Isaac B Singer: A Life

ONE
"A Stronghold of Jewish Puritanism"




THE LOCKET-SIZE PHOTO dates from 1926; it is one of the oldest known photographs of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Isaac is twenty-two years old, and he still has some hair, though he won't for very long. He is a thin, fair-skinned redhead whose ears stick way out. The expression in his eyes is beguiling, almost bewitching. His pale, transparent blue eyes seem to gaze inward. One can almost imagine the four-year-old boy who was taught to read with the Pentateuch and almost recognize the face of the future Nobel Prize winner. Incredulity, bafflement: the gaze is simultaneously straightforward and helpless. It is the gaze of a tormented dreamer, a gaze Singer retained all his life, as if his father's words on the Kabbalah still echoed in his ears: "It is not a simple matter, not simple at all. The world is filled with mysteries, everything happens according to its decree, everything contains the secret of secrets ..."1
This photo is strangely symbolic. It dates from the same period when Singer published his first writings. Everything prior to that time--childhood scenes, family albums--has disappeared. We will never know what Isaac looked like as a little boy or as an adolescent. The first time we see his face it is already the face of a younger writer, as if everything that came before--life without fiction--was not worth disclosing. As if he wanted to tell us that his true personality was inseparable from the works behind which he so often hid. The war spared that particular photo by chance, but Singer never believedin chance. The fact that his face is revealed to us for the first time just as he was emerging as a writer is a fitting place to begin his story.






The opening sentence could be Alfred Jarry's grim statement about Ubu Roi: "The action takes place in Poland, that is to say, nowhere." This is true even in geographical terms, for, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Poland was divided and under the iron rule of three empires, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. "Nowhere" could be used to describe Singer's native village, too, for today, more than a hundred years after his birth, every last trace of Jewish life has been meticulously obliterated from the landscape. The Poland of Singer's birth is nowhere in human memory. All the eyewitnesses to his 1904 birth have died. If they were still alive today, they would be 110 or 115 years old, assuming they had managed to flee Poland before the Second World War or were among the roughly 120,000 Jews--of the country's original population of three million prior to 1939--who survived the Holocaust.2
The only way, then, to reconstruct Isaac's first years is to trust his own recollections. Fortunately, these were unusually precocious and vivid. Isaac always claimed to remember events that had taken place when he was three or even two and a half years old. One day when he referred to his native village of Leoncin, by the sandy banks of the Vistula near Nowy Dwór, his mother was amazed. Isaac was only four years old when the Singer family had left Leoncin. How could he possibly remember anything? Singer described the inhabitants and the houses with such a wealth of detail that she was rendered speechless. He could even recall the villagers' names. His mother couldn't believe her ears. The boy was a prodigy. She didn't know that this ability to remember would inform his entire life, that he would constantly relive, polish, and transform his recollections, and that when his memory betrayed him, he would die.
Yet these extraordinary memories are accompanied by strange areas of darkness, starting with his date of birth. Was Singer born on July 14, 1904, as he often claimed? This is far from certain. He seems to have made up the date. For a novelist to start his life with a fiction is very fitting. Here is how he explained it later: "At our house, wenever celebrated birthdays. One day, at the heder, a little schoolmate said to me, 'Today's my birthday, I'm going to receive gifts.' I went home and, furious, asked my mother, 'What about me, when is my birthday? Why don't we ever celebrate it?' Sensing how upset I was, to make me happy my mother answered, 'Well, as a matter of fact, it's today.' The day was July 14, obviously not the real date, but I decided that would be it from then on."3
We will probably never know the real date. In Poland, all the relevant archives have disappeared. Singer's birth certificate is nowhere to be found. Was it destroyed during the First World War, or was it burned during the Second World War? Very few official registries of the Jewish communities remain. After 1945, some were found in the midst of ruins or buried in heaps of rubbish. Occasionally, villagers brought the schoolteacher papers covered with writing they couldn't decipher. More often, these documents were used as wrapping paper. In the countryside, herring was wrapped in the Torah.
