A Pessimism Full of Love

...The two argue, taunt each other, yet eventually reconcile and plan a "black wedding...

...He is a philosophical writer, and in philosophical terms the dybbuks serve as honest expressions of protest against the restrictions of orthodoxy, suggesting that the letter of religious law did not always provide happiness for those who abided by it...

...Still, it is piquant and absorbing, and it confirms an old, always very delicately inserted implication of Singer's that unnatural ambition, extravagant hope, is destined to be thwarted...

...it is to put us on more gracious terms with those mysteries of our assigned fates that the most matter-of-fact person must accept...

...The same never entirely quenched desire for lifeisthesubjectof'Old Love," written much later, set in a Miami apartment house, and more stoical in outlook...

...Suddenly her mood changes, she leaves, and the next day he hears that she has committed suicide...

...From his garret window, he looks up to the celestial bodies above and scorns the vital noisy activities in the street below—watermelon vendors, thieves, coarse young men and shrieking girls...

...He knew that the wide world was full of strange cities and distant lands, that Frampol was actually no bigger than a dot in a small prayer book...

...Satan is one of Singer's star characters, and in "A Crown of Feathers," an intricate tale of religious ambivalence and skepticism, he uses his luxuriant repertoire of harrowing imagery to conjure up the "Evil One...

...Abba's children emigrate to America, his wife dies, war breaks out and Nazi planes bomb Frampol...

...Suddenly, he notices in a closet the familiar sack that contains his shoemaker's tools from Frampol, and he sets to work mending all the shoes he can find...

...Interestingly, no figure resembling the author ever appears in the Polish shtetl stories as rebellious hero or in any other guise...

...Brazen and ribald, he calls for schnapps and wine, and exposes the respected leaders of the community as misers, swindlers, idlers and sycophants...

...When hegives in to his affection for the crooked-nosed, hoarse-voiced Black Debbe and marries her, health and virility return and long-forgotten quotations from the romantic poets, Goethe and Lessing, rise to his lips...

...Sheftel tarries in the synagogue, preoccupied with study and prayer...

...With holy oaths, the rabbi attempts an exorcism...

...At any rate, the dybbuks in "The Dead Fiddler" suggest the ferment that must have been going on under the orderly surface of shtetl life...

...The theme of recovery and renewal sprouts up in many a story, and a favorite Singer miracle (usually accomplished by the intervention of a mortal) is the revival of sexual power in frail elderly men...

...They remain obdurately ensconced inside of Liebe Yentl, until her father appeals to their Jewish hearts, and offers to pray for the fiddler for 12 months...

...Perhaps it is for the opposite attribute, modesty, that the unassuming, lovely eponymous character of Gimpel the Fool—unresentful of the tricks and deceptions played upon him, able to love an unfaithful wife and a bastard child—has guided Singer to his most universally understood story and his most beautifully cadenced prose...

...but it seemed to him that his little town was the navel of the universe and that his own house stood at the very center...

...The last and least provincial of the great Yiddish writers has been living in New York since 1935, maintaining alert, ironic surveillance over what he often rebuffs, in interviews, as "unhealthy" drifts in contemporary culture...

...He often thought that when the Messiah came to lead the Jews to the land of Israel, he, Abba, would stay behind in Frampol, in his own house, on his own hill...

...The prankish teacher's helper, who has admired her from a distance, pretends to be the demon Hermizah, and alternates sweet persuasion with fearful threats that if she does not allow him into her bed, he will drag her beyond the Mountains of Darkness "where the earth is of iron and the sky of copper...

...Imaginatively, he is still most at home there...

...Familiar as Singer is with the literature and history of Judaism, however, he is not theological...

...On this occasion Singer slips in the comment that Akhsa was prepared to make a covenant with him "as many neglected women had done before...

...But he falls ill, and a street woman who peddled bagels and cracked eggs takes care of him out of in-stinctivecharity...

...But picturesque as the devil may look, he is almost always introduced for some very secular purpose...

...Amusingly, Singer has persistently jibed at "isms" and "ologies" in his interviews, and has been especially quizzical about the effect of Freudian psychology, yet the purpose of the supernatural in his writing is frequently a psychological one...

...Instantly, two balls of fire come out of Liebe Yentl's nostrils, fly through the window, and the demons are gone...

...Now he is dessicated, cranky, without friends...

...But the tall buildings and crowds, the ornate table set by his now affluent sons, confuse and disorient him, and he falls ill...

...When Akhsa discovers that her grandmother had been admired by a Gentile prince, and finds some pressed cornflowers in a New Testament bible, she is tempted to read through its pages...

...The classic Singer tales?Gimpel the Fool," "Taibele and Her Demon," "The Little Shoemakers"—take place in small Polish villages like Frampol...

...He formulated a conviction that Yiddish writing had so far been too petty and sentimental, and determined to introduce new subj ects like emotional obsession, fanaticism, false messiahs and, most unprecedentedly, sex...

...Reb (or Mr...

...Yet in fact, Isaac Bashevis and his older brother Israel Joshua (author of The Brothers Ashkenazi) were regarded as heretics by their father because they chose secular writing as a career...

...Terrified and intrigued, Taibele offers small resistance, and he is soon visiting her twice a week...

...The Spinoza of Market Street" reminds us eloquently that the common life and human attachment are ultimately more important than the pursuit of any intellectual abstraction...

...He proves to be the most entertaining of demons, concocting puns and rhymes, describing his flights "over ruins and fields of toadstools, over the salt marshes of Sodom, and the frozen wastes of the Sea of Ice...

