The Last of the Yiddish Mohicans
SUNDEL, ALFRED
The Last of the Yiddish Mohicans THE SPINOZA OF MARKET STREET By Isaac Bashevis Singer Farrar, Straus & Cudahy. 214 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by ALFRED SUNDEL Contributor, "Western...
...Disregarding an occasional date, the non-city tales can be read as if they were contemporary with the Tantric Vedas, the Second Isaiah, Dante, Chaucer and Thomas Mann...
...Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, 1957...
...It is a between-the-wars, realistic account of 20th century Jewish life in Warsaw...
...They are the lesser works of a master in an age when masters belong either to the dead or have grown quiet...
...Despite its deletions, The Family Moskat is a Yiddish War and Peace...
...The Magician of Lublin, 1960...
...Such a man is the pantheistically meditative Dr...
...The rural tales are invested with a neo-fairy tale quality, not in a Christianized or Greek sense, but in a Judaicized one, a modern cousin to the Biblical accounts of Job and Joseph the Dreamer...
...The young were tossed in sacks over walls to waiting hands...
...Except that there are scholars among the goats and groats, rabbis who pore over the Talmud and Yeshiva students who can astound their elders with Jewish lore...
...Demons that were lost to literature after Milton's Old Testament borrowings are resurrected again in stark scenes where the reader finds himself eyewitness to the most ancient enemies of mankind...
...Glicka Genendel, liar extraordinaire...
...Two novels have yet to be translated, as well as more stories...
...The record is now clear...
...He stank like a skunk...
...Isaac Bashevis Singer, the last of the Mohicans of Yiddish writers, is the best...
...The plots are often as devious as the ways of God, the old virtues of faith, honor and loyalty upheld although seldom triumphant...
...In 1953, Saul Bellow translated "Gimpel the Fool," which has since become the most popular of Singer's short stories...
...Yet the actions of his rural Jews are so integral to the daily round that the vaporousness of time does not obtrude upon us...
...As a result, an agelessness pervades his scenes, which are often unidentifiable as to century...
...In "A Piece of Advice," we glimpse the angehe in a holy man to whom a Hasid and his Misnagid father-in-law have made a pilgrimage...
...His books are Jewish mosaics, full of strange turns and twists, rich and luminous with color and—to a nonJewish reader or even an assimilated Jew—nothing short of exotic...
...His dark moods of the human soul under siege by all that is foul (as in "The Gentleman from Cracow") are contrasted with the image of his Judaic ideal, a Spinoza-like dedication to learning made not with an oath or a righteous decision but for much the same reason that a star shines in the heavens...
...Fischelson trembled and the Ethics dropped from his hands...
...It lingers on today mainly in Russia, the United States, South America and Israel, a language doomed to extinction...
...When the rabbi came out of his study, he intoned the verses, "Peace be with you," and "A woman of worth, who can find...
...Writing in a near-dead language of his people and their ways —which are no more—he is a veritable lion of Judah who can breathe demonic, divine and earthly life into existence, the purest folk materialist since Gogol, a dazzling spellbinder of a storyteller...
...Then he began the Sabbath table chants...
...Singer's otherworldly concerns sometimes cause him to observe his characters like a grinning sprite astride a moonbeam...
...On the wedding night, "The doctor had explained to her that he was an old man, that he was sick and without strength...
...There followed book publications by Noonday Press: Satan in Goray, 1955...
...Quite different is the experience of the demon-obsessed virgin, Hindele, in "The Black Wedding": "She was thrown upon a heap of mud the devil to whom she was espoused entered...
...it has no future...
...Fischelson reads the Ethics with the attention that other men give to women...
...Money bought life...
...She could see him through her own belly as through a cobweb: half-frog, half-ape...
...Since then, he has worked for the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper...
...He is saved by a husband-hungry, old-maid neighbor, Black Dobbe...
...If these powerful tales fall a cut short of Singer's first collection, it is less to their detriment than to the singular merit of that earlier work...
...It deals with blessedness, the Jewish equivalent of saintliness, in the saint-fool tradition of one who continually forgives the evil done to him out of a gullible, blessed innocence...
...the wind-blown Dr...
...Isaac Bashevis Singer remains relatively unknown because of the isolation imposed by a dying, restricted language...
...The newest addition to this list is The Spinoza of Market Street, a second collection of short fiction...
...Yet the flower of that 600year-old culture is now blooming brilliantly in one of its most remarkable figures...
...The Jewish Daily Forward has been hoarding a treasure...
...When his income is disrupted by war, his physical life deteriorates...
...Aside from his Warsaw epic, Singer's principal focus is on rural Jews living in pastoral Polish towns untouched by radio, automobile or airplane, Jews as remote and uncitified as the Italian peasants of the Abruzzi...
...publication passed virtually unnoticed in the furor over the same publisher's best seller, The Wall by John Hersey...
...He had promised her nothing...
...Instead of concluding, Singer's folk tales seem to offer the last corner of an intricate tapestry to which our eye is directed...
...Reviewed by ALFRED SUNDEL Contributor, "Western Review,' "Perspective," "Retort" In the grim death camps of Nazi Germany, East European Jews met a ghastly end...
...His skull was of copper, his mouth of iron...
...Brought to us from a dwindling medium by various translators, they must surely have lost some of their original value, but we can be grateful for what we have...
...Hindele became pregnant...
...His viewpoint can seem peculiarly time-suspended, celestial, within the marvelous eye of God, seeing all the eras of human history reduced to a single period...
...he cooed like a dove...
...Fischelson in the title story, The Spinoza of Market Street...
...The book was slimmed down from the original by editorial costconsciousness...
...Yiddish culture belongs to the past...
...and—not the least of them—Bashe the Whore, talking on poorhouse straw to fellow human wrecks: "They came to me as if I were a doctor...
...The candle went out...
...The only survivors had fled before or were hidden out by gentiles...
...Here, to a limited audience, much of his fiction made its first appearance...
...In Singer's writing, Jewish ceremony, ritual, superstition, folklore and sacred script form a background for human aspirations and their counterforces to entwine once again like the fabled snake around the Tree of Knowledge...
...The younger brother of the late I. J. Singer (one of the greatest of Yiddish writers), he came to New York from Warsaw in 1935...
...A devil grew inside her...
...European translations have just begun in earnest...
...Of Isaac Bashevis Singer, it can truly be said: Do not let this man pass without honor...
...His body swayed...
...There are few living writers who could hold a Sabbath candle to him...
...Yaretzky, gentile doctor to the Jews...
...His communion with God was so complete that his soul almost left his body...
...Yiddish, the patois language (Middle German-Hebrew-Aramaic) that had developed in Poland since the 15th century, was uprooted as well...
...He can be Biblical, medieval and modern all at once...
...In 1950, Singer's chronicle novel, The Family Moskat, was published in an abridged translation...
...It is also a Menorah candle to the Warsaw Jews before the holocaust, shedding light not on their coldly calculated deaths but on their passionately felt lives...
...Other characters in this volume include the young know-it-all, Shloimele, who rushes into the Kreshev synagogue to confess a perverse sin that rocks the town...
...Nevertheless she returned wearing a silk nightgown, slippers with pompons, and with her hair hanging down over her shoulders...
...His folk are folk, of the masses, a people of faith, industry and perseverance subject to the eternal human conflict forever waged within their breasts...
...It is as to a doctor that readers can come to Isaac Bashevis Singer, for in Hindele, Shloimele and Bashe the Whore we partake of timeless humanity...
Vol. 44 • December 1961 • No. 39
