A Kaddish for Singer

...Isaac Bashevis Singer 1904-1991 A Kaddish for Singer Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel laureate who died in Miami Beach in July at the age of 87, lived in the yenne well of ghosts and spirits—unhappy dybbukim and mischievous, often wicked, sluydim.* His novels and short stories offered his unmistakably personal mixture of the humdrum and the metaphysical that critics may one-day call Singeresque...

...found themselves invited by him into conversations on subjects such as the immortality of the soul...

...He always claimed that he had never seen a ghost or a demon—"and how I regret it...

...His complexion suggested the texture of an old parchment, but his blue eyes sparkled and his hands and fingers playfully circled and twisted in the air...

...Please, tell me a story," he was in the habit of coaxing even casual acquaintances, and to have dinner with Singer meant an invitation to enter his fiction and to try on the roles he prompted, ever so gendy and craftily...

...He suggested that people discount what they think may be messages from another world and follow instead what their senses tell them in the full light of the day...

...Will we ever see his like again?'In one of his most memorable novels, The Magician of Lublin (Noonday, 1960), Singer declared through his hero, Yasha, who was part thief and part saint: "Only the body dies...

...The body is like a garment...

...Born in Poland in 1904, I. B. Singer escaped the Holocaust by immigrating to the United States in 1935...

...Isaac looked as baffled as a child seeing a treasured vase smashed into smithereens when he was once told that his brother Joseph lacked the fire he had...

...The soul lives on...

...Singer admired Balzac and Tolstoy, and said that he could never measure up to his older brother Joseph, who followed the European school of academic realism as exemplified by Thomas Mann...

...When a garment becomes soiled or threadbare, it is cast aside...

...He bowed only to nature, which he equated with God, and, like the ancient Greeks, he invested birches and crows, snowfalls and thunderstorms with supernatural powers...

...He believed in dreams and reincarnation the axiomatic way merchants believe in the laws of supply and demand...

...On the other hand, men often * Yenne welt (other world), dybbukim (wandering souls), sheydim (devils...

...Charles Fenyvesi...

...He wrote in an earthy Yiddish that many of his readers complained was too simplistic and even coarse, and he lectured in an easygoing, graceful, witty English...

...In suburban American homes and in New York and Miami cafeterias, Singer never gave up his search for sparks of long-lost souls from Jewish Poland...

...He excelled both as a realist and as a fabulist...

...He was discovered by the likes of Esquire and Playboy and started to become a celebrity in the late 1950s, after Saul Bellow translated into English one of his greatest novellas, Gimpel the FooL Nevertheless, to the end of his life, Singer remained a visitor to these shores—a storytelling guest living off his memories of another land and another time...

...In his "The Spinoza of Market Street," Singer characterized writers like himself, "dreamers who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid nets from unspun threads...

...Modest to the point of self-effacement, he was an avid listener, and he was not above eavesdropping...

...The son and grandson of rabbis and a student of a renowned talmudic academy of Poland, he did not follow the rules and practices of traditional Judaism...

...But his writing told another story: "Whatever doesn't really happen is dreamed at night," said his character, Gimpel the Fool, one of Singer's many pcrsonas who liked to say, with a sigh, "What's the use of not believing...

...Perhaps in style and content the artist closest to him was the Jewish-French painter Marc Chagall, born in Vitebsk, Russia...

...Singer was a sly magician who fielded questions from his earnestly questing audiences with more questions, recommending skepticism and rationality...

...A frail, slender figure impeccable in a dark suit, Singer frankly enjoyed the limelight and the lectern...

...Though by the 1970s he did occasionally venture into writing about contemporary Jews in America, his finest works depicted Polish Jews—tormented rabbis and light-hearted thieves, adulterers and innocents—who battled demons from past centuries...

...he used to cry out aloud— and he tried to fool the world into believing that all he wrote was "only literature," which he defined in one conversation "as dreams, only dreams, nothing more, and of the thinnest of fabrics...

...He eked out a precarious living as a Yiddish writer, stubbornly rejecting advice to switch to English...

...He was in his 70s when women half his age could still sense his sensual appetite—a recurrent and controversial aspect of the men and women peopling his books...