Warsaw, 1926-A Memoir
Singer, Isaac Bashevis
"Warsaw, 1926-A Memoir" Isaac Bashevis Singer Warsaw, 1926—A Memoir Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose fiction is covered with distinction, is currently writing what he terms...
...n Mount of Olives sheep were grazing under the k../ watchful eyes of two Arab shepherds, careful to keep the flock from straying among the tombs of the prophets...
...My having moved in with Sabina seemed to me even more than foolish...
...When Sabina heard what I had done, she said that I wasn't merely deranged but also suicidal...
...My only fear was that my brother shouldn't find out what I was doing...
...Afterward, NO= I told a journalist at the Writers Club what had happened, he told me that I was a dunce...
...It was a tiny room with a window facing a blank wall...
...She lived next door to a friend, a young man who was in the last stages of consumption and could last another six months at best...
...My face was pale and often as white as that of someone who has just gotten up out of a sickbed...
...completely unfamiliar to me...
...I knew that it was my fault...
...I read books about biology and was particularly interested in the debate between the mechanists and the vitalists, the Lamarckists and the Darwinists...
...I suffered from colds and no matter how many handkerchiefs I had, they were always soiled...
...Women constantly corrected my Polish, pointed out that my tie was crooked, that my trousers seemed about to fall off at any moment, and that my shoelaces were untied...
...My leaving to take a room at Dr...
...Delusions of Trotskyite provocateurs...
...7 / MAY 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer Warsaw, 1926—A Memoir Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose fiction is covered with distinction, is currently writing what he terms the "spiritual autobiography" of his youth, concerning his early literary career in Warsaw before he emigrated to the United States in 7935...
...Well, but terrible tidings emerged from the land of socialism...
...Meir Milner snarled along...
...She put out the lamp and grew immediately silent...
...I said: "Really, I don't know how to thank you...
...I was afraid lest she die in the night...
...The little hair left on my head was fiery red...
...Let me contrast this vignette with a different experience...
...I should have admitted this to Sabina, but I saw that she was tired of flighty affairs and that she longed with all her womanly instincts for a husband, a home, and children...
...This Sabina didn't speak of romantic love as had Gina or Stefa...
...On the telephone the editor proposed this revision to me...
...The whole thing sounded like a bad joke...
...He read each day's installment and pointed out again and again that this was opium for the masses to lull them from the struggle for a just order...
...The most important thing for a young writer was to have a clear head, not to have to constantly fret about money...
...I asked her if she wanted to accompany me to the synagogue to hear the blowing of the ram's horn, and she replied: "What for...
...She too couldn't live like her righteous forebears...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL...
...Whole families got by on such an amount...
...She had apparently swallowed a number of sleeping pills and had sunk into a kind of coma...
...Don't use any difficult words...
...Although Sabina was leftist-oriented, she hadn't yet decided whether she was a Stalinist, a Trotskyite, or an anarchist...
...She had been prescribed injections and a diet of liver which she ignored...
...Go home and get to work...
...Alpert's had convinced her that all the hopes she had placed in me had been foolish...
...There was no electricity in the house, only gaslight...
...She thought of me as a son...
...She confided to me that Gina was hardly as sick physically as she assumed...
...She told me that I was the best boarder she had ever had...
...To The American Spectator May 1978 5 her, a boarder wasn't someone who merely paid his rent—she had to feel a rapport toward someone with whom she shared a roof...
...Sabina's fiancé (as he was known in the house), Meir Milner, only sought to engage me in debates...
...I didn't have any possessions outside of my few books and manuscripts...
...He wrote poems in Polish...
...Although I didn't follow in the path of my pious parents, I had retained an ideal of a wife as my parents conceived it—a decent Jewish daughter, a virgin who after the wedding would serve if not one God at least one man...
...I knew full well that playing around with women meant toying with lives, but I lacked the character and the strength to heed the voice of my conscience...
...Mottel was a fervent Stalinist and he had come to heckle and maybe even throw a rotten potato or egg at the speaker...
...If you need an advance, you can get one right now...
...He worked a half-day as an assistant bookkeeper in a button factory...
...The rule of law, such issues as juvenile delinquency—these are the daily ingredients of a law officer's life, in Israel as in any other western democracy...
...My worries about a living had ceased so long as the novel would run, but Sabina's brother Mottel accused me of contributing to yellow journalism...
...In the Balfour Declaration which wasn't worth the paper it was written on...
...Sabina was ready to give me back the few zlotys I had given her as a deposit, but I wouldn't hear of it...
...He had been arrested twice...
...He had a low forehead and a thatch of pitch-black, curly hair...
...I attended a meeting at the Writers Club at which this Isaac Deutscher was the speaker...
