The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories
Singer, Isaac Bashevis
In Isaac Bashevis Singer's world, things are seldom what they seem. His stories are full of people who are constantly being deceived: men by women, women by men, men by promises of wealth or of a...
...His fictional technique is extremely cunning, full of tricks and traps and escape hatches...
...When they reach Bialystok, the Stalinists begin an inquisition of Yiddish writers, and those who are not killed are then forced to run again when the Nazis invade in June of 1941...
...Two weeks later, we got married...
...Often he will appear to be following dutifully in the tradition of Sholem Aleichem and his other Yiddish forebears, only to veer off wildly in his own direction, as if to remind us that his is the only Yiddish voice most literate Americans recognize...
...The feuilletonist remarks, "Hundreds of thousands such as Bentze were exiled to a sure death, all in the name of a better morning and a beautiful future...
...Methuselah barely manages to escape from this mirror of confusion, which he comes to understand is a vision of the future...
...He could not tell the difference anymore between laughter and crying, the cheering of female demons and the wild cries of male hobgoblins...
...The professor, who was once a believer in free will, now claims that "man has no more freedom than a bedbug...
...The story that launched Singer's considerable fame in this country, "Gimpel the Fool"—published in Partisan Review in 1953, in a translation by Saul Bellow—tells of a simpleton who spends his whole life being tricked for the amusement of his townspeople...
...The storyteller himself is no stranger to deception...
...In "Runners to Nowhere," a Warsaw feuilletonist relates the following bleak tale of Hitler's bombing of Warsaw...
...As he runs, he makes a shameless attempt to re-affiliate himself with the Stalinists running near him, as well as to court a married woman...
...Bewildered, he tells the author that for him "pleasure is a form of suffering...
...Many of the tales in The Death of Methuselah share Singer's most familiar premise: a traveler tells another person (frequently an author who may or may not be I. B. Singer) about an amazing episode in his life—usually one which reveals that things are not what they seem...
...Certainly none of the stories approaches the lucid elegance of "Gimpel the Fool...
...In hell "they called life death and death life...
...For Singer, man's earthly scourge is his readiness to be deceived into not distinguishing between wrong and right...
...God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived...
...Even here, the damned are struggling to maneuver better conditions and fewer tortures for themselves...
...My coming here to America in 1949 was, I may say, a triumph of my smuggling...
...A crowd of Jews is running from thebombs toward Bialystok, then under Stalinist occupation...
...Methuselah, 969 years old, is at last near death...
...This is thought by many to be one of Singer's best stories, and is probably his most famous...
...You always have to maneuver between the powers of wickedness and madness...
...Before long, to the professor's horror (which begins to feel strangely akin to delight), a Polish charlatan, an "impresario," moves in with him and his wife, and soon is even sleeping in their bed with them...
...four or five of the tales are rather trivial, such as "The Missing Line" and "Gifts," and one, "The Jew from Babylon," is unnecessarily obscure...
...Singer's own maneuverings have produced a collection that is quite uneven...
...Preparing to die, he says of the next world: "Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception...
...As the visitor boasts, "My body is my contraband...
...This story outlines the boundaries of an existence from which even the most vulgar opportunist is unable to escape...
...A woman he had once desired named Naamah, who is now a demon, persuades him to go with her to hell, which she claims is the true Paradise, where Satan is the true God...
...The next morning he is found dead, having realized that, from now on, "Man would manage somehow to crawl upon the surface of the earth, forward THE DEATH OF METHUSELAH AND OTHER STORIES Isaac Bashevis Singer/Farrar, Straus & Giroux/$17.95 Donna Rifkind THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988 45 and backward, until God's covenant with him ended and man's name in the book of life was erased forever...
...One must always steal one's way among those who have the power and carry weapons...
...While one could argue that Singer is about as much of a modernist as Geoffrey Chaucer, Howe's statement points to the capricious quality that is to me the most interesting aspect of his writing, and which is evident throughout The Death of Methuselah, his most recent collection of stories...
...In this volume Singer is by turns blasphemous and reverent, here comic, there tragic, first spiteful, then gentle...
...One of the collection's comic stories, "Sabbath in Gehenna," is set in hell, the ultimate exile...
...But Singer once again proves himself to be a most interesting contradiction: in some ways defiant of the Yiddish tradition to which he is an heir, he still manages to echo key sentiments from that tradition—sentiments that show to what extent the inevitability of deception has always been on the minds of religious Jews...
...The author himself is able to escape this trap—if only temporarily—by telling tales, an act whereby he is able to become for a tiny moment like God, the prime maneuverer...
...he is no longer able to distinguish between what he wants and what he dreads...
...No matter how guilefully his characters operate, all are susceptible to this torment, and for some it signals their destruction...
...visitor tells the author, "You once wrote that human nature is such that one cannot do anything in a straight line...
...Escapees from the malignities of Hitler and Stalin, unwelcome city dwellers in Warsaw, or emigres from dirt-poor shtetls: none of the survivors here can claim ever to have had a true home...
...The best runner among them is a Trotskyite poet named Bentze, of whom it is said that he "would have had a better chance to remain alive among the Nazis in Warsaw than in Bialystok among his former comrades...
...not only is any sign of goodness here conspicuous by its absence, but corruption too is utterly beside the point...
...In "The Impresario," a former deserter from the Austrian army in World War I, now a professor in Rio de Janeiro, tells a Singer-like Yiddish writer the story of his marriage to a promiscuous singer in the Yiddish opera...
...This visitor's story is one of exile—the story of all Singer's Jews...
...I swore a holy oath to get rid of her once and for all...
...A willingness to believe seems always to be accompanied by a willingness to be deceived...
...anger's most remarkable achievement in this collection is his title story...
...His stories are full of people who are constantly being deceived: men by women, women by men, men by promises of wealth or of a delusory earthly Paradise after revolution...
...Dichotomies are set up like an elaborate slalom course through which characters are forced to maneuver, between the sacred and the profane, faith and doubt, love and hate, asceticism and hedonism, miracles and ordinary life...
...For them right was wrong and wrong right...
...It is a fable about a biblical character, the grandfather of Noah, but it manages to incorporate many themes of the more mundane tales in this volume...
...In "The Smuggler," a Donna Rifkind is assistant managing editor of the New Criterion...
...They are dark sentiments, fostered by dark times, and can be summed up in this quotation from Ecclesiastes: "Fear God and keep his commandments, for that is the whole of man...
...Irving Howe once wrote of Singer that "though a master of Yiddish prose, he has cut himself off from the norms and styles of Yiddish culture, simultaneously moving backward to a pre-Enlightenment sensibility and forward to modernism...
...I knew that to live with this woman would be permanent hell for me," he tells the writer...
Vol. 21 • September 1988 • No. 9
