(Author: Gloria Sandak-Lewin, Vol. 68, No. 1, Pesach 2013)
This is the third of a four-part essay on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s great epic work, The Manor (1967), its sequel, The Estate (1969) and The Family Moskat (1950). The first two parts appeared in Jewish Affairs Rosh Hashanah 2008, and Chanukah 2012. The focus of this part continues will be The Estate.
A vast, sprawling work, The Estate is much bigger and broader than The Manor. It concentrates almost solely on the life, marriages and work of Calman Jacoby, an intelligent, hardworking, ambitious Jewish entrepreneur who maintains his Jewishness despite his growing wealth. In a sense it is a continuation of The Manor, but Singer has chosen a broader and more elaborate canvas, reminiscent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. There is an author’s note at the beginning of the book which reads: “The Estate is a sequel to and the conclusion of The Manor, published in 1967. The Manor begins with the Polish uprising against the Czar in 1863 and The Estate ends in the last years of the nineteenth century … The whole work appeared in serial form in the Jewish Daily Forward between 1952 and 1955”.
While The Manor is tight, compact and unified around a central character, Calman Jacoby, The Estate takes the reader into the lives of three people who, in one way and another, are associated with him: Clara Kaminer, his materialistic, immoral second wife, Ezriel Babad, his son-in-law, at odds with his religion but eventually partially returning to it, and the degenerate Polish Count Lucian who elopes with and marries one of Calman’s daughters, Miriam Liebe, only to bring her to destruction. A further extension of these dramatis personae is Ezriel’s nephew Zadok, an ultra-rationalist anti-Judaic secular genius and son of the beautifully spiritual Hassidic Rabbi of Marshinov. His role in the novel is dubious: is he introduced to throw Ezriel into relief – Ezriel the doubter, the conflicted Jew torn between his desire to be truly Jewish, a practising Jew in a Jewish community, and his skepticism? If not, what is Zadok’s function in the novel?
Calman Jacoby features very little in this book; Singer concentrates instead on his second wife Clara, whom he has divorced, her relationship with Alexander Zipkin, father of her daughter Felusia, Clara’s brief but foolish flirtation with the old man Mirkin who wants to marry her and is the cause of Zipkin’s estrangement from Clara (he claims that while she has caused him to divorce his wife Sabina and leave her and his little boy Kubus whom he loves she is flirting with the old man Mirkin because of his will). Zipkin and Clara have quarreled in Paris, each blaming the other, and Zipkin leaves Europe and goes to New York with his kind-hearted sister Sonya. There is also emphasis on Calman and Clara’s son Sasha who is good-looking, wild, popular, unruly, competent in business, sexually active beyond his years and showing signs of power, business acumen and success. One of the few references to Calman Jacoby occurs when Clara goes to him to say goodbye before leaving for America to join her lover Zipkin and asks Calman to forgive her: at fi rst denies then admits that Felusia is Zipkin’s daughter (not Calman’s) and asks Calman to say Kaddish for her if she should die before him. He agrees to do so but is clearly not interested in her. Calman spends Yom Kippur at his son-in-law Rabbi Jochanan’s in Marshinov. Because of Clara he is poor – another son-in-law Mayer Joel runs his business and gives him something to live on – he lives alone and prays and studies but still has dreams of lust.
