A Child's Garden of LB. Singer
Leviant, Curt
CURT LEVIANT A CHIID'S GARDEN OF (LB.) SINGER Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Lau reate, veteran novelist and short-story writer, and perhaps the mosl famous name in contemporary Yiddish...
...But there is deep meaning in these blotches...
...Soon three young men come as guests and they pit their Jewish powers against the black arts and succeed in dis-enchanting the inn and freeing and marrying the girls...
...Mr...
...In his next story collection, When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw, Isaac Bashevis Singer plays fine variation on the fun and spirituality motif with tales of fools, enchanted people, and shlemiels...
...much more has gone into Topsy-Turvy than was told to the author by his mother...
...Literature helps us remember the past with its many needs...
...The Fools of Chelm returns to a favorite theme...
...I have retold them in my own fashion, totally re-creating them in plot, detail and perspective...
...Of course, his prediction comes true, and once again we witness the moral world order that Singer avers in his children's fiction: in God's world charity and goodness outstrip cruelty and evil...
...At this point, the Jew, Joseph, enters the scene...
...Although he rarely deals with contemporary politics, Singer willy-nilly touches upon it here...
...A curious tension between Jewish subject matter and stained glass Christian pictorial art pervades this work...
...It shows the reality from which the stuff of dreams is made: poverty, cold, fear, combined with the heightened experience of being a son of a rabbi and a devoted, imaginative Jewish mother...
...What has happened will happen again...
...They express perfectly the China of our dear Emperor...
...In the Jewish fairy-tale ambience evil contends with good, young rabbis with witches, Jewish scholars with satanic figures, order with chaos...
...He has focused on no special character, nor has he developed a "cute" angle cut to endless variations...
...Here the numbskulls and ninnys of Chelm are put through their paces, waging war no less on a neighboring town...
...Other stories in this collection are nothing but my own imagination...
...The remarks that Singer himself has made in two of his children's books are indicative of his attitude to the craft...
...He has cast into children's fiction East European Jewish stories and folklore (this mode comprises most of his tales) and is especially fond of the shlemiel and the fools of Chelm...
...However, in the children's story, all ends well in China, and the pattern of know-nothingism and now-ness sans substance and purpose is reversed...
...This could be an old bobbe-mayse (grandma's tale), but it also sounds very much like a spoof on totalitarian politics and on modern art, Singer swinging out here at both East and West...
...The baby falls out of the cradle and the rooster escapes...
...In his adult fiction, Singer posits a view that man lives in a universe over which he has no control and wherein he operates without hope...
...Unfortunately, none of his children's books have appeared in the original Yiddish...
...Rooms contain old clothing, toys, dreams...
...For the writer and his readers all creatures go on living forever...
...It tasted so good, he licked the pot clean...
...One tale, "The Washwoman," concerns a poor, old, faithful, gentile laundry lady who would come to the Singer household to pick up the wash and carry it one and a half miles to her house where she washed the pieces by hand...
...Joseph not only saves Koza but falls in love with her...
...The dove lives happily without fighting...
...In stories time does not vanish...
...Only after fulfilling her mission, does she succumb...
...I still demand that a writer should write clearly, should have a story to tell, should write it well, that his people, his heroes should be alive and that the story should be more or less convincing in its own terms...
...The old joke about borrowed items "giving birth" forms the crux of "Shrewd Todie and Lyzer the Miser...
...I'm not fooled by all these cover-ups...
...His mastery of the folk idiom, infused with his own vivid imagination, have made his stories charming and unpredictable...
...In his dream he meets his parents and grandparents in a palace-like structure, wherein things never get lost, and which contains everything he had seen and possessed...
...The two spend three days together and the lad is saved...
...Or: To the untrained eye they may seem to be just smudges, without any form, sense or charm...
...It will take our critics at least one hundred years to fully appreciate its depth...
...A simple tale, no...
...This, the first full-length children's book by Singer, highlights the contrast between his attitudes towards children's reading and adult fiction...
