Isaac Bashevis, Singer
Kresh, Paul
ISAAC BASHEVIS, SINGER PAUL KRESH Three years ago this month, Isaac Bashevis Singer sat in his apartment on West 86th Street and talked to moment. "Jewish life is so rich, and so adventurous,...
...Rosenberg points out the struggle in Isaac's work between natural impulses and the mysterious workings of fate, between instinct and conscience, "always pitted against each other...
...She then enrolled at Bard but left after two years to travel in Scotland, where she performed with a pantomime troupe...
...The traffic...
...He must go with her to see the waterfall...
...She is interested in all kinds of things, in the theater, in movies, in literature—on which she has very fine opinions—but at breakfast she prefers to talk about cottage cheese...
...Bakeries, tailor shops, and a cobbler's shop marked by a sign showing a pair of boots lined the streets...
...By then he was twenty-one, but with his quaint Hasidic clothes, the sash about his loins, the skull cap under his velvet hat, and his full red beard, he looked much older...
...He has written two books, edited a third, and his articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Saturday Review, American Judaism, Playboy, and Stereo Review...
...Isaac tells the group that he originally sold the story for twenty dollars...
...He goes over the text with her...
...He recalls his young manhood in Warsaw, when he first began to meet women—how shy he was with them, what a gulf there was between his early fantasies and the awkwardness of his first self-conscious sexual advances...
...He recalls being terrified when the ram's horn was blown to announce the arrival of the Jewish New Year...
...The seminar classroom has harsh yellow walls and a worn carnation-red carpet, but the room is spacious, and light filters down agreeably through a high oval window in one wall and tall French windows at the back...
...Tomaszow, Pinchas Mendel's home town, was a sleepy village by comparison...
...The hour and a half has flown...
...Dvorah laughs boyishly...
...Learned enough Pinchas Mendel surely was, at least in matters concerning his faith, but wise in the ways of the world he would never be...
...Pinchas Mendel's concern for the purity of his soul sprang from his ardent hope that one day he would be able to perform miracles...
...which makes for tension and for ambiguity...
...The Academy of American Poets...
...During the Russo-Japanese War many Jews in Leoncin had become convinced that the arrival of the Messiah was imminent...
...Dvorah is a new friend, a fresh face in Isaac's busy life...
...Isaac treats the class to a story from Russian folklore, the story of a man and wife who never have to work because their dog brings them everything: "Milk, meat, bread— such a dog...
...The sun is still shining, the colors of the leaves seem even more extravagant this afternoon...
...If you'll bring me a fiddler, I'll climb up on a roof and sing you a nigun...
...Rosenberg points out that Rilke was made to dress like a girl until the age of puberty and ended up a homosexual...
...In Point Counter Point Alduous Huxley tries to explain his characters in Freudian terms, he says, and this dates the book...
...The wagon halted and I saw a train—first a large locomotive with three lamps like suns, then freight cars trailing behind in a slow, preoccupied way...
...There will, however, be such a scene in the stage version...
...According to Isaac he was "superior and aloof...
...And they pay you for that...
...She had a thin nose, a pointed chin, a rather frail body...
...She is said to have known the entire Jewish Bible practically by heart...
...Temerl arrived in Bilgoray for the signing of the articles—a custom among the Jews of Poland which brought the prospective in-laws together—wearing a satin dress which, according to Isaac, hadn't been stylish for a hundred years...
...and they didn't have a prison to put her in either in the town where this story takes place...
...I ran in to my mother to tell her the pig was crying and the man was beating it with a stick...
...And he remembers coming into the house with his face all grimy from playing in the sand, his mother scrubbing him vigorously, complaining all the while, "Look at this boy, look at him—he looks like a chimney sweep...
...She couldn't go on studying at Bard at eight hundred dollars a course, she said, but if she could be his chauffeur, ferry him up there and back, maybe he would let her sit in on his writing class...
...As for the women in Pinchas Mendel's family, there were stalwart personalities indeed...
...One young woman defends the length of the story...
...Did you write the story as a protest against puritanism...
...There is not an adventure or a meshugas that they don't take part...
...It's just a train.' I know exactly what 1 saw at the time—a train with cars—but there was a sense of mystery about it that still remains with me...
...Isaac's paternal grandmother was a woman named Temerl, whose mother, Hinde Esther, had supported her husband by selling jewelry...
...Time to be on the highway instead of standing here on the corner of 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, waiting...
...The Singers, in fact, would have been a little like Pooh Bah in The Mikado, who could trace his ancestry back to a "primordial atomic globule," had the globule in question shown a vocation for the rabbinate...
...The Hudson sparkles below in the bright sunlight...
...He hasn't seen Alma hurrying into the house ahead of him, but she will be there waiting for him when he gets upstairs...
...Where is Dvorah...
...Every day she gets up and tells me that the price of cottage cheese is thirty cents more than it was twenty years ago...
...Yet when he turns to talk to Dvorah, the pale blue eyes shimmer, and there is energy as well as affection in the low voice...
...He says he can understand almost anything that happens between human beings except when one tries to hurt the other physically...
...The next story, by a boy named Tom, is called "Interview with Silas Bodenham...
...If you walk in the street you know that you are not invisible, you are going to be seen...
...Let's go back and have some tea...
...After a while there are trees lining the landscaped parkway, their leaves just turning saffron and flame-red and umber, the sky a strong blue...
...She gets out and opens the door for him so he can sit up front next to her...
...Yet if anyone has ever really seen this place—sensed it, drunk it in, experienced its beauty— it is surely Isaac...
...Once, when a troupe of actors came to town to perform, he put on his coat, stormed out to the barn where they were giving their show, and ordered them off the premises as blasphemers, sending the audience along with them...