A large part of the novel deals with Clara’s surprise visit to her former lover Zipkin, who has remarried in America. He puts her up in a German boarding-house far removed from the Jewish community. At first he visits her twice weekly. Eventually he spends a week with her and then sees her less and less frequently until ultimately she decides to return to Warsaw with Felusia. A passage in the novel wonderfully describes the hustle and bustle of the Jewish New York from which Clara is isolated. If she had been in a Jewish neighborhood she could have attended
…the Yiddish theatre, lectures, discussions, celebrations. Even in wintertime, the Jewish quarter was congested … There were employment offices, tea parlors, and cellar restaurants, where home-cooking was served while musicians played. Fraternal societies held meetings. The stores remained open late. Barrels of herring, sour pickles, sauerkraut stood in front of stores. Home-baked bread, buns, challah, bagels, poppy-seed rolls and cakes were sold from pushcarts. In the delicatessen stores, people ate hot frankfurters and mustard. On East Broadway, the crowds streamed down the street in groups. They all seemed part of one family. Each ship from Europe brought socialists, bearded and long-haired revolutionaries who made speeches about the struggle for freedom. New ‘greenhorns’ arrived daily. Every home had a room or two rented out. Every third housewife prepared homemade meals for boarders. Yeshivas and cabarets, kosher restaurants and travel agencies, wedding halls and matrimonial bureaus abounded. Prostitutes hailed men to their rooms – sextons called them to a quorum in the synagogue. In the shops, the workers sang both liturgical and socialist songs. In the evenings, boys and girls danced in the narrow, gas-lit rooms. Every day was a holiday. But Clara was not a part of it. She wandered about the snowy sidewalks alone.1
Another segment of the novel deals with Ezriel, Calman’s son-in-law (married to Shaindel) who has moved away from Judaism and practices medicine. Like Asa Heshel in the earlier novel The Family Moskat, Ezriel’s character is not firmly drawn – he seems always to be a divided character, at loggerheads with his destiny and with himself. Ezriel is married to Shaindel, a simple devout woman who can function only in her home and in the kitchen, is only Yiddish-speaking and is worlds apart from the modern, anti-religious, free-thinking medical doctor Ezriel. Ezriel meets the widow Olga Bielikov, a convert from Judaism to Greek Orthodoxy, at a birthday party at the Wallenbergs (wealthy and respected converted Jews) which he has attended without Shaindel (she refuses to go). In time, he has a sexual relationship with her, even though Shaindel has given birth to their third child, a boy, and Ezriel reluctantly organises and attends the circumcision. Ezriel and Shaindel’s eldest child, Josiek, who is attending the university in Warsaw, informs his parents that he wants to leave Warsaw (because of the pernicious and pervasive antisemitism he has experienced at school) and goes to live in Palestine. Josiek’s plans so upset and disturb Shaindel that she lapses into melancholia and gradually loses her sanity. There is also a digression about Ezriel’s sister Mirale, who has been engaging in subversive political activities, has been impregnated by agent provocateur Stefan Lamanski (who has to fl ee the country for fear of his life) and has been in prison for six years before being deported to Siberia.
Yet a further strand of this complex plot concerns the exploits of Lucian (Count Jampolski’s younger son), husband of Miriam Liebe and brother of Felicia. He has been imprisoned for murdering the janitor of the complex of the absent employer of his beloved Kasia, a servant girl who has borne his illegitimate son Bolek. Tragically, Miriam Liebe has died of poverty and starvation (her father Calman Jacoby has never contacted her since she ran off with Lucian – Singer could, in the writer’s opinion, have made more of this). Kasia and Lucian’s children are being cared for and being brought up as Christians (Catholics) by Felicia, Lucian’s sister, an unbelievably saint-like woman married to a brilliant and good, if atheist, doctor Marian Zawacki. Felicia is also looking after and has ‘adopted’ Janina, one of the children of the peasant janitor who was murdered by Lucian – a respectable and hardworking young woman whom Lucian later seduces and impregnates. Felicia has fetched her brother from prison and tries to enable him to start a new life. In spite of his saintly sister’s efforts, Lucian disappears and when he returns commits suicide.
Interesting features of these various characters are as follows: Clara’s growing awareness of and repentance for her former immoral behavior in relation to her second husband Calman, both for the fact that she had a lover during her marriage and that the daughter born of the affair is illegitimate (a mamzer as defi ned by Jewish law) and that she would tell Calman not to be honest in business, that is, to be like everyone else. Before leaving for America she asks for Calman’s forgiveness and to say Kaddish for her should she predecease him.
