one purpose, to realize his dream."

It's too bad that Max, "a philosopher in his own way," couldn't have perused Telushkin's book. While he might have scoffed at the simplistic nature of the contemporary rabbi's advice—"Stay away from bad neighbors"—it might have saved him a world of trouble, and kept him out of jail. Of course, had he not traveled the wide and crooked path of criminality there would have been no story to tell, no Scum for us to read. In literature, as in life, nothing is got for nothing. Class is, as they say, dismissed.