A trip to Singer's birthplace today is hardly more fruitful. You cross fragrant mossy pine forests and fields still harvested with scythes before reaching Leoncin, about twenty miles northwest of Warsaw. The village stretches along a drab main road, the Street of the Partisans. Not a trace of its former Jewish life remains. The only people you encounter are children and a few men on bicycles with bottles of beer sticking out of their pockets. Today the house where Singer was born is gone; all that remains is an orchard. Across from the town hall, though, a dead-end alley bears the name of Isaac Bashevis Singer. But the graffiti--two stars of David--render the street sign almost illegible. Clearly, Leoncin's inhabitants have no particular desire to honor the great man's memory. No one talks about him; no one remembers him; the silence is deafening. The proposal that the village school be named after him was ignored. Isaac Bashevis Singer Street boasts not a single house; the inhabitants of Leoncin all refused to have a "Jewish address."4
A FAMILY OF RABBIS AND WRITERS
Since there are no independent sources, the best way to imagine the setting of those early years is through the autobiographical writings ofthe Singer children. In the Singer family--as in the Corneille and Brontë families--all the brothers and sisters were writers, or at least attracted to writing. Both Isaac's older brother, Israel Joshua, and his sister, Hinde Esther, recorded their memories of that vanished world. In Of a World That Is No More, Israel Joshua describes the shtetl's wooden houses, its sandy roads, the figurine of Puss-in-Boots in the tobacconist's shop window.5 These recollections are supplemented by those of Hinde Esther, who later became Esther Kreitman, in her memoir The Dance of Demons.6 At the time, Leoncin had a population of two hundred, Jews and non-Jews, who all lived in great poverty but sent their children to the same school and seemed to have coexisted peacefully.
By the time the third child was born, Isaac--Yitskhok, in Yiddish, or Itshele, in the affectionate diminutive--the Singer family had been living in Poland for generations. Four hundred years earlier, in the sixteenth century, that land had become, as the historian Pierre Chanu calls it, the "Far West (in the East) for mistreated Jews ... For Ashkenazi Jews, the center of gravity moved a thousand kilometers to the East, from the Rhine valley to the Jerusalem on the Polish and Lithuanian borders."7 The family names still bear the traces of this massive resettlement. Many Polish Jews kept their German names, such as Singer, which means "cantor."
Isaac was born into an extremely pious family. His father, Pinchos Menahem Singer, was a rabbi. So was his grandfather, his father's father, Reb Samuel, and Reb Samuel's father, Reb Isaiah; Reb Isaiah's father had been Reb Moshe, known as the "Sage of Warsaw," and Reb Moshe's father had been Reb Tobias, whose father's name had also been Reb Moshe, and so on, back to a certain Reb Zvi Hirsch. In other words, the men in the Singer family had been rabbis for at least seven generations. Pinchos Menahem's disappointment later on at Isaac's preference for sacrilegious writing over the Talmud and the Torah goes without saying. And, in a country where the general rule was that sons followed in their father's footsteps, so does the determination the young Singer would have had to show in order to follow his calling.
Furthermore, these men were not "ordinary" rabbis. On his father'sside, they prided themselves on belonging to a long-standing Hasidic tradition. One of Singer's ancestors, Reb Moshe, was reputed to have been a disciple, in his day, of the renowned Baal Shem Tov, the father of Hasidism. This mystical, popular movement, founded in Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century, advocated a new conception of Judaism. Born in reaction to an impoverishment in traditional Jewish thought, it stressed an immediate and joyous communication with the divine and responded to a malaise within the poorest sectors of society, whose preoccupations had become increasingly estranged from the intellectual rigor of the rabbinate. Hasidism says that only the "worst ineptitude" can exempt a Hasid, a pious man, from embracing a rabbinical career. Isaac's first transgression was not to be his least.
