The American Singer

By MARK ZANGER

Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to The Letter Writer
By Isaac Bashevis Singer
Edited by Ilan Stavans
789 pages. Library of America. $35.

Was Isaac Bashevis Singer an American writer? The Library of America sure thinks so. Though his works were first printed in Yiddish and most were set in Poland, the Library has deemed Singer worthy of three volumes, which set him securely on the shelf with his literary landsmen Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain.

Singer himself helps make the Library's argument—he participated actively in almost all of his translations and understood himself as using English as a "second original language." Although some have described the Yiddish versions, published in Der Forverts [The Daily Forward] as "first drafts," the one text I compared carefully, the 1966 story "Der Nodl/The Needle," takes no more liberties than are necessary to translate differing languages. For instance, in the English version, the story has "today all matches are made by Mr. Love." The literal translation of the Yiddish would be "the matchmaker [male case ending] is Love," which is somewhat more discordant. But this is a typical translation problem. It can be argued that "The Needle" is a relatively simple parable from a period when Singer had assumed command of both languages. Still, Singer is simply a more modern, more stark, and less discursive writer than, say, Sholom Aleichem, and thus much easier to translate into American prose. Despite the remoteness of Singer’s lost world of Polish Jewry, his literary language is not an obstacle to translation.

Ordinarily the Library of America editions add to the published canon of a given writer with uncollected works, but this first of three Singer volumes follows exactly the texts of his first four books of stories in English: Gimpel the Fool & Other Stories; The Spinoza of Market Street; Short Friday & Other Stories; and The Séance & Other Stories. If you own those books, you have everything in this book except a very good chronology of Singer’s life, a somewhat incomplete publication history of the stories in English and Yiddish versions, and a rather inadequate glossary and notes.

Other Library of America volumes reshuffle stories into the order in which they were written, or published, or a more logical order—and all of those options were available to editor Ilan Stavans. And yet, this is the order in which Singer chose to present the stories to American readers, so one can hardly pretend to right any wrongs by rearranging them. And even if you did, it would be hard to begin with any other story than "Gimpel the Fool," a kind of updated Peretz parable about a man who isn’t really a fool but prefers to be thought a fool than to be drawn into evil by those who abuse him. It is set in an imaginary town, Frampol, that is demographically between Sholom Aleichem’s imaginary towns of Annetekva (home of Fiddler on the Roof) and Chelm (where everyone is the village idiot). "Gimpel" was Singer’s first well-known story in the U.S., translated and presented by Saul Bellow, and established him as a fitting heir to the great Yiddish storytellers.

But then, you could hardly pick a better second story than "The Gentleman from Cracow," in which a wealthy and apparently generous eccentric is actually a demon who corrupts the same town of Frampol and nearly destroys it in a sea of mud. Because if Singer was the true heir to Yiddish literature, he was also a furious assailant upon its sentimentality, as though the Holocaust had rendered even the fantasies of its victims unclean, beyond the cleansing power of any ritual bath. Singer’s early stories are full of doubts about God but certainties about demons and evil. The Holocaust is never directly described in these stories, almost all of which are set in Poland in an undetermined past time, but it colors everything in them, much as the atomic bomb colors Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, even though that story was set in medieval Japan.

In fact, of the 54 stories in this book, all are set in pre-war Poland except for one set in the underworld, another set in the heavens (from which two souls are sent down to Poland), one set in Miami Beach (which turns out to be a lot like the underworld), one in Montreal (eerily reminiscent of Poland), and three in New York City, set among Polish exiles. Yet all but one were written in New York.

This volume contains three kinds of short stories. The first is a sort of Hasidic parable that goes back before Rebbe Nachman, although Singer’s are more twisted. (Singer empolyed this form for his later children’s stories.) Some of the longer stories in this mode, like the famous "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,"—he hated the movie—are modern novellas, and deconstruct Hasidism as they describe it.

Singer’s second mode is to write in the first-person voices of imps, demons, and Satan himself, and these stories are often fantastical, theosophical, erotic, and controversial.

Lastly, toward the end of this book, we begin to see him as a New York writer, recording the dreams and destinies of souls living in secular New York but still dreaming in cabala. In “The Lecture” (1965) he begins a postmodern play with his own persona that he later uses in his 1983 novella The Penitent, a book which prefigures Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock.

In the end, it's quite clear that Singer's work is that of an American writer, despite the apparently foreign subject matter and its language of origin. I would argue that displacement is one of the great American subjects, that our literature is often about people living with psychic maps that get them lost in their physical lives, people a lot like Polish Jews were in Poland, not to mention how they are in New York or Montreal. And if Singer's early influences were of modern European literature, those he has influenced are almost all American or Israeli. His most particular stories, set in New York, are about the increasingly universal problem of exile and survival. His stories set in the irretrievable past are no more dated now in English than they were 40 years ago, and the best of his parables are as eternal as the Talmud.

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? >>