Story Spinner

...To make the point, Singer read one paragraph of his Nobel address in Yiddish to a startled but delighted audience in Stockholm...

...Like Gimpel, Singer has spent his life telling lies like truth about the two worlds we inhabit, always inviting us to laugh along with him...

...saac Bashevis Singer's most famous tale, "Gimpel the Fool," is the best illustration of a favorite Singer theme...

...The core of Singer's art is best revealed in the comment of a narrator in one of his stories: "I had realized long ago that whatever anybody can invent already exists somewhere...

...It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year...

...And like William Faulkner, another inveterate yarn spinner, Singer likes to stay close to the traditional lore of the characters he portrays, showing often how the modern world has wrenched them from the grip of their ancient customs...

...Like them, he has understood that "Yiddish has not said its last word...

...In his Nobel acceptance speech, Singer paid special tribute to his native Yiddish, the vernacular of the Eastern Jews among whom he was born and raised...

...Singer is Freudian in the sense that there is a sexual underpining to almost every story he tells...

...But Singer is an American as well as a Jewish writer...

...Most telling in this regard, and my personal favorite in the collection, is "The Dead Fiddler," in which a male and female dybbuk (wandering spirit) enter the body of a young woman and outrage the community with their ribald antics...

...These days he sometimes publishes first in The New Yorker, earlier his work appeared in The Daily Forward, one of the last surviving Yiddish newspapers serving a steadily diminishing audience in New York and elsewhere...

...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein will be Fulbright Professor of American Studies in Japan for ten months beginning in April 1983...

...But when everyone laughs, Gimpel laughs too, and in his later years he explains: "I heard a great deal, many lies and falsehoods, but the longer I lived the more I understood that there were really no lies...

...Despite external differences, the audacity of the imagination is the same in Poland, New York, or Tel Aviv, where Singer's characters thrive...

...In another story, a Talmudic student becomes a lecherous idolater, quoting from the Bible to prove his theory that "sin is cleansing...

...No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world...

...No matter how strange a story sounds, if Singer has thought ' of it, there is a good chance it has already occurred or will soon...

...Whatever doesn't really happen is dreamed at night...

...This is especially true in his treatment of sex, largely censored from early Yiddish literature...

...Gimpel" is in this fine collection of forty-seven tales, several never published before...

...He has profoundly changed the tradition he inherited...

...It is clear, however, that Singer will be ranked along with the greats of Yiddish writing, with pioneers like Sholem Alei-chem, I. L. Peretz, and Mendele Mocher Sforim...

...Gimpel is the victim of all the inhabitants of his little town of Frampol, from the mean-spirited children to his scolding wife who betrays him time and again...

...It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Kabbalists—rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget...

...It is one of the many ironies of Singer's life and art that although Singer writes in Yiddish, some of his works are never published in the language since his audience is mainly American...

...Singer likes to point out that as Hebrew was a "dead language" until Israel made it the official language of the Jewish state, so it may be premature to declare Yiddish moribund...

...Since he often helps in the translation of his stories, Singer describes English as his "second original language" and notes that he has now lived longer in the United States than he lived in Poland...

...Singer is the archetypal storyteller and, like one of his masters, Sholem Aleichem, he invests even his most serious stories with humor...

...The prospects at the moment are not encouraging...

...It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world...

...No writer of fiction has ever dealt so openly with the sexual conventions of Judaism, which often likes to think of itself as above the carnal fray...

...It seems appropriate that both lived to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, Faulkner modestly deferring to Sherwood Anderson, Singer insisting it should have gone to Henry Miller...

...Singer describes in hilarious detail the sexual escapades of demons set loose in the world, the frustration of ascetic students and their masters, the uncontrollable ecstasies of the pious Jews (Chas-sidim) whose religious and sexual enthusiasms are often indistinguishable from each other...

...In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity...