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An Isaac Bashevis Singer Retrospective: “The Family Chronicles”: The Manor, The Estate and The Family Moskat

Author: Published on: Published in: Religion, Arts & Culture

(Author: Gloria Sandak-Lewin, Vol. 67, No. 3, Chanukah 2012) 

  • Feature image – taken from the cover of the Penguin edition of The Family Moskat, 1981

 

This is the first of a four-part essay on I.B. Singer’s great epic work, The Manor (1967), its sequel, The Estate (1969) and The Family Moskat (1950), which, though “written a few years earlier… is in a way a continuation of the same saga.”1

In a pamphlet entitled ‘Isaac Bashevis Singer’ (University of Minnesota Press, 1969), Ben Siegel speaks of “Isaac’s knowledge of ‘the Jewish psyche and culture’” as “deep and ancestral”, and continues, “One of the few writers to have mastered the entire Judaic tradition, he can enter and articulate it at any point without a discordant note.” Siegel recognises that Singer is “essentially his own man as individual and artist. His dignity, compassion, incisive intelligence, and originality are as evident as is his deep dedication to his craft. His unique vision gives to Jewish tradition, history and lore new meanings and applications.”2

Singer avowedly preferred the short story as a literary form, “because only in a short story can a writer reach perfection – more than in a novel”.3 However, it is in the early “family novels” or sagas that we see, between 1863 (the year of the unsuccessful Polish insurrection against Russian rule) and the end of the 19th Century the full sweep and scope of Polish Jewish lore, custom and tradition (The Manor, The Estate) and the ‘disintegration’ thereof between the 19th Century and the rise of Hitler on the eve of World War II (The Family Moskat).

Edward Alexander captures the changes in Jewish society admirably:

We watch the Jews leave the small towns and ghettoes for the life of cosmopolitan Warsaw and also Paris and New York. We watch them exchange the long caftan and long hair of the Chasidim for the short jacket and short hair (and often shortened memory) of the ‘modern’ Jew, who is sartorially then indistinguishable from the modern Gentile. We witness the gradual substitution of Polish for the ‘jargon’ of Yiddish as the language of everyday speech. We see young men who were brought up as Chasidim turn into Socialists, Assimilationists, anti-Semites. We watch young women trained to be “pure Jewish daughters” turn into Gentiles, or violent revolutionaries, or adulteresses.4

Before discussing the novels in full, perhaps a brief résumé of the main facts of I.B. Singer’s life would be appropriate. Born in Leoncin, Poland, in 1904, the third of four children, Isaac’s character – its dualities, contradictions, conflicts – was largely moulded by the clash in the personalities of his parents. His father, Pinchas Menachem Singer, was a rabbi and descended from a long lineage of rabbis, and his mother, Bathsheba Zylberman, was herself the daughter of a rabbi. However, his father was a Chasid, emotional, other-wordly, impractical, mystical, a dreamer, while his mother was a Mitnaged, practical, highly intelligent, rational, down to earth, capable. Florence Noiville, in her very fine biography of Singer, comments perceptively that Isaac’s parents were mismatched and that his mother should have been the husband and the husband, the wife:

The two were not so much together, but rather side by side, each cloistered in his or her impermeable world.  For Isaac, born into this atmosphere, the message was clear.  He would have to create his own inner world quickly, escape and protect himself from others, and rely primarily on himself.5

The paradoxes in Isaac’s personality have been discussed in full by Paul Kresh; but I shall limit this discussion to one brief quote:

The contradictions in Isaac’s nature and in the characters he writes about – the conflicts between the rational and the irrational, the innocent and the worldly, the demonic and the cherubic, the real and the fantastic, the romantic and the conservative – can all be traced to the marriage of his parents and the legacy of a Polish-Jewish past.6

Isaac himself has pinpointed the contradictions in his character: while he absorbed his father’s stories about miracles, demons and imps (the counterpart to angels), he also inherited his mother’s skepticism (“The net result is that I remained both a doubter and a man of faith”.)7

Another important influence on Singer was that of his elder brother, Israel Joshua. Older than Isaac by eleven years, he was a rationalist and secularist who gave his younger brother his first secular book, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (translated into Yiddish) when Isaac was ten or twelve.88 Noiville (p56) says that Isaac was twelve at the time while Alexander (p16) gives 1914 as the date when Isaac was given Crime and Punishment , which would have made him ten years old.

