Isaac Bashevis Singer: life, work, and literary legacy

Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer and "Gimpel the Fool" -- it is not "foolish" to stress the importance of Singer's biography in his writings

According to the Online World Book Encyclopedia, the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer exhibit a kind of Jewish magical realism. Its critical essay on Singer's life and work reads that the author's "best-known tales are romantic or legendary rather than realistic. The narrators in some of his stories are imps or demons. Many of his works combine modern realism with Jewish folklore and fantasy." (Saltzman, 2004) the passions of his main characters "are frequently of a sexual nature," but also have the additional quality of "manias and superstitions, fanatical hopes and dreams, the figments of terror, the lure of lust or power, the nightmares of anguish." Thus, Singer weaves the fabric of everyday life "with wonders, reality spun from dreams, the blood of the past with the moment in which we are living." (Nobelprize.org, 2004)

The magical qualities present in most of his tales, however, does not mean that Singer's life was without impact upon his fiction. Merely because a storyteller's tales have fabulous characteristics does not mean that his life is without features of interest nor had no impact upon his plots. Moreover, the Jewish tradition Singer came from often fused faith and folklore. In the Polish, Hasidic tradition he came from, interpretation and critiques of rabbis blended in with stories from the Torah, the rest of the Hebrew Bible, and apocryphal books. Passions and crazes of Singer "are personified" in the author's works "as demons, specters, ghosts and all kinds of infernal or supernatural powers from the rich storehouse of Jewish popular imagination. These demons are not only graphic literary symbols, but also real, tangible beings - Singer, in fact, says he believes in their physical presence." (Nobelprize.org, 2004)

Singer, a Polish-born rabbi's son was educated in a rabbinical seminary in Poland. Although won the 1978 Nobel Prize for literature for America, he wrote in Yiddish rather than Polish or English. Although he spoke several languages, his truest language of expression was always Yiddish, the language of his mother, "the language of the simple people and of the women." It was the women who "preserved fairytales and anecdotes, legends and memories for hundreds of years past, through a history which seems to have left nothing untried in the way of agony, passions, aberrations, cruelty and bestiality, but also of heroism, love and self-sacrifice." (Nobelprize.org, 2004) However, Singer's works in Yiddish found many notable English translators. The story "Gimpel the Fool," for example "was translated by Saul Bellow. (Britannica, 1997) Publication of the translation in Partisan Review in 1953 "gave a large audience of English-speaking readers" a first, bracing introduction to Singer's fiction.

As Singer was the son of a rabbi, the fact his Jewish education and Polish background form the basis of his writing should perhaps come as no surprise. (Saltzman, 2004) What may seem surprising, though, is that despite the fact Singer's father was a rabbi, much of his son's writings valorize the experiences of the common and uneducated Jewish people who live outside of the dominant communities of Jewish faith. But the elder, Rabbi Singer came from the "Hasid school of piety" that stressed the rabbinical responsibilities as a spiritual mentor and confessor to the entirety of a community, poor and wealthy, irreligious and religious. Thus community folklore and tolerance of the foibles of ordinary Jews had a greater stress in the structure of his father's faith, the community he served, and his son Isaac's writings. (Saltzman, 2004)

Isaac B. Singer's mother also came from a family of rabbis from the same tradition. "The East European Jewish-mystical Hasidism combined Talmud doctrine and a fidelity to scripture and rites - which often merged into prudery and strict adherence to the 1aw - with a lively and sensually candid earthiness that seemed familiar with all human experience." (Nobelprize.org, 2004) His early life and exposure to the personalities of his families, Isaac Singer later said, was "a literary gold mine," even though he may not have realized it at the time he was growing up and suffering from the persecution and hostility of the gentile community. (Singer Centennial, 2004)

Singer's family was quite poor, despite its religiously and socially prominent status. He later said that his early life was a constant education in the rough texture of humanity, as well as the struggle of common Jews. Gimpel, for instance, is "a gullible man who responds to a lifetime of betrayal, heckling, and deception with childlike acceptance and complete faith." "Though aware of his own suffering," Gimpel "is never cynical or resentful. No matter what mishap may befall him, "he retains a steadfast belief in human goodness. He accepts life as it unfolds, with all its paradoxes, "even enduring the constant and flagrant infidelities" of his wife. "Her deathbed confession that none of her children were fathered by him does not alter his love for the children. Gimpel is able to resist the Devil's temptations to take revenge against his deceivers only after Elka's ghost materializes, urging him to continue in the path of righteousness. After his wife dies, Gimpel leaves his family and wanders from village to village as a storyteller. Years later, he waits for death, the one experience by which even he will not be fooled." (Britannica.com, 2004)

The fullness of such the social world of Gimpel is manifest not only in Singer's "Gimpel the Fool," but all of Singer's tales. These tales present their protagonists in "a very Jewish but also a very human world," that appear to include everything from "pleasure" to "suffering" and "coarseness" to "subtlety." A reader may find "obtrusive carnality" and "spicy, colorful, fragrant," refinement, and "smelly, lewd or violent," scenes, are paired with the "sagacity," of the rabbinic tradition and the "worldly wisdom and shrewd speculation," of the upper classes of Jewish society. Thus, magical aspects of Singer's tales does not mean that a sense of realism and the texture of verisimilitude is eschewed by Singer, merely that Singer accepted the fantastic as well as the more obviously realistic as part of Jewish life. (Nobelprize.org, 2004)