...This suits him, especially during the long drives up to Bard...
...There is a benediction which the Orthodox say every day: 'I thank yo'u, God, that you did not create me a woman...
...I should say kaddish" he tells Dvorah, pointing to the corpse of a fly...
...From him the line went back to Reb Tobias, the rabbi Sztektein, and beyond him to Reb Moshe, the rabbi of Neufeld...
...Yes...
...But folklore gives you wings, gives you the little cap that makes you invisible, gives you little boots so you can walk seven miles in a second...
...Dvorah is waiting outside as she promised she would be, fresh as the air of the deepening autumn day...
...From a chapel comes the sound of Bach on an organ...
...Never mind, it's in the hands of the Almighty...
...Clio, a thin young woman with long, straight blond hair, pinches a paper clip with her pale fingers as she reads her story, "The Interface...
...It works only for your feelings...
...I feel it's what they call in Europe a feuilleton...
...Her intense blue eyes are darker than Isaac's, her hair a rich brown and clipped close...
...Isaac looks at his watch again...
...According to the Bilgoray cobblers she wore the smallest shoes in town...
...Early fall sunlight is awash over Manhattan, turning the cityscape tawny against a clear sky at the start of a busy weekday morning in October 1975...
...He says he enjoys his class in short-story writing, with original work on paper to be considered and talked about, more than the afternoon seminar with its questions and abstract discussions...
...The students in Isaac's short-story class, eleven of them, dressed in worn shirts and jeans and denim skirts, look incongruous in this austere, rather formal setting...
...Tell me," Dvorah says, turning again to her passenger, "if you had your choice between a bore and a bitch, which would you take...
...But I like the little story...
...He had two sons whose reputations in town were based on their keen wits and adder-sharp tongues...
...Dvorah sees her father, a surgeon, even less now than she did before her mother's death...
...Isaac says goodnight to Dvorah, pats her cheek, helps himself out of the car with surprising agility, his raincoat on, his old brown hat in place...
...Isaac says he supposes she must, "because after all she does marry the beautiful Hadass in the course of the tale," but that he has left the sexual question ambiguous...
...He and Isaac are collaborating on a picture book...
...A car approaches, a big blue comfortable-looking sedan...
...Dvorah, in fact, used'to attend a yeshiva in Flatbush...
...Jewish life is so rich, and so adventurous, and so unbelievable, that no matter what you do you can't over-describe...
...Folklore doesn't give a hoot about the mind...
...What was to be done to speed the new son-in-law on his way to a rabbinical career...
...he hated gossip...
...But to interest us it must be "a bad case of alienation...
...There he made four rubles a week and whatever else he could pick up from handling lawsuits and presiding at weddings and other rabbinical functions, while his wife Bathsheba got the yeast-selling concession for the local Sabbath loaves...
...What would they have done to her...
...Every week there was a market, and many peasants would come to the town bringing livestock...
...But in the thief's mind there was no contradiction...
...Justus Rosenberg, the English professor who has persuaded Isaac to teach at Bard this semester, joins him at the front desk and announces that today's subject is folklore in literature...
...Dvorah asks...
...He couldn't speak Russian or Polish or write down the address where he lived "in gentile letters...
...But that in itself would be enough...
...When she left the house," Isaac recalls, "she would polish those shoes a hundred times with a brush or an old stocking...
...The Bard campus looks like some colonial-village restoration project financed by the Rockefellers, with its red brick, white wooden porticoes, rolling lawns, and ivy rippling against building walls in the light wind...
...Then, through the smoky, deepening twilight, he and Dvorah walk to a colonial building where several students are standing on a balcony waving to them as they arrive...
...He also had a gift for mimicry and would do imitations of the teachers at the cheder, the religious school, where he unwillingly spent a good ten hours of each day...
...You're still working at the academy, Dvorah...
...A couple of days later he phoned her and said, "Well, will you take me...
...Pinchas Mendel had little difficulty with the rabbinical code, but he developed a block against learning Russian that lasted all his life...
...Isaac suggests that if there are dated references the publishers can always add footnotes explaining them, and gets a laugh...
...We are hypnotized all the...
...His death is more important than mine would be...
...Isaac replies, "You are right...
...It was when Bathsheba heard Pinchas Mendel discussing religious matters with her father that she made up her mind...
...Jacob Zylberman was a man who thought long and hard about eternal questions...
...This is their eighth trip up...
...In Warsaw I once saw a man steal a tallis—a prayer shawl...
...Not only did Reb Samuel fast a great deal...
...When the room is about half filled, a large dog of doubtful breed wanders in, sniffs, decides that this course is not for him...
...There is a stream ahead, and the roaring waterfall...
...For supper Isaac has vegetables and tea...
...There are a number of commandments which are only for men, not women...
...He says that the trouble is that even a master would be hard put to tell such a story in so few pages...
...he shunned worldly interests completely...
...Next week bring me more stories...
...Isaac Bashevis Singer will be published by Dial Press next month...
...The story, he says, is about alienation...
...A Bard student from Brooklyn, she had admired Isaac's work long before she met him...
...The matchmakers were not long in informing Reb Jacob that there was just such a paragon in the nearby town of Tomaszow...
...People can get accustomed to dictatorship—even to sitting in prison...
...He defeated the efforts of tutor after tutor...
...To know the Jews is really to know the universe...
...Since the Jewish people didn't have any power, they wouldn't have killed her, she wouldn't be put to death...
...Rosenberg thinks maybe it is time for the students to get back to the subject they were supposed to discuss in the first place—the role of folklore in literature...
...Isaiah's father in turn was Reb Moshe, who was known in his time as "the sage of Warsaw...
