Isaac Singer's Marvels

...Similarly, "Blood" is a study of the sadistic erotic personality, and the Jewish folklore in the story, from ritual slaughtering to lycanthropy, serves primarily as external dramatization for an internal motivation...

...His masterpiece, to my taste, remains "The Black Wedding" in the 1961 volume, but several stories in the new book invite comparison with it...

...There he rediscovers his childhood sweetheart, Raizel, thought to have been killed by the Nazis...

...Solomon Margolin, who was Schloime-Dovid the son of the Talmud teacher in the Polish shtetl of Sencimin, has a transcendent experience at a wedding of Senciminers in Brownsville in Brooklyn...

...there is no other...

...Sometimes in Short Friday, as in the earlier "The Black Wedding," Singer's demonology becomes a metaphor for repressed sexuality, so that mythology and folklore function as a vocabulary of psychopathology...

...or that he can write a model modern short story when he is so inclined (the Yiddish Hemingway...

...The Nazis destroyed the Jews, but those who escaped will be as ruthlessly destroyed as Jews by America (or by Israel, or by any place...

...Satan convinces him that he is "a pearl lost in sand" among the Jews, a petty and small-minded people who exalt mediocrity and are unworthy of their intellectuals (Singer must have enjoyed himself writing those speeches...

...In a scene of perverse sensuality, she is excited and seduced by watching Reuben cut the throats of her fowl...

...Short Friday, with 16 stories translated by a variety of hands, is fuller and more ambitious than Singer's two earlier collections in English, Gimpel the Fool (1957) and The Spinoza of Market Street (1961...

...Zeidel's weakness is pride...

...Jachid and Jechidah," a heavy-handed demonstration of the immortality of the soul...

...Instead, as a Christian Zeidel is the same learned misfit that he was as a Jew...

...But perhaps she is an illusion, and Raizel was really killed...

...Two stories in Short Friday deal with American life...

...Risha progresses inexorably from adultery to slaughtering animals herself and copulating with Reuben as the blood gurgles from the severed throats, to selling horsemeat and pork to the Jews as kosher meat, to Christian baptism, to apotheosis as a werewolf eaten by dogs...

...By the terrible momentum inherent in each first sin, in Singer's world (as in Hawthorne's...

...In Singer's world, werewolves and saints are of equal interest and value, along with Velvel the Barrelmaker and a hunchback peddling pickled herring...

...perhaps we are in "a cosmic Brownsville, a cosmic wedding...

...Their meeting place was the Radzyminer study house where they visited daily to tell each other stories...

...An equally marvelous story, "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," is about a girl whose bedridden father secretly studies Torah and Talmud with her, making her unfit for the life of "the noodle board and the pudding dish...

...With "the destruction of Tishevitz, the destruction of Poland," by the Nazis, the demon narrator tells us, "There are no more Jews, no more demons...

...so far as I know they are Singer's first such ventures...

...She succumbs to a passion for Reuben the ritual slaughterer that conceals a deeper passion for slaughter itself...

...The recognition scene, in which Yentl is able to convince Avigdor that she is a girl only by showing him the evidence, is as funny, pathetic, and beautiful as anything Singer has written...

...he is a literature...

...A third story, almost as remarkable as those two, is "Zeidlus the Pope...

...died, shot, burned...

...perhaps Dr...

...As he meditates, he is reassured by an advertising airplane that "They still served soup with kasha and kneidlach, knishes and stuffed derma at Margolies' restaurant...

...The story is utterly convincing, not in the realm of the rational (the world does not divide so neatly into vegetarians and werewolves), but in a realm of the imagination where the reader as well as Risha is intoxicated and maddened by the hot gush of blood...

...But Singer knows that Yentl is a lesbian—in fact she tells Avigdor so, as best she can, with "I'm neither one nor the other"—and Torah and Satan alike are here folk metaphors for latent homosexuality...

...But Isaac Bashevis Singer, who believes himself to be an extinct writer using a dead tongue, preserves them impartially—Yentl and the women, Zeidel and the village—in the immortal amber of his art...

...A very few of the stories seem to me unsuccessful: "Big and Little," an anecdote...

...Meyer was only present two weeks out of every month...

...The teeth of a deep sea fish on a pier are "evidence of a wickedness as deep as the abyss...

...The demon narrator of "The Last Demon," stranded in Tishevitz, is of course a Jewish demon...

...observing that Singer writes moral fables and allegories rather than stories, and romances rather than novels, I called him "the Yiddish Hawthorne...