...However, the man is bored almost unto death and he wants out...
...The world order, the struggle between evil and good, is again explored in The Wicked City, Singer's retelling of the famous Abraham-Lot-Sodom episode in the Book of Genesis...
...there is no goodness...
...Yet there is an elemental distinction between his adult and children's fiction...
...Such internal dissension is not described in the children's story, where love has a happily-ever-after ending...
...One of Singer's most tender and psychologically probing stories is "Menaseh's Dream," which creates a classical folk tale dreamworld...
...Satan and his assistants Curt Leviant is the author of The Yeminite Girl published in March 1977 by Bobbs-Merrill...
...A spectrum of Jewish lore, beliefs and holidays, a world of ethics and decency, stories wherein there is little introspection, for event, narrative, is all...
...The struggle between good and bad continues in Mazel and Shlimazel, or the Milk of a Lioness...
...After Shlemiel had finished the pot of poison, he lay down on the bed He was sure that the poison would soon begin to burn his insides and that he would die...
...With such poison I wouldn't mind dying every day...
...Seventy-five years old in 1979, Mr...
...Shlemiel got out the bottle of cider and drank it down to the last drop...
...Nevertheless, the mood is always adult: there is no shying away from horror, ice, or death—even though life and sunshine ultimately triumph...
...neither am I happy with bad writers who call themselves avant-garde and think that if they call themselves by this name their bad writing will be forgiven...
...Finally, Todie borrows the large silver candelabra he had set his eyes on...
...Koza, the beautiful daughter of a Polish tribal chief, is chosen to be the human offering for the annual sacrificial rite in honor of the river god...
...Any collection containing "Zlateh the Goat" and "Fool's Paradise" would have been a superb one...
...There is also a famous Yiddish folktale of a goat that leads a man to Israel via a magical short cut through a cave...
...Good symbol, poor fact, for the dove is quite an aggressive critter, with a killer instinct...
...In the latter, Zla prophesies doom and upheaval if Koza is not sacrificed to the river god...
...All the stories are products of a way of life rich in fantasy and make-believe...
...Mazel and Shlimazel are not merely abstract figures with names, but personalized creations who have a history, even a genealogy...
...Of course, as in all good folk tales, there are seven rooms...
...he brings her into his faith and takes her away from the pagans...
...To the storyteller yesterday is still here as are the years and the decades gone by...
...Convinced that he was about to die, he said to himself, "It's not really so bad to die...
...Singer's next work, Joseph and Koza, or the Sacrifice to the Vistula, accents Polish folklore, so authentically portrayed in his great novel, The Slave (which, to a degree, Joseph and Koza resembles...
...The colorful illustrations by Antonio Frasconi spring out of medieval church illuminations...
...He wakes and finds next to him a lovely girl his age, a dream realized...
...a monkey stuck his divine paw into a mixture of refuse and slime and with one slap made this monumental piece of art...
...Not only is the world of behavior, culture, fashion, education, and government turned upside down, but "those who made fun of the changed order were tortured and hanged...
...With Torah scroll in hand and with his word from Jerusalem he teaches law, humanity, and reason to a superstitious, pagan people...
...this portrait, done in cow dung, is our beloved Emperor, may he live a thousand years or more...
...But behind its apparent simplicity lurks an allusive superstructure...
...Singer's next children's book, The Fearsome Inn, combines the characteristics of a typical Singer children's story ethos (enchantment, young love and marriage, folkloristic groupings of threes) with the spirituality-plus motif: the forces of heaven overwhelm the power of darkness...
...Thirsty now, he goes for the apple cider his wife had put away for the holidays...
...evil a mirror of good...
...The dreamworld of the previous story is not the world of A Day of Pleasure, although there are wishes, longings and dreams in it...
...I am not happy with bad writing which tries to cover up its bad writing with being Jewish...
...After this there is no thought of selling the beneficient animal...