...Copies of each story under consideration are passed out so that all can follow the text while the author reads it aloud...
...He might be hungry and want something to eat...
...The discussion turns from Satan in Goray to the philosopher Spinoza, "who believed that emotions are always wrong...
...Our house was a poor house," he recalls...
...Quickly, with almost no expression, she reads a tale about a retired railroad man...
...Her eyes were blue, her skin fair, her hair—like Pinchas Mendel's beard—bright red...
...A wonderful woman, but conventional...
...Isaac begins to talk of the Cabala and an idea which has always fascinated I him—that the whole of the cosmos is engaged in a kind of universal copulation of the spirit...
...How could Yentl get away with the marriage...
...His father-in-law hired a Russian tutor for him and did everything he could to guide him into practical paths...
...Isaac was born on Bastille Day ("or November 21," he says...
...Where to find a husband for a girl like that...
...One day, in the town of Leoncin, he gave such a powerful sermon that the people asked him to stay and be their rabbi...
...When Hannah asked Temerl how her impractical young dreamer of a son was going to support a wife, Temerl responded airily that God would provide...
...A woman is not to study the Torah...
...one of the students asks...
...Even as a little boy Joshua would sneak out of the house to play in the fields with his friends...
...Schoolroom chairs with ungainly, paddle-shaped armrests are lined up in rows...
...Isaac in particular is elated...
...How could a father say such a thing to his own daughter...
...And they complained that the topic was unsuitable for Yiddish literature, "which has," Isaac says, "always dealt with men and women in terms of such problems as a rich girl falling in love with a poor man, very simple topics, very traditional...
...I am interested always in the exception—you might say, almost, in freaks...
...Hannah was also known for her stinging sarcasm...
...Isaac sits at the head of the table and tells his young writers that he is eager to hear what they have written since their last class...
...I am hungry for stories...
...Temerl supported hers too...
...The Yiddish critics were not patient with this paradox...
...Another woman raises her hand...
...In the cafeteria students are lining up with their trays for low-priced lunches...
...She's a pretty girl, with a face as fragile and unblemished as the shell of an egg...
...Ambiguity is one thing, obscurity is another...
...Rabbi Zylberman was fond enough of his two clever sons, Joseph and Itche, but his daughter, Bathsheba, was the apple of his eye...
...a sprinkling of them are prospective scientists and mathematicians...
...Jerusalem: Brandeis University: St...
...How could one woman fool another like that...
...In the play Yentl there is a character much like Dulcha who appears in the synagogue scene during the first act...
...Between the time of Joshua's birth and my own there were two other children, but they died of scarlet fever...
...Still, Isaac wonders why Tom's piece couldn't have been a little longer...
...Poets...
...But why did Isaac pick a strange girl like Yentl as the heroine of his story...
...Rosenberg would like to start off with a discussion of "Yentl...
...In the genius of Isaac these two strains were to join in a not always harmonious combination...
...Because through the exception we can learn more about ourselves, about normal people...
...he must stop accepting gifts of snuff...
...A sketch...
...When he got out, he told me he missed being in jail...
...But the bride he chose died before their wedding day...
...oh, yes...
...Isaac usually goes to the little apartment kept for him about half a mile off campus, but there isn't time now...
...His voice, with the distinctly Polish-Yiddish accent that over four decades in America have not obliterated, quavers a little with age...
...With her short haircut, her black turtleneck with the silver chain, her tiny white hands controlling the oversized car with complete assurance, she might be the perfect model for the girl in Isaac's story, "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," which is going to open on Broadway as a play in a couple of weeks...
...A story shouldn't need explanations," he says...
...But there was a sharpness in her eyes...
...Isaac says, "I will tell you...
...As the class continues and the comments grow more frank and heated one gets the feeling of being at a kind of group therapy session, where the patients are stories instead of people...
...Does Yentl have lesbian tendencies, yes or no...
...She's a conventional woman...
...You'd be surprised how people can cheat one another...
...He never dreamed that someday it would become a topic for classroom discussion...
...Yes, it is a modern story, but I think, personally, that if the story is right, all stories are modern stories...
...One woman in the class wants to get down to cases...
...Some of the students find Lee's hero too cynical and "unlikeable...
...And why are people interested in folktales...
...His wife, Hannah, was a dour woman with a skeptical turn of mind that had transmitted itself to their daughter, Bathsheba...
...Isaac is fifty years older...
...Soon she gets up again to fetch him a glass of milk and a second helping of beets...
...Not only did he devote himself to religion and Jewish scholarship...
...He chuckles...
...Very little furniture but many books...
...A seminar on literature one day, a class in short-story writing the next...
...Isaac's father's father was one Reb Samuel, an assistant rabbi in the town of Tomaszow...
...Once I saw a peasant beating a pig...
...Do you ever sing for Alma...
...After her wedding his mother's red hair was cropped close and hidden under a sheitl—the wig all devout Jewish married women were required to wear...
...The car maneuvers through the heavy city traffic, wheels out onto the highway...
...How thin his neck and shoulders are, frail, vulnerable...
...So many things can keep a person captive because of a fear of losing one's reputation, but our passions are still there...
...For reading poetry...
...Shavuot is the spring harvest festival that commemorates the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai...
...She thinks of Isaac as the father she always wished she'd had...
...Her mother, shortly before her death, had urged her to go see Singer: "Tell him you want to be a writer yourself and he must help...
...Once, when Isaac was three, Pinchas Mendel went off to see about the possibility of resettling in a village called Radzymin, for he wasn't doing too well on his meager income in Leoncin, and he wasn't happy there...
...Any man, says Isaac, can read such a story and recognize the dogmas the symbol of himself as the breadwinner, see in the dog's tragic fate his own possible end: " 'If I would stop making a living they would throw me out.' Folklore does in a few drops what art has to add a lot of water to do...
