{"id":134568,"date":"2019-03-18T09:00:26","date_gmt":"2019-03-18T13:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=134568"},"modified":"2019-03-19T13:39:32","modified_gmt":"2019-03-19T17:39:32","slug":"isaac-bashevis-singer-from-beyond-the-grave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/18\/isaac-bashevis-singer-from-beyond-the-grave\/","title":{"rendered":"Isaac Bashevis Singer from Beyond the Grave"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

VIDEO STILL OF ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER, BY TETSUO KOGAWA, 1977.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Isaac Bashevis Singer of public consumption\u2014the elderly, distinguished, Yiddish, Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer\u2014projected an air of oblique, quizzical humility, as if he were bemused by the grandiose esteem in which he was held. He endearingly told The Paris Review<\/em> in his 1977 Art of Fiction Interview<\/a>, the year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, that \u201ca story is still a story where the reader listens and wants to know what happens,\u201d and that he knew so few American writers \u201cbecause here in America I find there is no place to meet them.\u201d The younger brother of a celebrated Yiddish author, Israel Joshua Singer, he relished slotting himself beneath Israel\u2019s long-dead shadow. According to that Paris Review <\/em>interview, he listed himself publicly in the Manhattan phone directory, and \u201cwould invite anyone who called for lunch, or at least coffee.\u201d He enjoyed \u201cfeeding pigeons from a brown paper bag.\u201d The interviewer, Harold Flender, writes: \u201cThe first impression Singer gives is that he is a fragile, weak man who would find it an effort to walk a block.\u201d That public persona\u2014inviting, avuncular, warm, and unpretentious\u2014was played with such confidence that the private Singer was able to stand just beside it, unhidden but unnoticed. Despite his appearance of overwhelming physical frailty, Flender tells us, Singer actually \u201cwalks fifty to sixty blocks a day.\u201d<\/p>\n

In nearly every promotional photo of Singer, he seems to have been caught slightly unprepared, standing in the middle of the street, hands clasped awkwardly, like a maladroit foreign uncle. In portraits, he appears caught in the midst of composing himself, midsigh, midgrimace, midsmirk, his face, when in motion, a garden of widening, branching lines: deep-riven forehead wrinkles when the eyebrows arch, cheeks bunched up in a smile, overhanging like mountain crags, casting thick shadows. Yet in these photos his eyes belie the rest\u2014they are steady and very still. They are the eyes of a seer. The joke he is smiling at is also quite serious, his eyes say, that joke is the molten core of his being. Running beneath his genial exterior, feeding it, is a soaring religious notion, unflinchingly held, as if he had seen it with as little ceremony as a cloud or a car. It bursts into the open near the end of his Nobel Prize lecture, when he addresses Yiddish, his native tongue: \u201cThere are some who call Yiddish a dead language, but so was Hebrew called for two thousand years. It has been revived in our time in a most remarkable, almost miraculous way \u2026 Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world.\u201d Singer has reverted to prophecy. He was not an orthodox Jewish believer, but in the end he, like his rabbinical forefathers, did not believe in death. The universe and time were too vast, too wide, too kaleidoscopic, for finality. That is the extent of his prophecy. It is an extension of his humility.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As if in fulfillment of his own prophecy, Isaac Bashevis Singer has been astonishingly prolific in death. An untranslated magnum opus, Shadows on the Hudson<\/em>, was translated into English in 1998, followed by a sequel collection of reminiscences of pre-1914 Jewish Warsaw, More Stories from My Father\u2019s Court<\/em>, followed by a steady, enviable beat of short stories, either unpublished or published in Yiddish but never translated, stories steadily adding to and enriching Singer\u2019s great twin themes: the magical Yiddishkeit <\/em>cosmos wrecked in World War II and the scattered, wandering survivors of that wreckage. In the past two years, Singer\u2019s stories have been published in Harper\u2019s<\/em> and The New Yorker<\/em>. Another, \u201cThe Murderer,\u201d appears in the current spring issue<\/a> of The Paris Review. <\/em>Every few months, it seems, there is a Singer dispatch from beyond the grave, another unlabeled bottle floating in on the tide. Reading his bibliography, one would never guess he has been dead nearly three decades. And there will be more Singer for the foreseeable future, as the editor of his estate told The New Yorker<\/em>: \u201cThere are novels, short stories, memoirs, even plays\u2014some of which appeared in Yiddish and some of which \u2026 exist only as handwritten manuscripts.\u201d Heaps of Singer\u2019s words are wheeling blindly about in library archives, at the bottoms of desk drawers, manuscripts translated by hand on magazine tear sheets, unilluminated microfilm vibrantly uncollected and unclassified. He and his oeuvre refuse to be still. They seem to wend their way to the surface with something like the residue of Singer\u2019s consciousness, or rather with the uncanny pseudoconsciousness of an automaton, set in motion by a now-dead hand.<\/p>\n