Ezriel, one of Calman’s sons-in-law, is an interesting portrayal of a tortured soul, torn between his Jewishness and assimilation, his desire to be a Jew and his “stone-cold” skepticism (compare Asa Heshel in The Family Moskat). While one admires his intellect, one is shocked at his affair with a woman who has converted from Judaism to Greek Orthodoxy while at the same time his wife, Shaindel, is giving birth to a son, and how he resents having to arrange and attend his own son’s circumcision. One can, on the other hand, admire him for regularly visiting Shaindel when she is confi ned to an asylum, for refusing to divorce her and for the kindness and patience with which he speaks to her when it is obvious that she has lost her reason. In the end he comes full circle, visits the Hasidic Rabbi of Marshinov, leaves his younger son Misha (Moishele) with the Rabbi’s wife Tsipele and is determined to visit and even settle in Palestine where his elder son Josiek lives. Note too that he is the only member of the family who visits Miriam Liebe (Count Lucian’s wife) when she is poor, ill and destitute and has been rejected by her whole family, especially by her father, and brings her food parcels.
The Polish Count Lucian is a portrait of a disturbed, destructive, probably psychotic personality, playing havoc with people’s lives and impregnating women left and right (the servant Kasia, who bears his illegitimate son Bolek, Miriam Liebe’s two children, and Janina, daughter of the man whom he murdered – she has to have an abortion and leave the gymnasium and Felicia’s house). He is clearly unbalanced and wrecks the lives of every woman with whom he comes into contact, especially that of Miriam Liebe, who through him is reduced to poverty, isolation, illness, drink and finally death. He is probably Isaac Bashevis Singer’s epitome of the sickness and degeneration of the Polish aristocracy in the late 19th Century – his father, too, was unable to run his estate and ‘went to the dogs’ after his return from Siberia.
Zadok is a puzzle. It is difficult to know why Singer brought him into the book, except to act as a foil to Ezriel – both are sons of rabbis and assimilated Jews, on good terms with one other. However, while Ezriel gradually returns to his Jewish roots, Zadok remains an out-and-out rationalist, secular and assimilated. (His marriage to Hannah, the daughter of a rabbi, is extremely unfortunate and one feels for her, especially on Rosh Hashanah and the High Holy days, although her housekeeping and culinary skills leave much to be desired.) It is only towards the end of the book, on Rosh Hashanah, that Zadok realises what he has lost; he could have been sitting at the right side of his father, the rabbi of Marshinov, esteemed by thousands of Hasidim. Then again, when he goes to visit his dying father, he arrives only a few minutes before his death. Towards the end of the book he becomes aware, too, of the growing antisemitism in Poland, both personally, with regard to his neighbors, and politically, when he realizes that it is stemming not from the ignorant but from the educated classes and from the professors in Germany. In this sense he becomes a mouthpiece for the author. There is a passage starting with his wife, now pregnant, asking him to bring up a bucket of water:
Zadok picked up the bucket and went down to the pump. This fetching of water had become a nuisance. In the few years that Zadok had lived in Warsaw, he had literally seen the growth of anti-Semitism. Gentiles who used to say “good day” and remove their caps had stopped greeting him. Children who had grown up before his eyes had begun to ape and ridicule him. Girls laughed impudently in his face. The Polish press grew daily more malicious, constantly inventing new accusations against the Jews. Even the assimilated Jews were no longer immune to abuse. In Russia, there was no end to the pogroms. Jews were driven out of the villages. The pale of settlement where they were permitted to live grew smaller from year to year. And who was in the vanguard of all this? Not the hoi-polloi or the ignorant, but educated people with university backgrounds. In Germany, anti-Semitism was rampant among the professors. If education was not a remedy against the ancient practice of human repression, then what was? Zadok pumped the water. Around him stood a circle of Polish boys, aping his motions with the handle. “Hey, Jewboy, that is a pump, not your fringed garment!…” Zadok picked up the pail, spilling the water and wetting his boots.2