...I would like to see some of you overwrite rather than underwrite...
...Though she is reticent, she has an undefin-able poise and ease...
...He might be tired after the long day and want to go straight to bed...
...He's feeling talkative this morning...
...There is some discussion about how to translate the French term...
...Near the front desk a young man is tinkering with a tape recorder, trying to coax it to work so that this session in the seminar series on literature can be preserved for the archives along with the rest...
...Now Dvorah takes Isaac by both hands and pulls him up from the bench...
...They seemed to come from nowhere and to go to beyond the end of the world where the darkness loomed...
...I would say that in art it is better to do what your emotions tell you than what your reason tells you, because reason is not the most important element in art...
...What do you say...
...worldly, the demonic and the cherubic, the real and the fantastic, the romantic and the conservative—can all be traced to the marriage of his parents and the legacy of a Polish-Jewish past...
...A few months ago he agreed to take on this assignment, teaching two days a week at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, a two-hour drive from New York...
...I just wanted to tell you I love your work...
...But the Seventh Commandment, he says, has always been the most difficult for him to manage...
...Reb Samuel's father was still another rabbi, Isaiah Konsker, a Hasid and a scholar, although he never had a congregation...
...In the meadow itself cattle and horses grazed while ducks swam in the pond where the animals came to drink...
...A "light case" is not important, because after all everyone is a little bit alienated...
...But at the same time it was very difficult...
...Dvorah goes into the sun-splashed dining room to save a table, then gets on line to put together a vegetarian lunch for Isaac, who eats neither meat nor fish nor fowl—not even chicken soup...
...These things have been seething in Jewish history for two thousand years...
...The students have been asked to read three of Isaac's stories: "Gimpel the Fool," "The Spinoza of Market Street," and "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy...
...But to write a very short story you must have a very light touch...
...and on his return they presented him with a list of demands: He must not go off traveling again—or if he did, he must let the community know in advance, so that a substitute could be found...
...You are all very stingy about paper...
...Dvorah thinks that maybe here again the story has switched styles in the final paragraphs and lost "the beautiful simplicity" of its opening...
...Close to the Austrian border, the town of Bilgoray was bustling with Cossak officers who danced with Russian women, played cards for hours on end at the local military clubs, and trotted through the streets on horseback cracking their riding whips...
...Only the commentary becomes dated...
...In the meantime, however, Pinchas Mendel acceded to his mother's wishes and agreed to marry the daughter of the rabbi of Bilgoray...
...A boy arrives at the table to ask Isaac whether he could get into the short-story writing class...
...There were painted signs above the drygoods shop and grocery, pictures of pots and pans over the hardware store, cutouts of tomcats wearing leather boots and smoking cigarettes in holders in the tobacconist's windows...
...Debbie wears heavy-rimmed glasses, her black hair in bangs that practically hide the lenses...
...My grandfather used to sing me beautiful Yiddish songs from the Ukraine...
...Hi...
...It would frighten away the nightingales...
...It is also the holiday when the Book of Ruth—the story of the marriage of Ruth the Moabite into the House of David— is read in the synagogue...
...Several students speak to him...
...The preacher had given them the green light...
...If your reason tells you that by making such and such a calculation you will reach the moon, and you want to reach the moon, you have to listen to logic, to mathematics and to the computer...
...Why does Yentl want to be a man...
...When she is done, a young man says he feels that Clio has used too many contemporary references that will be meaningless in a couple of years...
...The professor reminds the students to prepare for next week, and the seminar is over...
...Paul Kresh is the creative director of the United Jewish Appeal— Federation of Jewish Philanthropies in New York City...
...Pinchas Mendel was, after all, the son of Reb Samuel, Tomaszow's assistant rabbi...
...He replies that he was thinking at the time about the restrictions Judaism imposes on women...
...Come on...
...You will not get to the moon by your emotions...
...And he might have stayed there for good had Bathsheba not gone to Tomaszow to try to bring her husband to his senses...
...Because we are limited, not only by governments, by fashions, by laws, by other people, but also by the laws of nature...
...The story, written in Yiddish in the 1950s, first appeared in English in the magazine Commentary in 1962 in a translation by Marion Magid and Elizabeth Pollet...
...Isaac says there is a ghost in the apartment, though it has not yet shown itself...
...He never stays angry for long, anyhow...
...Where's Dvorah...
...Dr...
...Pinchas Mendel would go to visit his parents in Tomaszow, and days and weeks would pass before his wife and children saw him again...
...Michael's College, Winooski...
...He's due at Bard College for a one o'clock seminar, must get there by noon if there's to be time for a bite of lunch before class...
...When his in-laws-to-be talked about real estate or politics, he was at a complete loss...
...The high-spirited Temerl and the gloomy Hannah were worlds apart...
...He speaks of folkloric influences on such writers as Gogol and Pushkin, of the folk sources from which the classical Yiddish writers drew, from which Isaac himself draws in his tales for children...
...Insane...
...I once had a friend who was a leftist...
...I wrote the story to show that behind all the strict behavior, behind the long skirts and the rules and regulations, human nature was still there...
...Isaac Bashevis Singer holds eleven honorary degrees* ("You'll have to call me Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor now," he says), has twice won the National Book Award, and in 1978 was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature...
...He was a rebel almost from infancy, oppressed by religious ritual, the drabness of the study house, and the opacity of the religious books he was forced to read...
...To Isaac Singer at three it was both at once...
...At Bard, on the way back to the car with Dvorah, Isaac is talking about Laurie and her story...
...She left at the age of nine when her family moved to Great Neck, where she went to public elementary school and later high school...