His maternal ancestry was no less burdensome. Bathsheba Singer, Isaac's mother, born Zylberman, was also a rabbi's daughter. She came from Bilgoraj, a relatively large town on the Austrian frontier. We know less about the Zylbermans' genealogy than the Singers'. But the description of the grandfather in In My Father's Court paints a clear picture of the family landscape. Rabbi Zylberman was not one to waste his time on "pettiness or small talk; he gave his legal decisions or religious interpretations of the law, and said no more." The rest of the time, he asked to be left to study in peace. In Bilgoraj, writes Singer, "though there were always opposing parties trying to destroy each other in the affairs of ritual slaughterers, elders, flour for Passover, Community jobs," Grandfather Zylberman kept his distance. "Nothing but the Talmud and the eternal questions interested him."8
THE WHOLE WORLD SEEN AS UNCLEAN
Piety, austerity, severity--these were the golden rules of the Singer family, to which we might add saintliness, truth, and integrity. Time and time again, Singer described the ascetic climate of his youthful years. Whether he had indeed lived this way, or whether he merely remembered it this way, amounts to the same thing: he was born into what he called "a stronghold of Jewish puritanism." His childhoodwas spent in half-unfurnished homes where the pantry was bare. His parents weren't wealthy, but they also frowned upon the slightest sign of luxury. Carpets, paintings, statuettes--all were systematically banned as signs of wealth or idolatry. Faces and carved images be gone! Though children love illustrations--today we would say they help stimulate their imaginations--for the Singers it was never too soon to learn the obvious: you do not compromise with the Commandments.
"I remember that in the heder I had once bartered my Pentateuch for another boy's, because the frontispiece of his was decorated with pictures of Moses holding the Tablets and Aaron wearing the priestly robe and breastplate--as well as two angels. Mother saw it and frowned. She showed it to my father. Father declared that it was forbidden to have such pictures in a sacred book."9
The same discipline applied to the body, considered a "mere appendage to the soul." In fact, anything suggesting pleasure was banished. In his memoirs, Singer recounts how Purim--the holiday commemorating Queen Esther's role in saving the Jewish people--irritated his parents. On that day, the air smelled of cinnamon, saffron, and chocolate. Messengers brought the rabbi mead and sweet-and-sour fish. The guests arrived wearing masks and cardboard helmets covered with golden paper. For the young Isaac, this holiday was a magic moment. But his parents were dismayed by so much frivolity and extravagance. "Once a wealthy man sent us some English ale. Father looked at the bottle, which bore a colorful label, and sighed. The label showed a red-faced man with a blond mustache, wearing a hat with a feather. His intoxicated eyes were full of a pagan joy. Father said, in an undertone, 'How much thought and energy they expend on these worldly vanities.'"
This sort of intransigence marks a person for life, as does this conception of faith. It is either blindly adhered to or rejected outright. Any middle ground is impossible. Young Isaac must have understood this early on. During the Purim holiday, he was perplexed by this asceticism. Not only were all the cakes forbidden (there's no way of knowing if the laws of kashruth had been properly observed) but the masks were also thrown into the trash can. "The wearing of masksand the singing of songs smacked of the theater, and the theater was tref--unclean. In our home, the 'world' itself was tref."10
Anything that made one stray from the quest for God was unclean--theater, painting, literature. Becoming open to the secular world and its futile pleasures, failing to devote all one's energy to being a "good Jew," choosing the profession of writer--all were tantamount to deliberately choosing a wayward path, immoral and unclean. They were tantamount to betraying one's father and disavowing one's roots. This rebellion weighed heavily in the Singer legacy. In fact, the theme of betrayal recurs in his books like a leitmotif. Men and women spend their time mutually betraying one another. Children betray their parents; people betray their beliefs, their values, their gods. Worse, according to Singer, "men betray themselves," which, he says, bothers him "more than anything."11
Yet in interviews and in his writings, Singer never really dwelled on the guilt this transgression might have aroused in him. Was this because he hadn't felt any guilt? Or because he preferred to avoid the question? At seventy-four, in his conversations with Richard Burgin, then assistant professor of English at Drexel University and editor of the literary magazine Boulevard, he explained why he had rejected the rabbinate--because of his religious skepticism and because a rabbi's life was, in his eyes, "a miserable kind of life." He added, without committing himself further, that his father very much wanted him to follow in his footsteps, but that his "younger brother followed him instead." 12 This seems like a polite way of discouraging discussion. A bit later, when Burgin asked the question again, "Did your father feel a sense of betrayal because you and your older brother became writers?" Singer skillfully dodged the issue again. Rather than discuss his feelings, he chose to describe the specific requirements of Hasidism.