...The strongest among them seized huge areas of the earth...
...They hammered away at me: How can one be a writer if one isn't ready to fight for a better world, equality, freedom, justice, a world without competition and of eternal peace...
...For the countless time I grew astounded over the bloodthirstiness that had been aroused among Jewish youth after two thousand years of Diaspora, after centuries of ghettos...
...I wanted to come to her bed at night...
...You're obviously drawn to one of those fancy young ladies of yours, but none of them will be as faithful to you as I've been...
...younger brother, Mottel...
...Sabina was bending over me and her hair brushed my face...
...Write simply, in short paragraphs and with lots of dialogue...
...He hurled sulphur and ashes at Stalinists and right-wing Socialists, at Fascists, and at such alleged democracies as America, England, and France...
...It had never occurred to me that I was such a catch...
...Within the groups, some individuals seized all the power under the guise of democracy while they preached offering the other cheek...
...When you wanted tea or whatever, I was ready to get up in the middle of the night to serve you...
...They kept putting up new munitions factories...
...I'll do everything in my power...
...This was pure nonsense since I didn't earn enough to maintain even one room...
...However, placed on the lowest shelf among the leatherbound law books, and within the minister's easy reach, lay a very businesslike pistol...
...Or had she gained access to secrets denied the healthy...
...How could an honest and sensitive person witness all this and still keep silent...
...I didn't hear her breathing...
...I tried to carry on a conversation with her about the supernatural but she didn't answer...
...What madness to want to turn back the clock of history two thousand years...
...In those days, sixty zlotys came to no more than eleven or twelve dollars, but in Poland this was a big sum...
...No, the world was no accident, no result of an explosion or something similar, as Feuerbach, Marx, and Bukharin contended...
...How could I treat her this way...
...His sister told me that he carried a gun...
...He smiled at me with the geniality of one who wants to grant a favor and rid himself of a burden at the same time...
...I had visited her during the Days of Awe—a sick woman alone in the woods and far from neighbors, from a store, and without a telephone...
...He wrote out a slip of paper for me and showed me where to take it to a cashier, who handed me two hundred zlotys...
...I read the first page and asked: "Will my name have to be used...
...This was no longer the Gina I knew but someone else...
...No names...
...In what, he asked, did I believe...
...We had already kissed and I knew that once I moved into her house she would become my mistress...
...Within the Jewish circles, he castigated the Zionists in all their factions and variations...
...My cheeks were sunken, my ears flaring, my back stooped...
...He spouted jokes, and absurdities that evoked laughter...
...I've forgotten his name, but his image is fixed in my mind—short, stout, with a round face, ruddy cheeks, and amiable, half-sleepy eyes...
...A young man was after her, ready to marry her, but the little love she had felt for him before had completely cooled within her...
...Alpert heard that I was giving up the room, she fell into a kind of panic...
...They gleaned all their information from the Scriptures, a book filled with miracles and legends...
...He was a favorite of the newspaper's owner, perhaps a relative of the owner...
...reminded him about the number of comrades who had gone to the land of socialism only to disappear, but Meir Milner shouted: "False accusations from fascist dogs...
...In the false promises of Leon Blum, Macdonald, Pearl, Diamond, Gompers...
...I lay awake thinking about Gina...
...There was even a chance he might smuggle himself into Soviet Russia or be sent there by the Party...
...Alpert's and Manila's reaction that I blurted: "Well, all right...
...In the League of Nations that had immediately after its formation begun to expire...
...In the chapter that follows he describes his encounters with the movement for World Betterment when it was still a spring flower...
...In the two days that I spent with Gina, Genia and I became so friendly that we kissed when I left...
...I understand that you can use it...
...Sabina had read the works of such modernists as Margerit, Decobra, Zapolska, and she had a high opinion of Emma Goldman...
...Although she was a leftist and I was considered a rightist, we were united by the same passion—to seize every possible, pleasure at any price before we vanish forever...
...During the years preceding World War Two, I was a foreign correspondent The American Spectator May 1978 7...
...It appeared to be a thousand pages long...
...I generally wasn't inclined to marriage and even if I had been, it certainly wouldn't be to someone like Sabina...
...Well, but I had already had two residences when Gina was still living in Warsaw...
...Alpert and Manila, God had sent me this source of income...
...he asked me...
...Deutscher said that the fact that Zionism could attract millions of Jews merely demonstrated the degeneracy and hopelessness of the bourgeoisie...
...He had also mentioned that I could translate from the German...
...Among those who came to the lecture were Sabina and her Isaac Bashevis Singer's most recent short-story collections are Passions and A Crown of Feathers, which won the National Book Award...
...No, this time it wasn't my brother but someone else who had told the editor of Radio that I had displayed a talent for writing...