...One comes up to the table...
...And so it is with art...
...Her most promising prospect was a wealthy young man from Lublin, but her father hoped to locate a man who was at once learned enough and wise enough in the ways of the world to make a good living as a rabbi, maybe even in a decent-sized city...
...You see here the work of a hive of bees...
...The sole effort he made to evade conscription was to pray that it wouldn't happen...
...Isaac says, "I will tell you how I feel about it...
...We know that he is a lonesome man and doesn't get along with others and wants to be alone, but it is not enough...
...It was only when Isaac's grandmother could no longer earn a living that her husband, Reb Samuel, agreed to enter the rabbinate...
...I feel that God has given talent to only a few people in each generation, but there is such a thing as a collective talent, and this is what creates folklore...
...Nearby was a warehouse containing farm machinery...
...In the opposite direction from the waterfall, Campus Road leads to Isaac's apartment—a tiny kitchen, a bath, and two rooms crowded with cots, a dormitory chair, a simple desk...
...They wanted me to come to some meeting and sing folk songs...
...They put him in prison, and he sat there for years...
...he knew even more about serving God...
...Her reputation would be ruined...
...Leoncin had one factory— the only two-storied building in town—which turned out a bottled beverage called kvass...
...Isaac's great-grandmother, Hinde Esther, was celebrated because a famous rabbi had once offered her a chair when she was taken to visit him...
...His only way out would have been to wound himself, but his mother wouldn't hear of it...
...Removing his battered brown felt hat, he reveals a scattering of sparse white hair above the pale pink dome of his head, and white ears, pointed, like an elPs...
...The contradictions in Isaac's own nature and in the characters he writes about—the conflicts between the rational and the irrational, the innocent and the * By the end of 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer had received doctorates from the Hebrew University...
...But this was not my main reason for writing the story...
...Isaac describes the journey in In My Father's Court: "All the Jews in town came to bid us goodbye, and the women kissed mother...
...Then we rode through the fields and forests and passed windmills...
...Not quite that, says Isaac...
...Even then I was thinking like a vegetarian...
...If you overwrite, it can always be edited...
...This fly is better than I am...
...And since it is a good story, we will finish this evening with it...
...Soon afterward the Singers put all their possessions in a wagon and left for Radzymin...
...And, in fact, as a recruit, he drew a high number in a lottery and was excused from service...
...It seem evident that Isaac's opinions about art and literature arise from his own predilections, champion the strong points of his own work, might just possibly be a kind of apologetic for his approach to storytelling, as opposed to more experimental methods...
...In my case I use Yiddish folklore— the folklore I heard in the house where 1 grew up...
...Well, if they were Jewish nightingales maybe it wouldn't frighten them...
...And because of the kind of father she had, so strict in his ideas, for her it was even more difficult...
...Reb Jacob offered to support him for five years while he learned Russian and passed the necessary examinations...
...He takes off his raincoat, holds it in his lap...
...My father's eyes expressed goodness itself...
...In the town there were two shops run by gentiles—one selling pork, the other beer and whiskey...
...He might be lonesome or elated and want to tell her about it...
...As for Pinchas Mendel himself, he looked, Isaac was told later, "more like a father-in-law" than a prospective bridegroom...
...Instead of concentrating on his Russian textbooks, he passed his time in the Hasidic study house or went off to visit his parents or cronies or the rabbinical court on the other side of the Austrian border...
...I began to cry...
...In every way he was a Mitnagged—a member of that European Jewish sect which put the emphasis on learning and the law, in complete antithesis to the Hasidic approach to Judaism and life in general, which stressed emotion, zeal, and mysticism...
...Bard is an informal place...
...as Isaac says in his book of memoirs In My Father's Court, he sweated so much when he prayed that "his wife had to give him a fresh shirt every day—an unheard of luxury in those days...
...The first criticism of Tom's effort comes from a woman who feels Silas is too articulate for the tobacco-chawing backwoodsman he is apparently supposed to be...
...It was addressed to Isaac Bashevis comma Singer...
...Of course...
...My songs are from the Polish Hasidim...
...It was easier to hide...
...In 1897 he went back and got his wife and children and brought them to Leoncin...
...The professor cites Ezra Pound, James Joyce, the painter Mird, and the composer Schoenberg as artists who have followed more complex routes to the essential truths...
...A story need never become dated...
...And what do you do there...
...Temerl hoped that Pinchas Mendel would marry young, although she insisted that his bride come from a rabbinic line...
...People who were supposed to be saints in their behavior came out and even indulged in incest to hasten the coming of the Messiah...
...She reaches out her right hand and offers Isaac's left one a daughterly squeeze...
...The students come mainly from middle-class backgrounds, but the college has a reputation in the arts, and many of these young men and women are planning careers as painters, actors, dancers, writers...
...It was reprinted in the collections Short Friday and An Isaac Bashevis Singer Reader...
...After lunch Dvorah says goodbye, promising to wait for him in front of the building where his afternoon seminar will end at two...
...She was self-taught in both the Hebrew language and the reading of the holy books...
...In the case of her youngest, Pinchas Mendel, she certainly got her wish...
...Only about a half hour for lunch in the cafeteria, then on to Professor Justus Rosenberg's seminar on literature...
...And naturally, an adventurous girl like Yentl would have to go to another town where nobody would persecute her, because in those days, if you committed a sin in Yonkers, they wouldn't know about it in Poughkeepsie...
...Today he's combining the two so he can get back to the city and keep an appointment early tomorrow...
...About the prayer house, which was usually empty except in the evenings and on the Sabbath, Isaac says, "I used to go there, into this empty little synagogue, and there was a meshugeneh, a crazy fellow called Dulcha—and he used to shake one of his legs and nod his head in a crazy way, and I used to imitate him...