...Singer has wisely chosen Miss Shub to render all his children's literature into English, thereby assuring that a unity of diction and style maintains itself throughout all the books...
...and one book, Mazel and Shlimazel, was translated into Hebrew in Israel...
...and three were runners-up for the Newberry Medal...
...In this captivating story, Singer cleverly harnesses two famous Yiddish concepts, mazel (luck) and shlimazel (ill-luck) and makes these attributes the characters of a cleverly plotted adventure story...
...But in The Slave, for instance, once Jacob has taken Wanda from her pagan surroundings, there are tensions and problems within the Jewish community itself...
...In a foreword to Zlateh the Goat he stated: Some of these stories my mother told me...
...SINGER Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Lau reate, veteran novelist and short-story writer, and perhaps the mosl famous name in contemporary Yiddish literature, published his first children's book in 1966, wher he was sixty-two years old...
...Singer lures the reader into an imaginative Jewish world of fantasy that is more hopeful—as indeed a child is—than the adult's world...
...An avowed traditionalist in literature—Singer believes in story above all, and in structure and well-realized characters—he pokes fun at art in the topsy-turvy world where...
...Of the seven tales in the book, two have elements of Singer's familiar demonic realm, and two are about that mythical East European village, Chelm, which depict the antics of its good-natured lunkheads...
...His son leads it to an out-oftown butcher, but the boy and Zlateh get caught in a blizzard...
...Fool's Paradise" (not a Chelm tale) concerns a man who thinks he's dead until a doctor prescribes a strange cure: the man is to be placed into "heavenly" surroundings...
...Singer's books for young readers quickly won wide recognition...
...He sees a pretty young girl but just then his grandparents tell the boy that he must leave lest he remain there forever...
...Summarizing this story would perhaps take more space than the very brief tale itself...
...Apple cider was expensive, but when a man is about to die, what is the point of saving money...
...What happened long ago is still present...
...An orphaned lad runs away from home to the forest where he falls asleep...
...Singer's children's books have been well translated by the author and Elizabeth Shub...
...Given the same setting in a story for grownups, there would no doubt have been a deeper exploration of evil and an excursus into eras as well: but these two elements are toned down for the youngsters' storybook world, where eternal justice is predictable and all wishes are granted...
...stand in the shadow of every angel...
...With a new emperor in power, ugly is beautiful, ignorance is profundity, boor-ishness is politesse...
...This tale has one of the oldest folk motifs—the impossible-task theme that echoes back into world folklore: pulling the sword out of the stone, changing a room to gold— here: milking a lioness...
...In an inn run by two demonic people, three Jewish girls are permanent slaves...
...Singer neither accepts orthodoxy, nor fanatical free-thinking, which for him is a religious excess of another kind...
...If "Fool's Paradise" resembles a fable, "Zlateh the Goat" reads like a Jewish mashal, or parable, rich in levels of meaning...
...Considering the cultural revolution in Communist China, the anti-Western pronouncement that Beethoven is a purveyor of bourgeois rottenness, and remembering Singer's own expressed views— / look for good writing...
...things: not to let the baby fall out of the cradle, not to let the rooster out of the house, and not to eat the potful of poison on the shelf (actually homemade jam which Shlemiel loves...
...Shlemiel is told by his wife not to do three (naturally three: it's a folk story...
...The contrast between this act and a similar prophecy by the wicked witch Zla in Joseph and Koza is worth noting...
...Shlemiel thinks] But sweet poison is better than bitter...
...Interior scenes look like monk's cells...
...in The Wicked City Abraham prophesies for justice...
...This tale revolves around the advice-that-isn't-fol-lowed folk motif...
...one, A Day of Pleasure, was chosen as winner of the National Book Award for Children's Literature...
...This set of circumstances resembles The Slave, where Jacob removes Wanda from her pagan Polish parents, converts her, and settles with her in the Jewish community...
...Where in earlier books he magically blended folk material and imagination, here the folk material appears skeletal, for the invention is transparent and forced...