...One is that the life of the shtetl in Eastern Europe is Jewish life...

...Jews in America, deprived of their shtetl culture and language, become "grandmothers with dyed hair and rouged cheeks" at Miami Beach, or backslappers in rented tuxedos at Brownsville weddings...

...and "Short Friday," a pious fable...

...He ends as a blind beggar, and at his death the imps of Gehenna await him with boiling pitch, and they at last acclaim him Pope Zeidlus...

...The other look at America, "A Wedding in Brownsville," is a realistic short story, and a magnificent one, but at its heart is the same unsubstantiality...

...This world of the Jewish shtetl in Poland, with an earlock at every ear, and a demon tugging at every earlock, is made blindingly real, as I observed in 1962, at the price of making 20th century America seem phantasmagoric (as perhaps it is...

...Yentl thinks that she is too important "for chattering with silly women," and Zeidel believes himself too brilliant to waste away in a little Jewish village...

...Zeidel is persuaded to convert to Christianity, where his genius will be acknowledged by his prompt elevation to the throne as Pope Zeidlus the First...

...Thus "Three Tales," an old-fashioned popcorn chain of supernatural narratives, has an irresistible beginning: "There were three in the circle: Zalman the glazier, Meyer the eunuch, and Isaac Amshinover...

...So he is, but one would not know from that comparison how much coarse merriment there is in his work (the Yiddish Rabelais...

...Short Friday displays a broad spectrum of sanctity: from the werewolf Risha and the drunken murderer Leib to the saintly rabbi of Tishevitz, martyred by the Nazis, and Shmul-Leibele and his wife Shoshe of the title story, so pious and good that after their marital exertions one Sabbath eve they are promptly gathered up to Paradise by an angel...

...the girl Avigdor loves...

...it better displays the breadth of Singer's range...

...After his death Yentl disguises herself as a yeshiva student named Anshel...

...One, "Alone," is a fantasy about Miami Beach in the hurricane season...

...A successful New York physician...

...I've heard that there are Gentile demons," he says primly, "but I don't know any, nor do I wish to know them...

...243 pp., $4.95), it becomes obvious that Singer is more than a writer...

...The precipitous tumble from meat eating through sexual license to apostasy and demonic crime, so economically charted in "Blood," is chronicled at greater length in Satan in Goray...

...Everywhere in the book are marvels and delights...

...If the Jews are just about extinct, then even in their ugliness and repulsive habits they must be treasured, like California condors...

...being one of those whom the Talmud calls periodic madmen, he was out of his mind the other two...

...Yentl-Anshel finds herself in love with her friend and fellow student Avigdor, but married to Hadass...

...We have also been annihilated," he explains, "I am the last, a refugee...

...Blood" begins with the chilling topic sentence: "The cabalists know that the passion for blood and the passion for flesh have the same origin, and this is the reason 'Thou shalt not kill' is followed by 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.' " "Blood" is about Risha, the young second wife of an elderly pious estate owner...

...The narrator, alone in an empty hotel, pursued by a repulsive hunchbacked girl, meditates on the possibility that Substance with its Infinite Attributes lies behind the world of appearance...

...Even those are written with so much vitality and style that their very failures are beguiling...

...The story says that what motivates Yentl in her transvestism is that "her soul thirsted to study Torah," that Satan the Evil One drives her to propose to Hadass and continue the imposture into marriage...

...It tells of a prodigy of Talmudic study, Zeidel Cohen, who is tempted by Satan (the narrator of the story) and falls...

...Which level is American Substance: the derma in the sky, the abyss in the sea, or the hump on the girl...

...Tishevitz may be so small that the tenth member of its congregation is a billy goat, but in Singer's view it is the entire Jewish universe...

...Margolin is an illusion, and Schloime-Dovid was slaughtered with the rest of his family...

...Through the reunions in "A Wedding in Brownsville" runs the litany: "tortured, burned, gassed...

...Many of the themes in Short Friday are familiar from Singer's other books...

...In a review of The Slave in these pages (July 23...

...Two themes familiar in Singer come with new urgency in Short Friday...

...The mad triangle of the story is ultimately resolved by a symbolic union like that at the end of The Slave: Yentl flees, Avigdor marries Hadass, and they produce a son named Anshel...

...1962...

...The protagonist of "Zeidlus the Pope" is a Jewish Faust like Yasha Mazur in The Magician of Lublin, and a more luckless one...