...After hearing his students out for awhile Isaac speaks up...
...One sidelong smile from Dvorah and Isaac is in good spirits...
...Rather than complain," Isaac recalls, "our grandmothers praised God for providing them with husbands who were scholars...
...Upstairs they enter a high, narrow, immaculately white room with tall windows and a curved ceiling—the sort of room in which eighteenth-century statesmen might have gathered to deliberate on the fate of the Thirteen Colonies...
...Isaac agrees about the struggle within his characters...
...Isaac says there is no law in literature that the hero of a story can't be cynical or that he must be likeable...
...The other young men, who wore polished boots and gold-rimmed glasses, made jokes about this venerable-looking boy who wanted to be a "wonder rabbi...
...Alma is a wonderful woman, but she's too practical...
...But somehow humanity rejected this part of Spinoza...
...Her daughter, Temerl, wanted nothing more than to see her sons study the Torah...
...You're welcome to join...
...The breeze ruffles the grass like a hand stroking a dog's fur...
...When Isaac walks inside, he sees that the window sill is lined with dead flies...
...Isaac retorts that you shouldn't have to consult a dictionary or acquire a special skeleton key to unlock the meaning of a work of art...
...We still think that love is a beautiful thing...
...I once heard a girl say to me, 'If I would be a man, I would seduce another woman every day.' When the story first came out in Yiddish, many readers protested...
...Otherwise, I would have had to describe their wedding night, and this I did not want to do...
...My name is Debbie...
...What kind of a story was this for a Yiddish writer to publish...
...If she doesn't show up soon, he'll take a cab to Grand Central, the train to Rhinecliff, New York...
...Besides, my dear, if I could sing like a crow even, I would consider myself a good singer...
...So Yentl breaks the law in order to be able to study the law...
...Dvorah comes back with a draft of the letter, and Isaac's face lights up...
...His childhood hope was to become a saint...
...An anecdote...
...He sported sidelocks and a neck kerchief, and continued to wear long hose and the traditional half-shoes even after they had gone out of style...
...Finally, despite the fact that by now he and Bathsheba had two children, Hinde Esther, born in 1891, and Israel Joshua, born in 1893, and had buried a third who had died in infancy—he left his family and went back to Tomaszow to live with his parents, who asked nothing of him...
...Dvorah waves...
...he must desist from hanging about the prayer house after services and go directly home...
...They are walking through the fields, the young woman and the man in his seventies, past clumps of early autumn flowers and stretches of long later-summer grass, then through a dense grove where leaves are falling gently, turning the forest floor underfoot into a rich mosaic...
...In fact, one night he did see a chimney sweep on the roof of the house across the way and imagined with dread that the sooty lad wanted to catch him and lift him to the roof...
...if that's the length the author decided upon, why must it be longer...
...Isaac is impatient this morning...
...But the year of the expected coming, the Jewish year 5666 (1906), went by without the Redeemer showing himself...
...He was in Israel himself during the summer...
...Both sides blamed the hostilities on Pinchas Mendel's trips...
...Moishe, the youngest sqn, was born in 1906, at a time when the Jews of Poland were subject to sanctioned hatred, pogroms, an attempted revolution...
...He cannot resist her apologies...
...He had no friends among boys his age, shared none of their interests...
...He would hand down his religious interpretations and legal decisions conscientiously, but he never got too close to his congregants...
...Isaac says he has heard fathers say such things to their children...
...Dr...
...Why not now...
...For the Hasidim, singing and dancing, miracles and marvels...
...While he was gone a longstanding feud between Leoncin's artisans and peddlers and the town's wealthier Hasidim came to a head, with the two groups trying to drown out each other's prayers in the prayer house...
...As the car turns into the block where Isaac lives...
...He only says, almost curtly, "All right, so we've seen it...
...A man is not allowed to put on the dress of a woman, neither the woman the garments of a man...
...But Clio hasn't provided enough material "to make us feel that her girl belongs nowhere—a very important statement...
...Pinchas Mendel agreed that he had to do something to earn a living...
...Instead Dvorah sent him a Jewish New Year's card, telling how much she liked his work and asking whether they might meet...
...To a Mitnagged a train is a train...
...One must try to imagine a town dotted with tiny houses, birds' nesting in their sloping shingle roofs, the unpaved streets covered with white sand from the nearby banks of the Vistula...
...If you have no wings, you know you cannot fly...
...The writing is good, the language is good, the details are good...
...All they could do, they could call her a sinner...
...Isaac cites the Iliad and the Odyssey as timeless stories...
...But the Zylbermans were to get only half of what they bargained for...
...Another says that the style seems to change in the final pages, to grow suddenly and unexpectedly lyrical...
...Isaac beams, looks up, and greets her...
...And there was no lack of volunteers...
...Isaac is glad to hear it...
...This formidable man was an expert not only in Hebrew and Hebrew grammar but in mathematics as well...
...Usually Isaac stays overnight in the apartment, but today there is scarcely time to sit down and have a cup of tea...
...You promised to sing me a Hasidic song, and you never have...
...Maybe it had been squealing...
...People can be hypnotized...
...Isaac reminds the class that his story is set in a period when it would have taken enormous courage for a woman to dress in a man's clothes, to pass herself off as a boy and actually enroll in a yeshiva, because if she was caught it would be no laughing matter...
...This brought him into early conflict with his father, and the strain between them increased as Joshua grew older...
...The sun climbs toward noon...
...The human soul is full of contradictions...
...After thirty-eight years of marriage, what can I tell her...
...I'd take the bitch...
...Will you sing me a nigun today...
...Although it was a warm day, he was wearing his fur coat because it was the finest article of clothing he owned...