Olga, Ezriel’s mistress, is a peculiar mixture of good and bad. She is, in fact, a cold fi sh and one wonders why Ezriel is attracted to her. It might be because she is the exact opposite of his wife, Shaindel: she is neat, polished, well-groomed, accomplished in her work (illustrated when she works for Wallenberg) and her home is likewise neat and tidy (quite unlike Shaindel’s). Men like her (after the death of her husband she has two offers of marriage, from Wallenberg and later from the military doctor Lieutenant-Colonel Dr Ivanov) and she is very controlled. She also looks after Ezriel’s younger son Misha after Shaindel is committed to the asylum. Her estrangement from Ezriel begins when Wallenberg leaves her money in his will with which she decides to buy an estate in the country. Ezriel puts all his money into the estate and lands up in debt. The breakup point occurs when Olga decides to have an extravagant, very expensive and elaborate ball on the estate and invites all the local gentry – it turns out that the night chosen for the ball is Tisha B’Av. Ezriel does not come. The ball turns out to be a bacchanalia. Ivanov takes control and establishes order; he shows a keen interest in Olga. The next day she goes into a neighboring village to do certain tasks, and expresses contempt and distaste for the Hasidic Jews with whom she does business – this attitude is further exacerbated when she passes a Jewish cemetery in which a funeral is taking place and compares (unfavorably) the Jewish wailing and lamenting and scenes of Jewish women prostrating themselves on the gravestones with the flowers placed on the graves of Christian cemeteries. She equates this with the kind of Judaism to which Ezriel wishes her to return.
The final break comes when Ezriel decides to spend the week of Rosh Hashanah and Simchat Torah with his brother-in-law married to Calman’s daughter (Tsipele) the Rabbi of Marshinov, taking Misha with him: he has decided that he wants Misha to grow up as a Jew. Misha (called Moishele by the Hasidim) is so happy with Tsipele, the rabbi’s wife (his aunt) and her daughter Zelda that he does not want to return to Warsaw, so Ezriel decides to leave in Marshinov. On his return home he discovers that in the week that he has been away, Olga has received an offer of marriage from Ivanov. This is the end of his relationship with her, although it would have ended anyway with Ezriel’s decision to visit and, eventually settle in Palestine.
What finally can be said about this novel – the sequel to The Manor? In contrast to the structural tightness of its antecedent, it is a broad, sprawling, occasionally fragmented work. However, at all times it is extremely readable, compelling and convincing: Singer knows his characters inside out, whether it be the morally fl awed yet absolutely womanly Clara, the Jewishly conflicted and spiritually tormented Ezriel, the psychologically sick and depraved Count Lucian and even the ultra-rationalist and anti-Judaic secularist Zadok who, after years of not visiting his father, the saintly Rabbi of Marshinov, arrives at his bedside only minutes before his death.
There are, however, several aspects of the novel that are inexplicable or unsatisfactory. First there is the Miriam Liebe episode, in which Calman Jacoby’s daughter runs off with the seductive, but base and degenerate Lucian, marries and has two children by him and is ultimately thoroughly destroyed. Is it plausible that a father as responsible as Calman Jacoby would cut his daughter (and grandchildren) so thoroughly out of his life and so ignore her that she eventually dies a lonely, ill and destitute alcoholic? This is even taking into account how in Eastern Europe at the time, Jewish parents commonly went into mourning – sat shiva – when intermarriage occurred.
Then there is Felicia, wife of the brilliant and rationalist Dr Marian Zawacki and sister of Lucian. She is the exact opposite of her brother, the epitome of the good Christian. Yet is it possible, saintly as she is, that she would spend a Saturday night reading a book on Christian martyrs while her atheist husband takes her brother’s children to the theatre for a little light entertainment? And after her husband’s sudden death, why would such a devout woman attend a séance and then inform Ezriel that she has seen Miriam Liebe’s spirit and has a message for him from herm? What is the point of this episode, except to inform the reader and remind us, as Ezriel tells Felicia, that he intends to visit and possibly live in Palestine?