It was also at the sculptor Ostrzego’s studio, where Israel Joshua was hiding to escape enforced Russian military conscription, that the young Isaac, bringing food to him, saw another way of life, diametrically opposed to his father’s strict and intense Judaism. Here, he was exposed to young Jewish men and women – the intelligentsia – living freely, without the encumbrances of prayer or prayer books, not observing the laws of Kashrut or any other laws, the girls posing in the nude for the artist.9

More important, it was his older brother who introduced Isaac to the Warsaw literary world by offering him the position of proof-reader on the Warsaw journal Literarische Bletter (Literary Pages), of which he had become co-editor in 1923.10 By that time Israel Joshua, disillusioned with communism, had returned to Poland, from Moscow, and his own literary career was flourishing. It was probably because of this position that Isaac had access to the Writers’ Club in Warsaw.11  Finally, it was Israel Joshua who, seeing the writing on the wall with the rise of Hitler, emigrated in 1933 from Poland to New York with his wife and younger son, Joseph, and invited the lonely and distraught Isaac to come to America at the beginning of 1935. Isaac became a freelance writer with Der Forverts (the Jewish Daily Forward), the American Yiddish newspaper for which his brother had been Warsaw correspondent. He would contribute to its columns without a break for forty-five years.12

A further factor which was to influence the writer was his residence from 1908 to 1917 (between ages of four and thirteen) at 10 Krochmalna Street, Warsaw. In this regard, Noiville writes:

… Today the only thing that remains of the mythical Krochmalna Street is its name.  Almost nothing was spared by the World War II bombings. After the first ghetto uprising in 1943, the Nazis razed the houses. The last survivors were deported to Treblinka or Majdanek. The ground was levelled. A new neighborhood, cold and impersonal, sprang up on the site of the Jewish city.13

Noiville comments further that Singer’s descriptions of life on this street, his “literary gold mine”, are “all the more precious in that they tell us about a culture on the eve of its disappearance.14 She asks us to imagine, visualize, reconstruct, the pre-World War I setting that was the world known to Singer:

…the droskys – horse-drawn carriages – trundling over the cobblestones, weaving their way between the traps, the carts filled with cabbages and potatoes; … the cracking of the coachmen’s whips or the clinking of the milk cans in the brisk early morning air; … the sound of a Yiddish melody being played on an old gramophone between the noises of hammers and sewing machines. In Singer’s day, Krochmalna Street was always in the grip of a kind of fever, teeming with life. Artisans, water carriers, furriers, tailors, fruit peddlers, fences, maids, witches … This was the colorful group of people … who gave the street its motley flavor. In the converted courtyards of the buildings, children held top-spinning contests. … [At the end of the street] was the ill-famed Krochmalna Square, the meeting place of thieves, pimps and prostitutes. It was just a few steps away from the synagogues and the Hasidic study houses. Vice was never too far from virtue.15

Kresh observes that Isaac’s observation point of all this activity was “a balcony where he loved to spend his time. This refuge above the street was Isaac’s television set, his movie house, his theatre in the round. When he looked down from his perch on the second floor, he felt close to life, close to the teeming action on the sidewalk. There he would spin out his daydreams and think about [eternal] questions”16 about God, the man-woman relationship and the universe. Needless to say, his observations gave him essential material for his novels and short stories later in life.

A factor, generally overlooked and underestimated, which virtually changed Isaac’s adult life and work, was his determined effort to learn English in America. After a year of English classes, he could make himself understood (“I knew that, if I didn’t learn this language, I would be lost forever”) and some ten years later, though still with a strong Yiddish accent, he was “completely fluent and had an extensive vocabulary.”17

Singer was still determined to write in Yiddish, despite the fact that soon after his arrival in the US he saw that the language had no future in America and despite the later destruction of his major readership in Eastern Europe after the Holocaust. It was through his Warsaw friend, Aaron Zeitlin,18 writing from Warsaw, that he realised the importance of his work being translated from Yiddish into English since, as Zeitlin advised him, only with translation, would he become a successful writer.