...I'm too shy...
...But if the Jews of Bilgoray regarded themselves as more sophisticated than the Jews of other towns in the area, Jacob Mordecai Zylberman, the Bilgoray rabbi, was himself infinitely austere...
...Copyright © 1979 by Paul Kresh...
...He is regarded as one of America's most distinguished writers...
...According to Spinoza every man or woman who falls in love is crazy...
...He knew about spirits, demons, and goblins...
...In Talmudic law...
...Suddenly the woods end...
...I think sometimes you young people are in a way too lazy to write more...
...Even Jewish nightingales...
...He makes a living taking pictures at weddings and bar mitzvahs so that he can pursue his craft, photographing Hasidic life in Brooklyn...
...There were those who felt that the union of a Hasidic man and a Mitnagged woman was practically an intermarriage in itself...
...Completely...
...Mother said, 'Why are you crying, silly...
...But Pinchas Mendel went his own way...
...Despite this small vanity, if custom had permitted it Bathsheba might almost have been a model for Isaac's Yentl, for the rabbi's daughter was something of a scholar...
...She is breathless, eager, disarming...
...Beyond, near a meadow, stood the local house of worship and the ritual bath...
...What's funny...
...He sits on a bench in the sun, stooping a little over a local newspaper as he waits for her in his dark suit and white shirt with the quiet tie, the wisps of his white hair blowing in the drowsy breeze, birds chirping all around him to the orderly strains of Bach...
...I could only sing for you if I was hiding in a dark place where nobody could see me, in a closet...
...A thin, intense young man named Lee reads his story, "Some Kind of Solitude," next...
...My brother, Israel Joshua," he says, "was eleven years older than I, and my sister, Hinde Esther, was thirteen years older...
...His father was Reb Zvi Hirsch, the rabbi of Zhorker...
...Back in New York, she married Abraham Menashe, a young photographer, a Jew from Egypt...
...These stories reveal that the children, despite their strict religious upbringing, lived close to nature...
...Vermont: Texas Christian University: Sacred Heart University...
...Dvorah sets the big car speeding toward New York through the starry October night...
...I remember how sandy the town was, and I remember the animals...
...It has the form of fiction, but it is really not fiction...
...It was this Reb Moshe who is supposed to have been the disciple of the Baal Shem Tov...
...Everyone in the room is excited about the story—impressed by how well Laurie has brought off the Dickensian trick of describing a character exclusively through the objects that surround him...
...In this eighteenth-century mise-en-scene the students look incongruous in their jeans, legend-bearing T-shirts, and plastic jackets, as though somebody had lowered the wrong backdrop behind them...
...He would like to meet the ghost...
...Pennsylvania: Bard College: Long Island University: University of Connecticut: and Uppsala College, Uppsala, Sweden...
...If Homer had imposed psychological and philosophical commentaries on the action, these epics would be obsolete...
...This appeals immensely to our human emotions...
...Why not...
...She glances at him with smiling eyes that delight in him...
...We were a rabbi's house...
...Is there a special dearth of paper here at Bard...
...The family claimed they could trace their lineage to a disciple of Rabbi Israel Ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov himself—the revered sage of the Ukraine who founded Hasidic Judaism...
...I am less than this fly...
...Where is that girl...
...She has just returned from a visit to Israel...
...She was supposed to be here at nine o'clock sharp, and it's ten after...
...They don't get along too well...
...Isaac suggests that the story be rewritten to describe "stronger events," with the sense of alienation growing "stronger from page to page and from sentence to sentence" until the reader is convinced that the girl's alienation is not just a passing state of mind but a real and distressing condition...
...But he was certain the world this side of eternity was an evil place, and he would never change his mind about that...
...And it was there in Leoncin, in 1904 (not in Radzymin, as Isaac has sometimes stated), that Isaac Singer was born...
...To steal a prayer shawl is sheer nonsensev because you are breaking the law of the Almighty, who said...
...It was a summer evening, the sky seemed to blaze with glowing coals, fiery brooms, and beasts...
...Rosenberg says maybe it's a matter of developing certain tastes—a taste for Ezra Pound, for example—of making the leap, for instance, from representational to abstract art, or from program music to atonal music...
...Dvorah is twenty-one...
...Soon afterward Pinchas Mendel was called up for conscription into the army of Czar Alexander III, the King of Poland as well as Autocrat of all the Russias...
...He tried to sell subscriptions to a prayer book he had translated into Yiddish, and he began giving sermons in small Jewish towns...
...The family only lived in Leoncin until 1907, when Isaac was three years old, but he has some vivid memories of the place...
...A young man points out that Yentl's mother is dead when the story starts and that her father laments that Yentl isn't proficient in domestic matters and says God should have made her a boy...
...This fable about a Polish rabbi's daughter, who says she has "the soul of a man and the body of a woman" and who thirsts so much for learning that she disguises herself as a boy so she can enter a yeshiva, has especially intrigued these young readers...
...Yet when I try to talk to Alma about all the possibilities—all the directions love can take, all the conceivable byways of human passion, she doesn't want to hear about it...
...I wish I had ten daughters like you," he says...
...One man thinks the story could have been improved by a greater use of dialogue...
...He says he feels privileged to be in the presence of a genuinely promising young talent...
...If all the laws ever legislated by men were to be wiped out, he says, and all that was left were the Ten Commandments, that would be enough...
...I don't think I am naturally a monogamous person...
...Isaac says this story too is about alienation...
...We can go into the woods this afternoon, and you can sing for me...
...time...
...But the dog becomes old, he cannot provide for the family anymore, so they throw him out...
...The wedding in Bilgoray was a noisy occasion, a chance for the girls of the village to try out the latest dances...