...Oh, this is a stroke of luck for me...
...Sabina frequently complained to me: "How it happened that such a child should come out of our pious family is something I'll never understand...
...During the day she occasionally erupted in a wet cough but that night I didn't hear so much as a rustle from her...
...And soon there was nothing left to say...
...Manor East by Middle East A lesson in Middle East geography—and Israeli survival...
...6 The American Spectator May 1978 Late at night I went to sleep...
...But somehow I had the feeling that a God Who tolerated my insanities wouldn't forsake me...
...They called him the renegade, fascist, sellout, capitalist bootlicker, imperialist murderer, provocateur...
...Why did He allow poor people to jump from trolleys and lose arms and legs, or Gina to die of consumption, or innocent children to burn to death by falling kerosene stoves...
...Suddenly, I awoke...
...The novel didn't have to be merely translated but adapted in such a way that the action was shifted to Warsaw and the heroes and heroines became familiar Jewish men and women...
...He would tell his fellow writers and they would have something to laugh at...
...He kept on needling me...
...Had she lied earlier about her communications with the dead and now no longer sought to deceive me...
...Millennia rather than centuries meet here in a perpetual clash of incongruities, the most striking mark of this beautiful land...
...He allowed his sister and mother to support him...
...Since my brother was a correspondent for an American newspaper, I had some connection with America...
...and beyond them, interspersed among the graceful houses, were the new monstrosities, the gleaming hotel towers, their artless white an affront to the soft pink of the city (Jerusalem has been built almost entirely of the local Judean stone of roseate hue...
...I felt so touched by Mrs...
...11, NO...
...He took a thick German book out of a drawer...
...He would have scolded me like a father...
...But I was too proud to do something like that...
...I hoped to rouse a passion within her and to make her talkative one last time, but Gina said that she must sleep alone...
...Well, and what would I do with two rooms...
...He ran around with rich girls who were drawn to Communism and he took money from them, allegedly for party causes He was a big eater and able to quaff numerous mugs of beer and sleep fourteen hours at a stretch...
...Sabina's mother would serve me lunches cheaply...
...He pounded his fist on the podium and his audience of Trotskyites encouraged him with thunderous applause...
...If the novel catches on, you'll get more work from us...
...She was ready to keep me on without paying rent, she claimed...
...She sat there and waited for death...
...It seemed that my type of conspiracy required two addresses...
...Shelves upon shelves of books—Ottoman law, British common law, Israeli law, all equally F. S. Manor is senior editorial writer for the Winnipeg Free Press...
...He was willing to bet that he would raise me at least forty zlotys a week on the spot...
...Doctors who had examined her had agreed that she suffered from anemia, but it wasn't the kind of anemia that necessarily killed...
...As you understand...
...The problem was, however, that the Yiddish reader wouldn't accept a novel with a locale as alien as Berlin with its strange-sounding streets...
...I came from a house which knew of no diplomacy...
...She often derided the institution of marriage as antiquated and held that the man of the future wouldn't make contracts for lifelong love but would conduct himself according to the dictates of nature...
...He came from some town in the Lublin region...
...A room had become vacant in their apartment and the rent was half of what I was now paying...
...Manila the maid also flushed, and turned sulky and tearful when she heard I was moving out...
...The office of the Israeli Minister of Justice was very much like the office of any prominent lawyer...
...I had the feeling that whatever I said to her would constitute a burden...
...You'll supply us some ten thousand words a week...
...Isaac Deutscher, who had become a Trotskyite, revealed many Stalinist outrages in his little magazine—the slave camps, the liquidation of the old Bolsheviks, the rigged trials and purges which had already taken the lives of millions of innocent people...
...But at the back of the minister's mind, indeed everybody's mind here, is the paramount concern with sheer physical survival...
...Well, and from where had the Zionists concluded that Palestine belonged to the Jews...
...Whenever I glanced in the mirror I always grew half frightened of my own face...
...She had almost stopped talking...
...The chapter printed here forms part of the second volume of Singer's spiritual autobiography, A Young Man in Search of Love, text copyright ©1978 by Isaac Bashevis Singer, published by Doubleday & Co., Inc...
...He told me to come to his office and I didn't walk but ran...
...She came each morning to visit and brought food she had bought for Gina...
...I wasn't tall or handsome, and I spoke a poor Polish...
...Somewhere inside, the Polish Jews sensed that they were doomed...
...My earnings were so meager that I could no longer pay for my room at the eye doctor's on Zamenhof Street and Miss Sabina proposed that I move in with her family...
...Was this socialism...
...Sabina had read some of my stories and she believed in my literary powers if I could only find the right direction...
...He had left a number where I was supposed to call him right back...
...But Deutscher had a powerful voice...
