The Image and Other Stories

...nor do they have the rich complexity of "Gimpel the Fool" or "The Spinoza of Market Street," which will surely remain two of his greatest achievements...

...The Zionists of the 1930s, one must remember, had little use for Yiddish novelists...

...an older woman discovers that a former lover from years past is planning to marry his own daughter, whose existence he had never known of...

...Just when we thought he had summed up his oeuvre with the publication of his Collected Short Stories (1982), the Stories for Children (1984), and Love and Exile (1984), a one-volume reissue of his autobiographical trilogy, he comes out with a new collection of tales never published before in book form-for all the world like an exuberant performer who refuses to stop with his final curtain call...

...Most recently this includes a new novel, The Way Home, which has been serialized in the Forward for the past year and a half...

...Like his Yiddish-speaking audience, then, we can feel comforted by his assurance that the storyteller is as much our special property as others...

...The past few years have also seen the publication of the novel The Penitent (1983) and two books for children, The Golem (1982) and The Power of Light (1980), not to mention the novels, stories, and memoiristic pieces published in the Forward and other Yiddish-language periodicals that Singer's English-speaking audience has never seen...

...a paralyzed whore manages to seduce the driver hired to cart her off to the poorhouse, making him abandon his family to run off with her instead...

...Few of these solutions are apt to prove satisfactory in the long run, for Singer is too much of a skeptic not to see the flaws in any scheme of salvation, particularly in political movements...

...In "The Pocket Remembered" and "A Nest Egg for Paradise'-two variations on the same theme-a pious Jew briefly succumbs to sexual temptation and then, stricken with guilt, is ultimately brought to greater holiness and contentment...

...If there is anyone left who is unfamiliar with Singer's work, The Image and Other Stories will serve as well as any of his recent books as an introduction...

...The supernatural, when present at all, is merely a faint echo of the all-too-human passions which these stories explore- pride ("The Mistake"), quarrelsomeness ("The Litigants"), guilt ("The Pocket Remembered," "A Nest Egg for Paradise"), and, most frequently, love...

...A novelist who collaborates so closely with his translators as Singer does, who has spent the past fifty years of his life in America, who knows that the vast majority of his readers are non-Yiddish speakers, must indeed in some measure be writing for the translator, as Singer himself acknowledges in the preface to this new book...

...In fact, although the publisher of this current collection does not mention it, several stories in The Image were published previously in Yiddish-not surprisingly for an author who once told an interviewer that "he does not write for the translator...

...In a graceful bow to the audience at the end of one of his stories, the narrator remarks, "I am forty percent deaf, thirty percent blind, sixty percent senile, but I can still read my lectures, repeat my old jokes, discern a beautiful face, listen to the many secrets that women tell me on the morning after my appearance when we drink coffee and munch toast with jam...

...The mood here is more mellow, the energy somewhat attenuated...

...One wishes Singer many such mornings.such mornings...

...a poor Jewish girl manages to meet the Polish poet she idolizes-only to find her romantic dreams turn into a nightmare of humiliation...

...No wonder there is something ghostlike about these survivors Singer meets up with in his stories-whether in New York, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, or Tel Aviv...

...Such options are not available for many of the characters of these later stories, however...

...To be sure, the stories are not top-notch Singer-but this is merely to say that they do not approach the demonic energy of such early tales as Satan in Goray, "The Destruction of Kreshev," "The Black Wedding," or "The Gentleman from Cracow...

...As far as I'm concerned, however, he's welcome to repeat variations on his act for years to come...

...Having nearly been trampled by a horde of middle-aged women all eager to shake his hand after a lecture, I can personally vouch for their aggressiveness...

...At a time when serious fiction tends toward murky plotlessness, Singer has gone a long way to make Aristotelian values respectable again...

...The English version, he writes, is especially important to him because it is the basis of all subsequent translations into other languages: In a way, this is right, because, in the process of translation, I make many corrections...

...Readers of Singer narratives will notice the repetition of familiar autobiographical settings: Some stories he hears as a child in Warsaw, others as a young writer embarking on his career or as an older writer in a New York newspaper office, or, later yet, as an aged celebrity, still prone to misadventures with his ardent female admirers...

...Although in his autobiography he mentions a period of years after his emigration to America when he was unable to write any fiction, he has grown increasingly prolific in later life, producing work after work with an energy that would astonish a far younger writer...

...If he has not managed to become an English-language novelist like Conrad and Nabokov, those other writers-in-exile from Eastern Europe, he is at least a kind of uncle by adoption to his American readers...

...Here, as elsewhere, many of his stories are devoted to showing the astonishing persistence of sexual passion in all its unlikely forms: In the title story a girl is prevented from consummating her marriage because of the interposed image of her previous fiance...

...Anita Susan Grossman has written for Commentary, the Times Literary Supplement, and other publications...

...Frequently his stories describe the conflicting pulls of worldly and other-worldly concerns...

...The underlying themes, too, remain the same, conforming to a world view that might be described as a mixture of rationalism and mysticism...

...Besides, unlike the other two artists, Singer had a particular reason to keep writing in his native tongue at all costs: to memorialize a language whose speakers had been systematically murdered by the millions in the twentieth century, and to keep alive a literature and a culture which had barely begun to flourish when they were brought to the point of extinction...

...The son of a Hasidic rabbi, Singer has retained a deep affection for the system of belief he rejected as a youth, so that for all his celebration of the passions, he also recognizes the joy that can be reached by immersion in the Torah and a religion based on ritual and self-restraint...

...It may be true that he is a repetitious writer, constantly reworking the same material, as the Yiddish critic Elias Schulman complained in Di tsukunft recently...

...in another, a Polish squire, overcome by grief at his wife's death, digs up the body to sleep with...

...In his fiction and memoirs he is particularly hard on Jewish Communists, who should have known better but who flocked to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, only to perish there...

...Having lost their original religious belief, they seek a variety of substitutes for it-in philosophy (Spinozism), social theories, spiritualism, the secular mes-sianism of politics (especially Communism), or simply immersing themselves in love affairs...

...THE IMAGE AND OTHER STORIES Isaac Bashevis Singer/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/$17.95 Anita Susan Grossman Isaac Bashevis Singer's latest book of stories shows that the old master, at eighty-one, has lost none of his wizardry...

...It would seem that the Jews of Eastern Europe came from the shtetl into the flux and chaos of the twentieth century, at the mercy of the forces of history and of their own turbulent passions...

...I always remember the saying of the Cabalists that man's mission is the correction of mistakes he made both in this world and in former reincarnations...

...Still, however bleak their ultimate social implications, Singer's short stories are also racy, vivid, teeming with life-in short, unmatched in their narrative power...

...Some of them even turn back to orthodoxy out of disgust with modern life, like the protagonist of The Penitant, or Yasha Mazur in The Magician of Lublin, who becomes a hermit...

...Neither age nor decrepitude exempts his characters from taking their assigned parts in life's comedy...

...but neither has socialism or even Zionism ever really captured his imagination...

...But then, whom does he write for...