It was thus that after an approximately eight-year period of prolonged writers’ block, profound depression and suicidal tendencies after his arrival in New York, and having been jolted into creative activity by the terrible shock of Israel Joshua’s sudden death of a heart attack in February 1944, that Isaac wrote his long and involved family saga The Family Moskat, in 1945. Prior to that his first novel, Satan in Goray, had been serialised in the Warsaw magazine Globus by Zeitlin in 1934 and published in book form in 1935.19 The Family Moskat was serialised in the Daily Forward in 1948 and published in English translation (translated by A.H. Gross) by Alfred A. Knopf in 1950. Translations of later novels and short stories were done by Isaac himself with the help of a host of women translators – “Elaine Gottlieb, Mirra Ginsburg, Laurie Colwin, Nancy Gross, Elizabeth Pollett, Elizabeth Shub, Dorothea Straus and Dvorah Telushkin”25 – as well as his nephew, Israel Joshua’s son Joseph, who co-translated The Manor and The Estate.

A further breakthrough came with the publication, in 1953, of the short story Gimpel, the Fool, “discovered by two literary critics, Eliezer Greenberg and Irving Howe, [who] were preparing an anthology of Yiddish short stories, [a treasury of Yiddish stories] to be published in English translation.” The translation was done by a hard-pressed and very busy Saul Bellow and the story was published in the Partisan Review in May, 1953. According to Noiville, “the readers of the Partisan Review were immediately captivated” and, although Isaac apparently showed Bellow no gratitude (much to Bellow’s chagrin), “it was thanks to Bellow [that] Singer had bridged the gap between Yiddish and English, between the Old World and the New.” 20

From now on Isaac moved from strength to strength, gaining popularity, fame and wealth, as well as being awarded two American National Book Awards and culminating ultimately in the Nobel Prize for Literature on 10 December, 1978.

Perhaps we should look at a few choice quotations of sayings/utterances by Isaac Bashevis Singer, to give the measure of the man before going on to discuss in the forthcoming second part of this article his “family chronicles”, The Manor, The Estate and The Family Moskat.

I B Singer on free will: “The truth is that the belief in free will is a categorical imperative.  We cannot live a moment without believing in it.” …21

On being a religious writer: “[T]here is a soul and there is a God and there may be life after death. … I feel that our real great hope lies in the soul and not in the body. In this way I am a religious writer.”22

On the Ten Commandments: “No novel, no poem, and no short story can take the place of the Ten Commandments. It is not enough to read the Commandments. You have to practice them. So literature will not do the job”.23

On being a writer: “A writer is “an entertainer in the highest sense of the word. A writer should never set out with the vain hope of saving humanity. His job is to tell a good story…”;24 “The writer of literature is basically not a teacher, but a teller of tales….”;25 “[A] writer should never stray from his roots….The truth is, the more a writer belongs to his own people, the more he belongs to all people. A great artist is always part of his nation, its culture, its history, its aspirations”;26 “A writer should never abandon his mother tongue and its treasured idioms …”27

On the Yiddish language (in the introduction to his acceptance speech on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature): “The high honor bestowed on me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language – a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics; a language that was despised by both gentiles and emancipated Jews”.28

In reply to a question by television host Dick Cavett on 17/7/1978 as to in what respect he considered himself a Jew: “If you ask me really how I am a Jew, I would say that it’s a great problem to me, but since I get up in the morning a Jew and I go to sleep a Jew, I dream like a Jew, I speak like a Jew, I suspect that I must have some Jewish blood in me.”29

And, in a vein of typically Yiddish tragicomic humour, on why he is a vegetarian (he decided to become one in 1962):30 “I am not a vegetarian for the sake of my health, but for the health of the chickens. For the animals, every day is Treblinka”.31

On the man-woman relationship (in an interview by his former translator Laurie Colwin, for the New York Times Book Review, 23/7/1978): “If there is love … there is treachery”.32

