At War with the Almighty

...The volume is valuable, therefore, in weighing the motifs that recur in his fiction: the demonic, the erotic, the Jewish a triangular nexus that Singer has made his own private terrain...

...Perhaps that explains why even when writing nonfiction, Singer can?not long supress the narrative urge...

...Gradually, he moves away from the holy texts and starts to emulate his freethinking elder brother, Israel Joshua (author of Yoshe Kalb and The Brothers Ashkenazi, and one of the famous figures in 20th-century Yiddish prose), going to the Jewish public library to read secular Hebrew and Yiddish works...

...Although he maintained a pious posture at home out of respect to his rabbi father, books introduced him to the power of darkness and to eros...

...His voracious reading also produced a chain of other discoveries, loosening innocence and naivete and increasing doubt...

...Consequently, just as he displayed radical courage in departing from the mainstream of Yiddish fictional themes and modes, he resolutely scoffed at false modernist trends toward obscurantism and stuck conservatively to such old-fashioned and basic qualities as plot, character and clarity...

...His erotic impulse is stimulated by the spiritual unions de?scribed in the Kabbala-and as the Biblical Patriarch Jacob was attracted to Rachel so was Isaac Bashevis drawn to "the mystery of girls...

...Author of the forthcoming novel, "The Yemenite Girl" THIS BOOK may be considered a spiritual correlative, like music to words, of Singer's memoir, In My Father's Court...

...Reviewed by Curt Leviant Professor of Hebraic Studies, Rutgers...

...In the book, Singer states: "I saw to my astonishment that I belonged neither to my own people nor to any other peoples...

...There is a touching, as well as ironic, Jewish timbre to Singer's being initiated into the outside world by the written word...

...The penultimate and final chapters of A Little Boy in Search of God provide an example...

...From his youth, Singer was an iconoclast, a loner unafraid to clear his own path through the woods...

...Here the volume ends, but it is only the middle of a to-be-continued autobiography...

...Well-read in the traditional works of Judiasm, he finds himself unable to reconcile some of their statements with all the upheaval, violence and injustice in the world...

...I do not know whether this is fortuitous or was planned, but it is certainly effective...

...His holiness-haunted visages come as stern reminders, almost like a finger of God, invariably facing scenes of dissipation or religious wrangling...

...literary critic...

...It is often said that a writer's quirks may be a masquerade designed to enlarge the mystery around him...

...The Zeitlin relationship, with its aura of sanctity, stands in stark contrast to the one immediately following...

...Isaac Bashevis Singer meets an older, attractive womanscion of Hasidic rabbis-who is a slightly mad devotee of theosophy...

...The drawings are fine expressions of this, and the engaging memoir before us, like all of Isaac Bashevis Singer's works, shows that he has not diminished his struggle...

...story-like incidents embroider the philosophic prose with verisimilitude...

...The first is devoted to Hillel and Aaron Zeitlin, father and son, who were rare among Yiddish writers for be?ing deeply grounded in both secular and Jewish culture yet steadfastly adhering to Jewish practice...

...Singer has a profound affection for these two artists and noble human beings...

...He recounts how, despite their disparate views on religion, God and tradition, he and Aaron shared a deep friendship, a love of spiritualism and a mutual disdain for the vanity of untalented hacks...

...Aaron, professor of He?brew literature and Yiddish poet and dramatist, died two years ago in New York...

...What he faces, in short, is an antinornious split: One favorite source disparages pray?er, another counsels fervor...

...Hillel Zeitin died a martyr's death wear?ing his prayer shawl and tefillin on the way to the Treblinka death camp in 1942...

...Thus the tale of his beginning to turn from the quiet exist?ence of an Orthodox Jewish boy: While his parents are asleep, Isaac browses through his father's books on Jewish mysticism, normally for?bidden to youths until they are much older...

...Ira Moskowitz (who previously collaborated with Singer on The Hasidim), has provided illustrations of Jews in religious ecstasy that are a counterpoint to the text...

...As World War I neared its end, the 14-year-old Singer was reading Heine, cheap pulp fiction and philosophy in a vain search for an an?swer to the question that haunted him: Why is there so much suffering in this world...

...Moreover, these continue to be uppermost in his esthetics...

...Certain characters emerge to enhance our understanding of his education...

...We see him dubious early on about the redeeming power of social movements, too: He is pessimistic about politics and excoriates the self-puffery and provincialism of Yiddish writers' clubs and organizations, eventually coming to feel the celebrated classic writers were overrated...

...If we take A Little Boy in Search of God as an authentic autobiographical statement, we must conclude that Singer's literary obsessions are mirror slivers of his real life...

...Instead of fighting in my writings the political leaders of a decadent Europe and helping to build a new world, I waged a private war with the Al?mighty...

...In his view, the philosophers spoke of analytic and syn?thetic meaning and hid behind Greek phrases...

...Are mysticism and imps really an extension of Singer's personal attitudes, or are they simply adornments to the artist's carefully nurtured persona...

...And it is these tensions that inform his life and writings with an intellectual and dramatic complexity...

...The possibly misleading title not?withstanding, far from being a childen's book, this is a very mature and quite frank, almost confessional, assessment of the author's outlook...

...Some even held, an acerbic Singer says, that man's problems stemmed from lack of clear definitions...

...The description of his first experience there is particularly moving-a rather timid boy returning his broth?er's overdue books...

...The thrice-married woman provides Sin?ger with a badly needed room, meals and comfort at a time in his life when he is despondent and has contemplated suicide...

...But it is neither a woman's seduction nor the temptations offered by nonreligious friends that spurs on young Isaac's alienation from piety...

...But where that recounted incidents, characters and stories of his childhood in Warsaw, A Little Boy in Search of God focuses mainly on feelings, thoughts and development of beliefs the music of soul, if you will??in recording how he arrived at his world view through reading and encounters with people...

...To fully understand Singer, though, one must be aware that alongside a skepticism fueled by Spinoza, who taught him that pray?ing was not efficacious and undermined his faith in the God of prayer, stands a belief in the Kabbalistic texts, which assert that prayers fervently recited go directly to the Throne of Glory...