...But you know," he continues, "it's harder for me to imagine some things than others...
...Connecticut: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ohio: Spcrlus College, Philadelphia...
...And after the Shavuot holiday late that spring, in the year 1889, Pinchas Mendel Singer, twenty-one, married Bathsheba Zylberman, seventeen, and the two rabbinical families were joined together...
...Isaac, who has little interest in music except perhaps for the simple Hasidic tunes he has promised to sing someday for Dvorah, wonders about this...
...It's only twenty minutes from here...
...They declared him their rabbi, and their rabbi he was to be...
...Strong characters can hypnotize weak characters...
...He wants to know what the others think...
...Isaac hates to be late, hates to be kept waiting like this, standing around...
...And everyone was in step, it seemed, except the bridegroom...
...An incurable visionary, he wrote his own commentaries on the Gemara, the body of Jewish oral law, but he never got rid of his broad Polish-Yiddish accent...
...He had no patience with petty things, small talk...
...Alma herself can ! be glimpsed racing around the corner from Amsterdam Avenue to the huge arched entrance of the old-fashioned stone apartment building so that she will be there when Isaac comes home...
...A kind of insanity like any other kind of insanity...
...I remember this very vividly...
...To think of not having any address, of not belonging, is terrible...
...The town was small enough so that the fact that he had not passed the proper examinations could be overlooked...
...A young man asks whether Isaac had the rights of women in mind when he wrote "Yentl...
...If I would be an editor of a magazine, I would edit it a little bit and publish it...
...Isaac asks Dvorah to turn off the car radio...
...For if you believe in the Torah, how can you do something which is against it...
...I read manuscripts from poets...
...We ought to know more about the hero—who he is, what kind of person he is...
...He loved animals, especially horses...
...I love her...
...Sing one...
...Isaac remembers his father's striking countenance—his dark hair, his blue eyes, the bright-red beard...
...She is an enlightened woman, but recently when somebody said to her, 'You are a liberated woman,' she became insulted...
...I'm a reader...
...After that she went to Israel to study...
...Rosenberg, how I feel about folklore...
...Isaac points out that many women have wished that they were men...
...Now, three years and one Nobel Prize later, we are pleased to present the first chapter of the first Singer biography, a labor of love by Paul Kresh, who is a friend of Singer...
...And this to me is the essence of art...
...Isaac continues to be genial, but when Dvorah brings the tray, he concentrates on his food...
...Isaac reiterates his faith in the emotional approach, simplicity, and clarity...
...I have two birthdays") in 1904 in a tiny Polish town called Leoncin, in the province of Warsaw, the second son of Pinchas Mendel Singer, an impoverished Hasidic rabbi from the town of Tomaszow, and Bathsheba Zylberman, the daughter of the rabbi of Bilgoray, in the province of Lublin...
...You have made a real beginning, but you'll have to build it up...
...Isaac's grandfather, Reb Samuel, however, refused for years to become a rabbi, devoting himself to the Cabala, the body of Jewish mystical literature which was to have so great an influence on Isaac's ideas and work...
...Isaac dozes for a few moments, and then it is time to walk back to the cafeteria to eat before the six o'clock class in short-story writing...
...In science, perhaps, yes...
...To bring this out you need strong events...
...I once got an invitation...
...Isaac wants everybody with a question to have a turn...
...They're different...
...Thou shalt not steal...
...Jewish women in Poland in those days bore children, cooked, and ran their households while their men were out studying the Torah, and supported them if necessary...
...Dvorah goes up to an office to answer a letter requesting Isaac's appearance at the Lotus Club in New York to accept still another literary award...
...Playful...
...He has known parents so eager to have a girl that when a boy was born they dressed him as a girl and gave him a girlish name...
...Then Isaac says maybe he has delivered his verdict too quickly...
...To a Hasid it can be a mystery...
...Isaac has the class's hushed attention as he talks about his novel Satan in Goray, set in the time of Sabbatai Zevi, when the Jews of Poland were expecting the Messiah momentarily...
...Well, I will tell you...
...And yet this author of eight published novels, seven books of short stories, four books of memoirs, twelve books for children, and hundreds of short stories and articles has never had a college education and writes all his work in Yiddish, a language the majority of his readers don't understand...
...for the Mit-nagdim, a sane and rational faith the wisdom of which was to be sought in scholarship, not in folklore...
...Yentl's act was a sin—but a sin committed for the sake of being able to study Torah—a kind of contradiction...
...If I would be an editor in a small town, I would publish it immediately...
...A woman complains that there are so many characters in Clio's story that it is difficult to keep track of them...
...He would hate to think of a world where people would have to read Finnegans Wake or nothing...
...for a girl to disguise herself as a man is a sin...
...At least it's money...
...A young woman at the back suggests that "Yentl" is more modern than most of the author's tales...
...I can imagine sex with perhaps two women, but with a man and a woman—that's harder for me to imagine...
...There was a buzzing, a humming, and the croaking of frogs...
...I also do a little filing...
...The voice of nature tells us one thing while the Commandments of Moses tell us to curb our natural impulses, so obeying those apparently simple Commandments is not an easy thing...
...She's never late, he can't understand it...
...Isaac doesn't say a word about the beauty of the afternoon, the birdsong all around, the waterfall they have come to see...
...There would be enough messages for mankind for the next ten thousand years...
...The sun is even warmer now, the sky a profound blue...
...The last story of the evening is read by Laurie, a young woman with a low, throaty voice...
...Isaac's brother Israel Joshua tells many stories of the family's early days in Leoncin in Of a World That Is No More: A Tender Memoir...
...A preacher told them that the Messiah would come to redeem them only if they sinned...
Vol. 4 • September 1979 • No. 8