Singer\u2019s posthumous stories do not feel like the dregs of an archive\u2014they are fresh, vital, and assured. Describing Maryan Skiba, the eponymous protagonist of \u201cThe Murderer,\u201d Singer captures him in a few broad, confident strokes: \u201cHis flaxen hair reached to the middle of his forehead and stood up like a hog\u2019s bristles. He had a red face, a snub nose with flared nostrils, and round yellow eyes without brows.\u201d There is both a fable-esque simplicity (the splashes of primary color) and a touch of sophisticated irony (the hoggish hair rhyming porcine with the snub nose, the red and browless face), as if Singer were mingling the palette of Henri Matisse with the sensibility of Max Beckmann. It is not the work of an exhausted author. Again, as his estate editor says: \u201cReaders and critics may think of Singer as a dead author, but for those involved in continuing to bring his work to light, he\u2019s very much a living entity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Few authors are better suited than Singer to speak to us from a life-in-death perch. It is a natural extension of himself. In life, he was to the majority of the reading world a sort of walking ghost, a mediated entity, refugee of a disappeared land, writing about a dissipating culture in Yiddish, a language that, if not dead at the time, was then like a cut flower\u2014still vivid and malleable, but consuming its final resources. His most famous stories revolve around shtetl life, or loss-haunted, death-haunted, Shoah-haunted Yiddish refugees at large. Even Singer\u2019s earthiest, most clowning stories are veined with elegy, with lateness, with the heavy sensation of the mourner waking up happy, from a happy dream, as the memory of their loss seeps back in. In his Paris Review <\/em>interview, Singer describes the years of literary silence that overtook him upon arriving in America in the thirties: \u201cMy images were not anymore. Things\u2014I saw thousands of objects for which I had no name in Yiddish in Poland. Take such a thing as the subway\u2014we didn\u2019t have a subway in Poland. And we didn\u2019t have a name for it in Yiddish. Suddenly I had to do with a subway and with a shuttle train and a local, and my feeling was that I lost my language and also my feeling about the things which surrounded me.\u201d Singer describes here a kind of death, the withering of a critical organ, a critical faculty. He eventually emerged from this temporary tomb after the Yiddish homeland he left had been razed, itself another partial death. Singer in his maturity wrote across chasms of death\u2014the phenomenon of death has not seemed to touch his literary output because, in a sense, his stories were always posthumous. Alive, he was somewhat dead; now dead, he is curiously alive.<\/p>\n

This motif of flitting back and forth between blurring realities is one of Singer\u2019s central preoccupations. His stories often introduce an element of the supernatural\u2014a dybbuk, a resurrection, an impossible vision, communication from the dead, spirit possession of animals (the central preoccupation of \u201cThe Murderer\u201d)\u2014only for the question of that element\u2019s reality to become the driving concern of the narrative. Often there is a fear of insanity, the specter of our concept of reality being irrevocably torn. In \u201cInventions,\u201d a narrator who cannot sleep through the night tells the story of Morris, a doctrinaire Communist theoretician who feels a ghost pulling at his bedsheets one night. Supernaturalism is forbidden to the rational, religion-inoculated Homo Sovieticus<\/em>, and Morris becomes deranged by this intrusion of superstition into the complete Communist system. He asks, \u201cGod in Heaven, can there really be demons? In that case everything falls apart.\u201d Still in the grip of his haunting, the narrator tells us: \u201cHe has one hope\u2014that the whole thing was a dream. But something tells him that he knows the difference between dreaming and reality \u2026 Outside, a trolley car passes by, and he can hear the scraping of the wheels. Reality still exists.\u201d In the morning, Morris sees evidence of only his own tugging on the sheet; nevertheless, he falters in his next speech, undermined by lingering uncertainty. As for the reality of the vision, the narrator proposes: \u201cIt is possible for a man to dream while awake.\u201d Many Singer stories end on this conditional note, a sort of epistemological shrug.<\/p>\n