A further point: Is it possible that the daughter of a murdered man, Janina, even if she does come from a peasant background, would allow herself to be seduced by her father’s murderer (Lucian), have to go through an abortion, be withdrawn from the gymnasium and expelled from Felicia’s home, and still weep and wail, after his suicide, that she loved him?
In spite of these reservations, two positive features come into prominence. One is the magnificent description of the death of the saintly Rabbi of Marshinov: no other author with whom I am familiar describes death so beautifully. There is something holy, spiritual about it. The Rabbi is dying: many thoughts go through his mind, but he is upset that he has not had “a vision, a sign from above.”3 After several hours he sees a great light:
“And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And God saw that it was good.” The rabbi was witnessing creation. Within one moment everything had become clear, all questions had been answered. The rabbi closed his eyes, but the light was still there: a radiance that shone neither outside him nor within him, but filled all space, penetrated all being. It was everything together: revelation, surcease from all earthly turmoil, the profoundest joy. ‘All is right, God is perfect!’ something in the rabbi cried out. It was all so simple that he could not grasp why he had not known it before. How long had it all lasted? A minute? Seconds? Time itself had vanished. He had merged with eternity. He had only one wish left: to let those who had sunk into doubt and suffering know what he had seen. He stretched out his hand to knock on the wall, but his hand made no sound.4Contrast the above with Clara’s death, where there is a sense of busyness, bustling activity, people coming and going: her former husband, Calman, her latest lover/admirer Vinavar, her son Sasha, Sabina (her lover Alexander Zipkin’s first wife), her father’s young wife Celina all come to say goodbye – her death is very much in this world, whereas the dying and death of the Hasidic Rabbi of Marshinov is purely spiritual. Disappointingly, and surprisingly, there is no description of the death and burial of Calman Jacoby – only of his last illness in hospital: it is almost as if Singer has lost interest in him and shifted the focus elsewhere – to Clara, Ezriel, Zadok – all disbelievers – and to the Marshinov Rabbi at the end.
Finally, The Manor and especially The Estate cover the entire spectrum of Judaism in late 19th Century Poland, from the shining spirituality of the Hasidic Rabbi of Marshinov to his secular, ultra-rationalist son Zadok; from the spiritually and emotionally conflicted Ezriel, constantly questioning his Jewish identity, to the wretched Miriam Liebe who elopes with and marries a corrupt, disturbed Polish count; from the entrepreneur Calman Jacoby’s ambitious materialism and worldliness within the bounds of traditional Judaism (in The Manor) to his growing religious rigor, his moral outrage on discovering his second wife Clara’s adultery and his ending his last years as a poor orthodox Jew acting as a beadle in the Society of Caring for the Sick in Warsaw. Finally, who can forget the image of little Misha/Moishele, whom Ezriel wrests from the initially nurturing but gradually antisemitic gentile home of his converted mistress Olga, and leaves in the care of the kind and loving wife of the Rabbi of Marshinov, how he happily drinks his milk and eats ginger cake, speaks Yiddish as he had done with his late mother, and recites the simple benedictions learnt in his early childhood?
Gloria Sandak-Lewin has taught, tutored and lectured in English Literature at Herzlia High School, the Department of English (University of Cape Town) and the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies (University of Cape Town) respectively and has published a long historical poem, My Father’s House (1985, 1997), a collection of poetry, My Father’s House and Other Poems 1965-1985 (2000), and a collection of short stories, A Separate Life: Tales of a Woman Estranged (2006).
NOTES
- Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Estate (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 252-3.
- The Estate (1970), p.368.
- Ibid., p.371.
- Ibid., p.373.
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