...Or...
...Several of the stories, however, have been published in the Yiddish daily, The Forward, to which Mr...
...Weeks, months, pass...
...Since then eleven more children's volumes have appeared, al least one, and sometimes two, every year...
...And he prefaced When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw with: Children are as puzzled by passing time as grownups...
...For ninety days prior to her day of death she is entertained by girl friends (note the parallel to the Biblical story of Jephtha's daughter...
...Fortunately, he finds shelter in a haystack and is sustained by the goat's milk...
...In my writing there is no basic difference between tales for adults and for young people...
...Singer has been wearing his children's hat for thirteen years...
...Well, what can one expect from a shlemiel...
...These are folk tales she heard from her mother and grandmother...
...Fearing his wife's sharp tongue, he decides to take poison...
...A Sholom Aleichem tale, "The Enchanted Tailor," wherein an innkeeper fools an innocent yokel by switching a milk-goat for a billy-goat, serves as one of the plot devices for "Shlemiel the Businessman...
...The parallel is fascinating because it once again highlights the difference between Singer's attitude in his children's and his adult fiction...
...In real life many of the people that I described no longer exist, but to me they remain alive and I hope they will amuse the reader with their wisdom, their strange beliefs, and sometimes with their foolishness...
...In Joseph and Koza, the netherworld evil/pagan forces contend with Jewish/divine ones, and the latter prevail...
...In Singer's books for grownups, innocence is a chimera...
...Oh, the poison tastes sweet...
...Drama is omnipresent, but there is no doubt about the result: prayer is efficacious, hope is requited, Judaism is victorious...
...Singer's shortest children's book is Why Noah Chose the Dove...
...there is no question about the triumph of good...
...The same spirit, the same interest in the supernatural is in all of them...
...he also lambastes the decline of artistic values in a free society in its mad drive for modernism...
...In this tale, set in China, all values are turned upside down (the old belief, perhaps, that the Chinese are upside down at the bottom of the globe...
...When a monumental occasion such as one's 75th anniversary is celebrated, the traditional Yiddish blessing, biz hundert un tsvantsig yor (may you reach your 120th), is mandatory...
...And, of course, besides all this source material, he is able to synthesize the rhythms of plot devices and characters of the traditional folk and fairy tale (characters in groups of threes, enchanted forests, wicked prime ministers, gullible kings, golden-haired princesses, fulfilled wishes) with elements from Jewish folklore (Elijah the Prophet, a dream palace with seven rooms, a magical she-goat, kabbalislic wizardry...
...A Day of Pleasure, the only volume not originally written for children, is a memoir by Singer of his Warsaw childhood, drawn from his adult book, In My Father's Court...
...Yet the theological ambiguity that pervades Singer's novels and stories is curiously absent in his children's books, and the contrast between the two genres is obviously not accidental...
...What happens to a day once it is gone...
...Death and dybbuks and demons are as potent as the viable Jewish tradition, polar opposites that provide a dramatic and spiritual tension to his work...
...The seventh contains events of the future...
...Isaac Bashevis Singer's first book for children, Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, presented the admixture of fun and spiritual engagement that his subsequent children's books would explore...
...Traditional art and traditional ethics are restored...
...Now Shlemiel began to have an ache in his stomach, and he was sure that the poison had begun to work...
...Singer concludes that there are more doves than ferocious beasts in the world and he may very well be right...
...Singer's children's stories are parables—point the way to a better world...
...Singer has here put into parable form his disgust with a rigid political system's tampering with beauty and art, with their opposition (pun intentional) of values, as the Yiddish expression has it, mitn kop arop, upside down, topsy-turvy...
...Patriarch Abraham is a man who does good deeds, and the people of Sodom laugh when he prophesies doom to the wicked city...
...With more pictures (and sprightly hued ones at that) than words, the text can be read in two or three minutes...
...So, then, despite his late entry into the field, Singer has shown his expertise in the genre...
