Parables that Surprise

...The visitor, who has escaped the Holocaust, defines himself as a smuggler...

...They are fleeing from Nazi to Communist territory...

...By this measure, Singer always comes through for the reader...

...They could neither stay together nor remain apart...

...Singer replied in part: " It must be short...

...Like a conjurer, though, Singer instantly breathes life into his people...

...Such lines are the outgrowth of a life's experience and work...

...lnConversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer Richard Burgin asked him what his "rules" were for composing a short story...

...Others include six-week vacations with sex and free love...

...His stories are deeply sad and cynical, yet they are steeped in humor and charm...

...Comrade Yankel proposes that they form a "united front...

...In "The Smuggler," a little toothless man wearing a knitted cap appears at Singer's door with a cart of Singer's books to be autographed...

...He was sent somewhere to the north to a place where the strongest man could not last longer than one year...

...it is undoubtedly because he has stayed so close to his roots that his work continues to have a vivid authenticity and strength...

...they are the distillation of maturity and exact observation...

...The nails on the beds began to glow with heat...

...The plot should be such that when you read the first page, you don't know what the second will be...

...If they are not always deep, though, they are invariably instructive...

...Another writer among the refugees is Bentze, a physical dynamo who has "a pair of huge paws...

...One of them is Feitl, a frail Yiddish writer...

...Nothing can be explained," one of his characters says...

...Underscoring this political betrayal is Bentze's deeper treachery in taking Feitl's wife away from him...

...Now in his 80s, Singer continues to write with zest and freshness...

...In 1941 the Nazis arrive at Bialystok and the Stalinists run...

...He acts like a hermit, and is constantly absorbed in computing his earnings...

...Take "Sabbath in Gehenna...

...He keeps us guessing, as he intends to...

...A more serious treatment of political themes, "Runners to Nowhere," still interlaces humor with human suffering and tragedy...

...Singer paints a macabre picture of Polish Jews hurrying on foot along a road, burdened with trunks and briefcases full of manuscripts, clothes and food...

...The flowers were nothing but symbols for the counterrevolutionists Rykov, Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had already been purged...

...Poland is always in the author's memory...

...he was just a little man, a bundle of skin and bones, with a single tuft of hair on his chest, protruding ribs, knobby knees, and arms like sticks...

...He breaks many rules of the canon: He doesn't concoct scenes, doesn'tcreate characters in depth, but rather tells us what went on...

...That is not to suggest The Death of Methuselah is a disappointing collection...

...The flare is small, and usually it is not (as in Singer's early stories and novels) the sustaining flame of great art...

...A meeting is held by "the free thinkers (there are many of them in Gehenna...

...As is usually the case with enlightened ones, their topic is how to improve their lot, how to make a better Gehenna...

...When you read the second page, you don't know what the third will be, because this is how life is, full of little surprises...

...Social do-gooders in this collection get their comeuppance...

...He describes a retired man in Florida: "Without clothes, Israel Danziger wasn't Israel Danziger at all...

...He hadn't reckoned with the kind of power that in one second erases everything petty and ambitious...

...But Bellow also wrote: "For there is power in a story...

...Although Singer does not here attain the heights he scaled three decades ago in Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, he remains one of our best short form writers (along with Stanley Elkin and Stephen Dixon...

...But the Sabbath ends: "The fires leaped up again...

...In one story Singer writes of a married couple in late middle age: "On the surface it appeared simple enough, but behind their mutual affection hovered a kind of enmity...

...My body is my contraband," he says, and he has smuggled it through life "between the powers of wickedness and madness...

...Unable to carry his load, he "stopped and began to choose those plays he thought were his best and threw the others away...

...Singer's details have the power instantly to evoke a character, a life or an epoch...

...It's one person narrating to another...

...In The Death of Methusaleh, each tale flares to life...

...I must be convinced, or at least have the illusion, that I am the only one who could write this story or this particular novel...

...When he warmly invites a nephew to live with them, she perceives it as a welcome change...

...A radiator in a Manhattan apartment "was seething quietly, and sang out a tune which reminded me of our tiled stove on Krochmalna Street and the kerosene lamp overmyfather'sdesk...

...The punishing demons grabbed up their rods, and a lashing and a whipping and ahanging and a wailing erupted once more...

...When he "threw himself on the ground to kiss the earth of the Socialist land, a Red Army man clutched him by his collar and arrested him...

...There the Stalinists, who have organized their own NKVD, put him on trial...

...My favorite stories here include two that are almost unutterably sad...

...In a small town in Austria, "It was rumored that those who baked the bread kneaded the dough with their bare feet...

...The Stalinists are happy to accept him as one of their own...

...For a short while all the strength and all the radiance of the world are brought to bear upon a few human figures...

...By these higher criteria, I am less sure...

...And the third condition is the most important...

...They begin their inquisition: "Someone had written a poem about spring and this critic managed to find in such innocent words as 'flowers' and 'butterflies' allusions to Mussolini, Leon Blum, Trotsky, and Norman Thomas...

...In "The Trap," a woman enters a loveless marriage with a man who barely speaks to her...

...A story to me must have some surprise...

...It testifies to the worth, the significance of an individual...

...Singer's map of the world shows a terrain marked by chaos, jealousy, treachery, infidelity, betrayal, pathos, idiosyncrasy, and perversion—"the eternal laws of human conduct," by his lights...

...only observant Jews and Zionists (narrowly) escape Singer's wrath...

...Of course, it should have suspense from beginning to end...

...The birds were not just simple birds but the bands of Denikin and Makhno...

...She is piteously mistaken: Her husband has only set out to destroy their marriage...

...A Trotskyite, he "switches over with shameless vulgarity" to Stalinism now...

...We are drawn irresistibly into their lives and turn the pages with eagerness...

...The compression and concision he achieves give these pieces more the character of parables...

...Broken by his loss, Feitl manages to reach Bialystok...

...Eventually they were able to get along only in the dark...

...He has a numberof demands inmind: "First, that the week in Gehenna should not last six days, but that we should have a four day week...

...Bentze makes it to the Soviet Union...

...He makes them real and urgent...

...On that special day the fires do not burn, "the beds of nails are covered with sheets...

...Yet the man is shattered by the unexpected death of his wife:" He'd forgotten that one could lose absolutely...

...They are also mesmerizing...

...contributor, New York "Times Book Review" Saul Bellow, an early translator of Isaac Bashevis Singer, has written of the short story in general that it "should be interesting, highly interesting, as interesting as possible—inexplicably absorbing...

...After his apostasy Bentze offers cigarettes only to his new comrades on the road, proclaiming loudly that he has none to spare for "Trotskyite traitors to themasses, lackeys of Rockefeller and Hearst, agents of the Fascists...