And a few selected reasons for why he writes for children: “Number one: Children read books, not reviews. They don’t give a hoot about the critics. Number two:  They don’t read to find their identity…. Number seven:  They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, and witches…. Number nine: When a book is boring, they yawn openly without any shame or fear of authority. Number ten: They don’t expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only adults have such childish delusions.”33

And finally, on death: “At the moment of death, the soul of a simple water-carrier understands more than the greatest living Tsadik [righteous or saintly person.]”34

I conclude with two further quotes. The first reveals the achievement of the man at the height of his popularity, powers and success shortly before he was due to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm. Kresh writes:

Isaac has certainly won the allegedly cold heart of the city of Stockholm, conquering all Scandinavia, apparently, with his wit, his charm, his presence of mind. The stooped little man in the black overcoat is a strange sort of hero for the land of the Vikings. And he is entirely conscious of the mythic quality of his popularity here – the cheder boy from a Krochmalna Street tenement who made it all the way to the foremost literary honour in the world and soon will be dining with royalty at a banquet table.35

The other anticipates the quality and tenor of Singer, the man and writer, two months before he made his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Writing about the new Nobel Laureate in The New Republic (21/10/1978), Maureen Howard predicted: “He will speak as he writes … as a man who is in touch with his language and his people – the living and the dead.”36

 

Gloria Sandak-Lewin, a frequent contributor to Jewish Affairs, is a poet and writer living in Cape Town. She has published two books of poetry, My Father’s House (1985, 1997) and 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). She has taught, tutored and lectured in English Literature at Herzlia High and the University of Cape Town. This article is the first part of a longer piece, the next instalment of which will appear in a future issue of this journal.

 

Notes

  1. B. Singer, ‘Author’s Note’ at the beginning of The Estate (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.)
  2. Paul Kresh, Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Magician of West 86th Street: A Biography (New York: The Dial Press, 1979), pp361-2.
  3. , p203.
  4. Alexander, E, Isaac Bashevis Singer (Boston: Twayne Publishers, Division of G.K. Hall & Co., 1980), p83.
  5. Noiville, F, Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life, translated from the French by Catherine Temerson, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, First American Edition, 2006, p13.
  6. Kresh, p16. For a fuller and amazingly detailed discussion of the paradoxes in I. B. Singer see pp388-9.
  7. , p41
  8. Noiville (p56) says that Isaac was twelve at the time while Alexander (p16) gives 1914 as the date when Isaac was given Crime and Punishment, which would have made him ten years old.
  9. Alexander, p16.
  10. Noiville, pp.43-4.
  11. Kresh, p147. According to Joseph, Israel Joshua’s son, Poles and Jews lived so far apart in Warsaw that ‘The Yiddish literary world became a tightly knit family where everyone knew everyone else. There was the Writers’ Club, where they all hung around, ate their meals, made their assignations, even slept – did everything and really led a lively, busy, active kind of life. They had their theatres, their cafés, their clubs. I don’t think they made much money, any of them, and you would think they might have been unhappy, because it was all hopeless, they were all doomed. But there was a kind of spirit of hope and gaiety which cannot be explained by any logical theory.  It was the gaiety and the hopefulness of people who had lost hope.’ 12 Information partially provided by Alexander, p19.
  12. Noiville, p18.
  13. , pp17-18.
  14. , pp19-20.
  15. Kresh, p35.
  16. Noiville, p85.
  17. “[A] literary idol of Isaac’s whom he met one spring day in 1924 when the two were standing in the only warm place in the Writers’ Club, near a wall heated by an oven in the restaurant next door”, Kresh op. cit. p90.
  18. Kresh, p117.
  19. Noiville, pp 92-3.
  20. Kresh, p351.
  21. ‘ Isaac Bashevis Singer’, interview by Harold Flender inFall, 1968, featured in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 5th series, 1981, p92.
  22. Kresh, p351.
  23. Dvorah Telushkin, Master of Dreams. A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer, New York: William Morrow and Co., 1997, p207.
  24. , p94.
  26. , p244
  27. Noiville, p139.
  28. Kresh, p354.
  29. , p234
  30. Telushkin, p51.
  31. Kresh, p348
  32. , pp381- 382.
  33. Telushkin, p309
  34. Kresh, p415
  35. , p404

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