Cautious Jewish Hopefulness

IT IS SAID that when Isaac Bashevis Singer came to Harvard last year to give a reading from his latest novel that he sounded too much like a whining old Jew. From one of his own stories in this new collection, one gets the impression that Bashevis Singer isn't always well-liked. The story is about a New Year's party for Yiddish writers, and in this seemingly autobiographical sketch, the narrator/author says he has always hated such parties because "Leftists scolded me for failing to promote world revolutions. The Zionists reproached me for not dramatizing the struggle of the Jewish state and the heroism of its pioneers." And his hostess adds to this list of grievances when she says she must defend the narrator against attacks of being snob, cynic, misanthrope and recluse.

The author might be having a little fun in this story, extolling his own virtues by claiming he has many detractors--like, he implies, many great men. But pride and even whining are easily within the range of emotions Isaac Bashevis Singer explores in Passions, and as he says of Eastern European Jews--both those who were destroyed in the Holocaust and those who survived to come to America--"The longer I live with them and write about them, the more I am baffled by the richness of their individuality and (since I am one of them) by my own whims and passions."

Bafflement is surely the least obvious fault of Bashevis Singer's stories. They all resound with a clarity that comes from sparse language and a discerning eye for only the most important details. And through this clarity, a stark precision that has captured the lives of a very small segment of mankind, there comes a kind of broader perspective I can only call wisdom because it seems so rare in the modern short story.

Bashevis Singer is a master story-teller, concerned more with the subject of his tales than with the way they unfold. The only form of self-consciousness is a simple kind, coming from the characters that often tell stories within Bashevis Singer's stories. In "Sam Palka and David Vishkover," for instance, Sam tells the recorder/narrator of his double life as a Park Avenue big-man nagged by his wife and, under the pseudonym of Vishkover, as a simple salesman in the eyes of a naive mistress. Sam's small pauses during the telling of his story, self-conscious caesuras like "Where should I begin?" or "Why drag it out?" or "Why go on?" pretty much mark the limits of the Bashevis Singer's interference in his stories. There's no embellishment here, just the facts presented as straightforwardly as possible. And who should need garnishings with stories like "The Two Sisters," about a man who finds two women just after the war--one refined, the other like an animal--and lives with them in a polygamous relationship; or "The Witch," about an ugly schoolgirl who wishes for her teacher's wife to die, and then seduces him?

MEMORABLE CHARACTERS here--like most of Bashevis Singer's more important character sketches elsewhere--derive the most rudimentary aspects of their personalities from being Jewish. "Hanka" is the story of a mysterious woman by the same name whom the first-person narrator meets in Argentina. She lived in the ghettoes of Warsaw during the Nazi occupation--saved only by her Gentile lover on the "Aryan side" of the city. Despite surviving the Holocaust, her experience living in a hidden closet, every minute fearing capture and torture, has convinced Hanka that she is dead: "Those who stood at the threshhold of death remain dead," she says.

Throughout these stories the Holocaust has left an indelible impression on the lives of its survivors, even those who escaped its wrath beforehand. So just as the first-person narrator describes a woman's eye in "Sabbath in Portugal" as having "an embarrassment and a modesty which I did not know still existed," and then recalls his first love "whom I had never dared kiss, and who had been shot by the Nazis in 1943," so too, aging Harry Bendiner in "Old Love," thinks himself a fool to believe in God "After what happened to the Jews in Europe."

But for Bashevis Singer nothing could be worse than to become obsessed with the Holocaust. In "The Yearning Heifer," a Polish immigrant praises the writer/narrator for his column in the weekly Yiddish paper. "The news is all bad. Hitler this, Hitler that. He should burn like a fire, the bum, the no-good. What does he want from the Jews?" But this passes quickly from the story--as deeply and sincerely as it is felt--so the narrator can talk about his main subject.

Because of this attitude toward the Holocaust--one that acknowledges the scope of its horror and its scars, but one that also recognizes the fact that it is in the past--Bashevis Singer can bring his memory to bear on the very culture the Holocaust helped to destroy. And this is where he's at his very best, when he's describing his first forage outside his home town in the Old Country ("A Tutor in the Village"); or telling about the nicknames given to people in Polish villages, names like Haim Bellybutton, Yekel Cake, Sarah Gossip, Gittel Duck and--for a sinister Calvinist-type--Benjamin Fatalist ("The Fatalist"); or describing holiday revels ("Passions"):

The women had cooked huge pots of cabbage with raisins and cream of tartar. They had baked strudels, tarts, all kinds of fruitcakes. The burial society gave a banquet and mead was poured like water. One of the elders who had special merit in the eyes of the community was honored by having a pumpkin with lighted candles placed on his head, and being carried on the shoulders of the people to the synagogue yard. Bevies of children, the holy sheep ran after him baaing.

The two most striking stories in this sense are "Errors" and "Passions," each a kind of story-telling session among a group of men, evolving from simple tales into more complex elaborations on the same basic themes: mistakes and obsessions. In "Errors" the first of these two tales have been told when Meyer Eunuch, the wise one, interrupts to say that neither were really about errors, but willful malice, and then relates the story of a young man in rabbi school who makes a mistake so bad that his teacher says: "You want to be a rabbi? A shoemaker you should be." The point of the story is that even though the man takes this advice literally, and becomes a cobbler, all works out in the end, because as Eunuch says, errors, like everything else, "come from divine sources."

In "Passions," the same thing happens: Eunuch interrupts two very beautiful stories--one about Lieb Belkes who thinks so much about Israel that one day he leaves his village and walks there, and another about a simple tailor who becomes a great biblical scholar in only twelve months' time. And Eunuch tells of a rabbi so obsessed with Yom Kippur that he decides to celebrate it every day of the year. This is the strangest of all desires in Passions, most of which are earthy--the desire that is finally closest to being Bashevis Singer's one abiding passion. For as Meyer Eunuch says, "Everything can become a passion, even serving God."