...Genia liked to talk...
...If Lamarck and his disciples were correct in that acquired traits are inherited, every Jew should have emerged a hundred percent pacifist...
...In brief, a wife like my mother...
...Sabina spoke to me frankly...
...I had been struggling along as a proofreader and translator and suddenly I had become rich, even if burdened down with work...
...0 F.S...
...That night I had slept an hour or two...
...He handed it to me and said: "Glance through it...
...My name had been mentioned in a Polish-Jewish newspaper she read and it was an honor for her to have such a person in her home...
...But if I moved in with her, sooner or later he would remove himself...
...When Mrs...
...In the distance shimmered the two cupolas, the silver cupola of the el-Aqsa mosque where President Sadat went to pray, and the golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock...
...She couldn't drop him all at once since he was madly in love with her and was, despite his Leninist convictions, capable of killing himself...
...had chosen but two idols that I would be willing to I serve: the idol of literature and the idol of love, but many of my colleagues both in and out of the Writers Club' invariably served the idol of World Betterment...
...Unless he is a bastard...
...Why didn't you bargain with him...
...He advised me to call the editor and demand more...
...I awaited a miracle and a miracle came...
...I'll stay with you, my dears...
...I walked into the Writers Club and the woman at the door told me that the editor of the afternoon paper, Radio, had telephoned me...
...In a second I decided to hold on to both rooms...
...One death isn't enough for them...
...The Stalinists tried to outshout him...
...I had light-mindedly broken up a match between two young people...
...In Wilson's hypocritical manifesto...
...Deutscher had overwhelming proof that Leon Trotsky would have handled things differently...
...Modern Jews and Muslims should be born circumcized...
...valid in this country that since time out of mind has been the bridge between Europe, Asia, and Africa...
...Had my brother again tried to get me a job...
...The editor had just acquired an exciting novel from Germany, where it had enjoyed a huge success...
...Genia's brother was a doctor in Warsaw...
...I had taken on so much work that I was constantly behind...
...I listened to these reproofs in amazement...
...I had been raised to believe that haggling and praising your own work and asking for a raise after a deal had been made was beneath human dignity...
...I gushed, knowing the whole while that it is poor business to show how eager you are for a job...
...Was this the ideal postulated by Marx, Engels, Lenin...
...The editor said: "We'll give you sixty zlotys a week...
...The capitalist countries fought wars on account of oil...
...I had nothing to move out and nothing to move in...
...She toldme that doctors—her brother concurring—had given her a year to live...
...Strangely enough, she had formed a friendship with a woman in Otwock who was also consumptive and with whom she was more open and talkative...
...Because I didn't want to disappoint Mrs...
...I had blurted out that I didn't believe in historical materialism and he had promptly become my enemy...
...After talking to us—a small group of Canadian newsmen—for some time with a lawyer's fluency and clarity of mind, the minister explained that he had to attend a cabinet meeting called to deal with such mundane matters as juvenile delinquency...
...Mottel Duck had already served time at the Pawiak prison for his Communist activities...
...But why didn't He reward deeds nobler than mine...
...He had dropped out of the Gymnasium and gone off to Palestine where he had struggled for two years, suffered from malaria, and come back a dedicated Communist...
...I always kept your room spotless, not even a speck of dirt...
...He excused himself, stacked his papers into his briefcase, and then, in what seemed a reflex gesture, reached for his pistol and put it atop his papers...
...Mottel was something of a buffoon...
...The editor was paying me half of what other writers of this kind of work were getting...
...I took care of your phone calls and all your dates...
...Weak as she was, she had made up a bed for me on a cot in the same room where she slept...
...The Radio, like the other Yiddish newspapers, printed suspense novels...
...Mottel was short and broad-shouldered, with thick lips, a broad nose like a duck's (he actually was nicknamed Mottel Duck), and small, piercing eyes under bushy brows...
...Let me begin with two of them...
...Although I felt doubts about God, His benevolence and providence, I offered up silent praise to Him...
...She complained to me: "What bad did we ever do you that you're running away from us...
...Lies fabricated by the reactionary pigs...
...I belonged to a generation which no longer believed in free will and which based everything on circumstances, ideologies, and complexes...
...She might have calculated that in time I might tear myself away from Poland...
...He was blond, blue-eyed, snub-nosed...
...Let them burn like a wet rag, slowly," interposed Mottel the wag, "there is one cure for them—to be made a head shorter...
...It was half-dark in there even on the brightest day...
...Her eyes filled with tears...
...I had resolved repeatedly and warned myself not to have anything more to do with this Sabina, but I did the opposite...
...Gina no longer wanted to live...
...Had she given up her belief in the immortality of the soul...
Vol. 11 • May 1978 • No. 7