...We can deduce, if only from the unseemly behavior of the two dybbuks, that they must be sinners, at least in a theological sense...

...Indeed, if there had never been a Freud, we might have settled for Singer—olympian, observant, nonjudging, passionately conscious of emotional ambivalence...

...His sons furnish a cobbler's bench, leather soles, nails, everything he needs for his trade—and he is a new man, rising at dawn to make comfortable shoes for the whole neighborhood...

...Despite the emphasis of many critics on Singer's predilection for the exotic and perverse aspects of Judaism (perhaps inferred from the Messianic frenzy of his remarkable novel, Satan in Goray), much of the strangeness in these stories is only the strangeness of the reader's own mundane world...

...To an ethical, compassionate writer steeped in the Jewish religion (Singer's father was a Hasidic rabbi and he himself attended a rabbinical seminary), the notion of sinful possibilities in human beings is naturally very vivid...

...Their red-haired daughter, Liebe Yentl, is more or less left to her own devices...

...where goats graze among the cemetery stones, poor Jews eat their Sabbath loaf in a sanctified glow, and erudite rabbis intervene in domestic crises by citing obscure references in Maimonides...

...Hearing of a new betrothal contract to a scholar who is not much to look at, she retires to her bed and is shortly possessed by an offbeat sort of dybbuk who claims to have been a fiddler in real life...

...Specters are simply clues that some distress, conflict, depression, or violent urge is on the scene...

...Taibele plies him with questions, misses him when he leaves, and begins to realize that she loves him...

...But how different Singer is from those contemporary writers who put their most energetic strokes into portraits of society's disintegration and disarray...

...Abba would rise from his work, wash his hands, put on his long coat, and go off to the tailors' synagogue for evening prayers...

...Though it is all part of the devil's plan, Singer is here, as elsewhere, associating theological error with normal curiosity and imagination...

...In "Taibele and Her Demon," a small, fair, dimpled woman of cheerful disposition is deserted by her husband...

...The fiddler defies everyone, rowdily playing a succession of dances, marches and hops...

...Singer set in Broadway cafeterias or Miami condominiums, a reader will find something to relish, to shake his head over, or that he is forced to acknowledge...

...As does most of Singer's work, it constitutes a formidable testimonial to human resilience and endurance...

...In his touching story of two unprepossessing souls who manage, with the help of a benign demon and the innocent violation of a Commandment, to outwit the community's restraint and find a way out of their loneliness, we see how deliberately Singer intermingles the natural and supernatural as parts of the same reality...

...Reviewed by lsa Kapp EVEN IN the recent anecdotal stories by LB...

...Like most of the New World stories, "Old Love" is more haphazard in plot, less perfect in its language than "The Spinoza of Market Street...

...They had not forgotten their heritage, nor had they lost themselves among the unworthy...

...As if he were some inspired pied piper, Singer composes strange harmonies in such stories, uniting the religious orthodoxy that keeps the community strictly bound, the down-to-earth pleasures of bed and board (loving wives, virile husbands, an occasional lecherous demon, an array of foods beyond the call of nourishment), and suspended, unseen fairy-tale visions of beauty, wickedness and virtue...

...Stories like "The Little Shoemakers" radiate family affection and tranquillity: "Evenings, whenthesun wassetting, the house would be pervaded by a dusky glow____Pesha, Abba'swife, would be cooking kasha and soup in the kitchen, the children would be playing, neighboring women and girls would go in and out of the house...

...An elderly widower, resigned to solitude, is visited by a vivacious neighbor, who rekindles all his youthful feelings...

...But years later, in one of those ambiguous Singer endings, Liebe Yentl dies and someone sees a barefoot girl on the road accompanied by a long-haired man carrying a violin case...

...Another ingenious example of the connection he makes between forces from without and forces within is "The Dead Fiddler," which begins just as an old-fashioned story should: "In the town of...there lived a man by the name of Reb Sheftel Vangrover...

...Only on the Sabbath and on holy days would he step into a cloud and let himself be flown to Jerusalem...

...On Sundays, the sons spread burlap aprons on their knees and join him, and he looks around at his heirs: "No, praise God, they had not become idolaters in Egypt...

...When her fianc6 dies, she grieves and becomes distraught and fanciful...

...But the most entrancing of his Collected Stories—those in which absurd accident combines with real tragedy, which make our spirits rise even as our hearts sink—are about the old world he escaped from nearly five decades ago...

...Then he is joined by an even more outrageous female dybbuk, once a barmaid and whore...

...Eventually Abba boards a ship to join his sons in America...

...His wife takes charge of worldly affairs, buying and selling wheat, corn and barley...

...What lyrical attention he bends, in contrast to them, toward the wholesome, stable elements in the background against which fears, passions and catastrophes erupt...

...This delightful narrative about agift-ed craftsman and his seven sons who honor and care for him is surely one of the most optimistic pieces of fiction ever written by a self-avowed pessimist...

...Wise, beautiful and wealthy Akhsa is inveigled by a devil employing her grandmother's voice into rejecting a worthy suitor and converting to Catholicism: "She saw a naked male figure—tall and black, with long elflocks, the horns of a buck and two protruding teeth, like a boar's...

...Fichelson, once a vigorous and respected scholar, has spent 30 years perfecting his understanding of Spinoza's Ethics...

...His body was translucent as a spider web...

...Singer'sown rebellion was considerably more subtle and sophisticated than his brother's...

...When the devil enters, it is not to make our surroundings more eerie...