...It is offered herewith, along with the hope for many more delightful children's stories...
...An angelic stranger has the Jesus look, with one outstretched hand, finger out, and the other hand across his chest, as in paintings by Byzantine and medieval Christian painters...
...It should be made clear at the outset that Singer's children's books are by no means writedowns, no Sally-Dick-and-Jane readers, no Poohs...
...This is the only book where the pictures do not harmonize with the text...
...No one could possibly doubt that the man who wrote The Magician of Lublin, Family Moskat, Satan in Goray, and The Slave is the author of these children's books...
...And Singer concludes by saying: Her soul passed into those spheres where all holy souls meet, regardless of the roles they played on this earth, in whatever tongue, whatever creed I cannot imagine paradise without this Gentile washwoman...
...But this Singer volume also has "The First Shlemiel," one of the funniest children's stories I have read...
...In short, the emperor demolishes everything that is held dear...
...Singer's inventions and variations around a classical theme ring somewhat hollow...
...Finally, she staggers back, pale and weary, saying that she had been ill, but that her will to return the family's wash did not let her die...
...Contrary to the pejorative coloration the goat has in Western lore, in Jewish lore the goat has always had positive connotations—from the tsigeleh (little kid) in the most famous Yiddish lullaby, to the Chad Gadya ("One Only Kid") of the popular Passover song, where the kid represents the people/nation of Israel...
...Singer himself has stated in an interview...
...Where are all our yesterdays with their joys and sorrows...
...Zlateh, then, may symbolize the Torah, sustaining the Jews in times of need, but unappreciated until the advent of the hour of stress...
...In the same year that he published Alone in the Wild Forest, an overly plotted, author-manipulated tale, Singer also issued The Topsy-Turvy Emperor of China...
...but, after selling it, he tells the owner that it "died...
...To round out the story, Singer then adds two other nonsensical twists to the ill-luck plagued character: Shlemiel buys a trumpet that is supposed to put out fires and then sells brandy which he and his wife buy from each other, exchanging the same three-kopeck piece till there is no stock left in the barrel...
...I cannot even conceive of a world where there is no recompense for such effort...
...The dove, however, insists that each creature is unique, hence Noah chooses the dove to be his messenger...
...I even mention the same villages and towns...
...In our time, when literature is losing its address and the telling of stories is becoming a forgotten art, children are the best readers...
...But he has also drawn upon Polish folklore, and has even written a Chinese tale which was told to him by his mother...
...Neither do men and animals...
...Todie borrows a big silver spoon from the right Lyzer but when he returns it he adds a teaspoon, saying that the large one had given birth...
...Once the old woman does not return...
...His subject is wide-ranging: in one book he retells a Biblical story, in another, a Hebrew legend...
...The story has a classic, fabular ring to it, with a moral lesson as to benefits of this world over presumed advantages of a fool's paradise...
...Morality wins again...
...After God proclaims to Noah that creation is to be destroyed, all the animals tell why they should be saved...
...Singer is a regular contributor...
...In the same terrain as the adult fiction, demons and witches thrive, but the moral order is not in limbo...
...These tales, however, lack the authenticity of the Chelm folk tales...
...It is in this spirit that I wrote these tales...
...Occasionally, more than one award was given to one book...
...Elijah the Slave is a short tale of a poor man whom Elijah the prophet helps to rise from poverty to riches...
...I am for social justice, but since I am a pessimist and I believe that no matter what people are going to do it will always be wrong and there will never be any justice in this world, I have in my own way given up...
...It is the bird of peace...
...The American Library Association has given its Notable Book citation to three of his volumes (presented only to some sixty out of the 40,000 plus books published annually...
...Here, a poor furrier reluctantly decides to sell his goat...
...And yet, Singer's tale has a distinctive Jewish touch...
...In all of them we find the same direct, unadorned style, the same meticulous attention to story line and characterization...
Vol. 4 • November 1978 • No. 1
