Playing Favorites

By JBOOKS STAFF

Well, there’s a reason the Library of America had to publish Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Collected Stories as three different volumes: our author was absurdly prolific. But then, there are stories and there are stories. We thought it would be entertaining and instructive to ask writers who knew their Singer what their favorite story was. Here’s what they said. After checking out their responses, why don’t you add one of your own—right here.

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and editor of Singer’s Collected Stories.

My favorite Singer story? Maybe "Gimpel the Fool," which to me is a rewriting of Don Quixote. Or perhaps "The Manuscript." I'm also attracted to the exoticism of "A Night in Brazil" and find "The Cafeteria" hypnotizing. And then there's the masterpiece Satan in Goray and the moving romance in The Slave...

I've been obsessed with Singer since I first read him, in Spanish translation in the 1970s. Obsessed may be a polite term: I actually turned him into myth. I read everything by and about him I could put my hands on and have turned his odyssey into my roadmap. He was not only a mesmerizing storyteller but also a bridge of sorts with the decimated universe of Eastern European Jewry where my ancestors started their journey to Mexico. My passion became less adulatory and more critical as I matured. I asked: What was Singer's originality? And what is the explanation of his success in America?

So when Max Rudin, publisher of The Library of America, invited me, in 2000, to edit a three-volume set of Singer's Collected Stories as well as an illustrated album of Singer’s life, to be published on the occasion of his centennial, I was ready to understand the man behind the myth. I delved with gusto into his drafts, notebooks, correspondence, interviews and memorabilia... What I found was an inspiring yet vulnerable artist: sentimental, arrogant at times, who could be brutal to his staff (translators, secretaries, etc.), and, more than anything else, committed to his own posterity. The process of mapping his life and editing his fiction has made him more tangible to me—and more elusive too. Am I less obsessed as a result? Not in the least. My admiration has only increased but it is also less naive. Singer pushed Yiddish literature from the fringes to the mainstream. The effort made him at once a torch and a target. I'm fond of writers who navigate extremes such as these.

Jon Papernick is the author of The Ascent of Eli Israel, a collection of short stories. His story "The King of the King of Falafel," was included in the recent anthology Lost Tribe: Jewish Writing from the Edge.

My first recollections of I.B. Singer are of a kindly Old World Yiddish grandfather who told tales about silver spoons giving birth to silver spoons and cows magically flying above the village rooftops. Later I realized that Singer was a master of not quite the love story, but the sexual, adulterous tale in which history's doomed and its survivors struggled deeply with faith, loneliness, God, and the fate of the human race.

Singer's stories have always deeply affected me as a writer; he seemed able to tap into the mystery of what it is be human in a way that no other writer has. When I read his novel The Slave, I was stunned by the penultimate chapter in which the aforementioned slave, Jacob, returns in death to his God.  It is such a powerful scene, the death so beautifully rendered that it seemed as if Singer the writer, was actually straddling two worlds, the earthly and the divine.

Dara Horn’s first novel, In the Image, received a 2003 National Jewish Book Award.

“Gimpl Tam” (or “Gimpel the Fool” as Saul Bellow famously translated it) is the story of a man who believes everyone, always. The people in his town take advantage of his gullibility, sending him running to watch imaginary events and tricking him at every opportunity. His wife bears six bastard children through affairs she convinces him not to see. But as Gimpl says, “What’s the good of not believing? Today it’s your wife you don’t believe; tomorrow it’s God Himself you won’t take stock in.” As he grows old and awaits death, he dreams of the world to come, where “God be praised: there even Gimpl cannot be deceived.”

Published in the mid-1940s when the horrors of the Holocaust first came to light, the story raised a storm. Readers wondered if Gimpl’s credulity was a metaphor for those Jews whose naïve and foolish belief—whether in God or in humanity—made them blind to what their neighbors had in store for them. But when I first read this story as a teenager, I wondered whom to believe. Is Gimpl really the fool for believing that “everything is possible”? Or is he not a fool at all, but more like the original title’s “tam”—not an imbecile, but a simple man like the biblical Job, blessed with the gift of being able to believe?

As my own beliefs evolve over the years, I have found that this is a story that changes as I change. When I was younger, I sided with Gimpl; now I see the harm that comes from trust, and wonder again whom to believe. But each time I read it, I am struck by how the problem always emerges as one of either-or, of either having faith or lacking it. That duality in itself is the false temptation of the supernatural—of believing in either a world that turns through forces of good or one that turns through evil. In the end, the answer, as always in Bashevis’ work, is a natural one. The fools are neither those who rely on a benevolent world nor those who don’t, but rather those who cannot understand the capacity of a belief of any kind, whether in good or in evil, to make itself come true.