In \u201cOne Night in Brazil,\u201d Lena, a prewar Warsaw acquaintance of the narrator (who is also the wife of the pathetic failed Yiddish writer the narrator has come to Brazil to meet) is convinced a dybbuk has invaded her stomach\u2014the narrator feels it, and believes it a tumor or a psychosomatically induced mass. She then attempts to seduce the narrator, telling him a dybbuk resides within him as well, begging his dybbuk to kiss hers, and despite his ardent desire to leave, to escape her insanity, it seems his dybbuk does rise, and \u201ceven while I made this firm decision I put my arms around Lena.\u201d The narrator had ceded control to his own dybbuk, or to something beyond the rational: \u201cI wanted to say I didn\u2019t understand it. Instead, I said, \u2018It seems that life and death have no common border. Life is total truth and death is total lie.\u2019\u2009\u201d Back in New York, the narrator is snowed under by both manuscripts from the writer and love letters from Lena, who tells him of cosmic vibrations and telepathy. Finally, the narrator learns that Lena has indeed been killed by her tumor. Of his own dybbuk, his involuntary mystical pronouncements, the narrator provides no final verdict.<\/p>\n

Humble uncertainty is the ethic of life in Singer\u2019s work\u2014to know reality is death, perhaps the only death. Singer fittingly expresses this conviction in simultaneous, seemingly opposite ideological grammars. In his work, there is the deeply biblical notion of the real as forbidden and unapproachable, incinerating. God cannot be gazed upon directly, even by Moses. Lot\u2019s wife is punished for gazing upon God\u2019s wrath. God\u2019s name itself is secret. And alongside that suprarational fear is the bedrock modern value of skepticism and constant inquiry, of knowledge as a forever unfurling process whose only enemy is a closed, certain mind. Thus in \u201cThe Cafeteria,\u201d one of Singer\u2019s best-known stories, the narrator, immediately after citing Kant, ne plus ultra of rationalism, can say, \u201cEsther didn\u2019t sound insane. She had seen a piece of reality that the heavenly censorship prohibits as a rule. She had caught a glimpse behind the curtain of the phenomena.\u201d Elsewhere the narrator asks, rhetorically, \u201cIs there no death? Or is there no life?\u201d The very questioning is Singer\u2019s demonstration of an answer. As Singer told The Paris Review<\/em>: \u201cI feel that in spite of all our sufferings, in spite of the fact that life will never bring the paradise we want it to bring, there is something to live for. The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself life is worthwhile living.\u201d It is life\u2019s unfinished nature, our incomplete understanding, that gives it its essential degree of freedom.<\/p>\n

The phenomenon of Singer\u2019s posthumous productivity is like something out of a Singer story: a writer dies, but his stories continue to appear in the best magazines every few months. Not only that, but also a novel and, funnily enough, a sequel to a memoir\u2014more life! Alive or dead? He has dashed back and forth across the line. The public demonstration of his humility, that things are beyond our understanding always, is dependent on his own self-effacement, his death. And there is the irony that his prolific posthumous output is in large part due to the deadness of the language whose resurrection he prophesied, the great backlog of stories in Yiddish left untranslated for want of speakers and readers and translators. Yiddish\u2019s dying allows him to seem alive now, and this posthumous burst of publishing energy in turn helps keep Yiddish alive\u2014some of the unrevealed treasures of Yiddish are ones that he himself hid away. Life and death, in this case, indeed seem to have no common border. Every new Isaac Bashevis Singer story is another question, another complication, another vivifying mystery.<\/p>\n

Read Isaac Bashevis Singer\u2019s \u201cThe Murderer\u201d in our Spring 2019 issue<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Matt Levin is a writer living in Uganda.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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