Collected Stories
Gimpel the Fool to the Letter Writer
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Library of America, 789 pp., $35
Collected Stories
A Friend of Kafka to Passions
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Library of America, 856 pp., $35
Collected Stories
One Night in Brazil to The Death of Methuselah
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Library of America, 899 pp., $35
ON A FEW OCCASIONS I have been asked who among the writers of the past half century I thought might be read a hundred years from now. I could think of only Isaac Bashevis Singer--chiefly because he is the single writer of our time who might as easily have been read a hundred years before his birth. And yet, most critics prefer not to delve into the reason behind Singer's literary timelessness.
Born in Poland in 1904 and coming to America only in 1935, Singer wrote all his stories in Yiddish and had translators with greater fluency than he. Although his knowledge of English improved greatly over the years, Singer always spoke in a greenhorn's accent. ("It is a rare mark of individuality to be a great writer in a language he speaks so badly," wrote Paul Valéry of Joseph Conrad, who never lost his strong accent, either.)
That Singer wrote in the dying language that is Yiddish makes his case all the more interesting. Three volumes of his stories have now been collected and published in the Library of America. (The only other non-American-born writers in this canonical publishing enterprise are Vladimir Nabokov and Alexis de Tocqueville.) Singer's devotion to Yiddish--the mameh
loshn, or mother-tongue--was complete. He insisted it has "vitamins other languages haven't got" and claimed that it is "very rich in describing character and personality, though very poor in words for technology." In his Nobel Prize lecture of 1978, he remarked that the language captured "the pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience, and deep appreciation for humanity" of the Yiddish-speaking people among whom he came of age in Poland. And yet, in the same lecture, he claimed universality for Yiddish, averring that "in a figurative way Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, a frightened and hopeful humanity."
Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Leoncin, Poland, the son and grandson of rabbis. He grew up in an atmosphere of grinding poverty and conflicting piety. The conflict derived from the continuing argument between Singer's father's mystical tendencies and his mother's more traditional, rationalistic Judaism; the poverty, from Singer's father's refusal to take a Russian-language examination required by Czarist law, so that, despite his considerable learning, he was forced to work as, in effect, a clandestine rabbi serving the poorest of Jews.
The central figure in the Singer household was his mother, Bathsheva, after whom Isaac took his middle name Bashevis. The daughter of a distinguished line of rabbis, a woman of genuine Jewish learning in her own right, she was, from all reports, a personality of great force. Singer was said to resemble his mother physically--small-boned, blue-eyed, and red-haired--and, some say, temperamentally; and he reverenced her all his days.
|