Not only that we didn't want to be Rabbis, but that we left, from his point of view, our religion. From my father's perspective, I was an atheist, even though I believed in God. But he demanded more. I had to believe in every little dogma and bylaw the Rabbis created generation after generation. I had to believe that they were all given to Moses on Mount Sinai. However, Icould see that all these laws were man-made. For example, one law in the Bible became eighteen laws in the Mishnah and seventy in the Gemara or in the Book of Maimonides. This was their form of creativity. Just as the critics today will take a poem of Byron or Shelley and will write whole books about it, and they'll find in its verses things which the author never intended, so our Rabbis use the words of the Torah. They had to be creative, they had to do something with their minds, and after a while the Jewish people had to live according to this hairsplitting. They made life so difficult that a religious Jew had no time for anything else but religion. It became for the Hasidim and for many other Jews a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. I could see this when I was still very young. I also asked myself questions. If there is a God, why is it that those who pray and carry all these man-made burdens are often poor and sick and miserable and those who don't practice them are often happy? I saw at a very early age that this kind of religion is nothing but commentary upon commentary, sheer casuistry.13
Yet this did not prevent Singer from being a believer. All his life he insisted that he believed in God, but in his own way, without following any particular precepts. Had he been right to want to rid himself of this set of rules and constraints? Wasn't it an illusion to believe in an "in-between" area that is neither atheism nor strict observance? Singer asked himself these questions to his dying day. And like many of his heroes--some of whom ended their lives in Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem--it is likely that these doubts accompanied him to the grave.
MISMATCHED PARENTS
But let us return to the precocious child who became convinced early on that man had perverted religion. Now he is a pale-faced little boy with red earlocks, growing up in "a stronghold of Jewish puritanism" under the protection of his two older siblings, Hinde Esther and IsraelJoshua, fourteen and eleven years older than he. In 1906, two years after Isaac's birth, a fourth and last child was born, Moishe, who later became a rabbi.
Their parents' marriage in Bilgoraj, several years before, had not gone unnoticed. Though it was almost summer, Singer's father, Pinchos Menahem, arrived in a fur coat. This detail is revelatory of his character. He was absentminded, inattentive, and naive. He had been tied to his mother's apron strings and wore traditional long white hose and old-fashioned shoes. He wasn't at all interested in women and even less so in social customs. His mind was elsewhere. According to Singer, he could easily have taken his mother-in-law or sister-in-law as his wife that day. This is barely an exaggeration. Even for his own time, Pinchos Menahem had an unusual way of living in his own world. As a little boy, he had wanted to become a saint. As an adult, he devoted himself entirely to the Torah and couldn't stand the slightest disruption of his beloved study.
Pinchos Menahem's tragedy, however, was that he had neither his father's charisma nor his father-in-law's brilliance. Emotional and unworldly, he struggled to control his feelings. He was capable of bursting into tears, once predicting the end of the world when a woman swore a false oath on a sacred scroll. His detachment from reality may explain why he never succeeded in becoming an "official" rabbi. In the divided Poland of the day, he would have had to pass a Russian exam, but Pinchos didn't speak a word of Russian or Polish. He didn't even know how to write his address "in the letters of the Christians." He spoke only Yiddish and withdrew to his inner world, constantly insecure.
"Father always lived in the fear that he might, God forbid, be imprisoned. According to Russian law he was not even licensed to perform weddings or to grant divorces. True, by way of a certain 'fixer' he regularly sent small sums to the local precinct chief and captain. But who knows what the Russian police would suddenly decide to do?"14
Though Pinchos Menahem was a cultured man as far as tradition was concerned, Isaac never showed any admiration for him in his memoirs. On the contrary, he and his mother sometimes seemedashamed of him. When he was called upon to arbitrate complex issues in the presence of wealthier rabbis, his wife worried in the kitchen, afraid that he wouldn't understand the complicated matters being discussed. Isaac, too, wondered about his father's capabilities and watched him with embarrassment. "My father, to be sure, presided at the head of the table, but he seemed to shrivel in the presence of these worldly divines and their smooth conversation ... I resented these clever Rabbis, yet at the same time I envied their children."15
Bathsheba prompted no such feelings. At every opportunity in his autobiographical writings, Isaac expresses his love and deep admiration for his mother. This slim, well-dressed redhead with the smallest shoe size in town spoke in a learned way, and her words were always authoritative. While Pinchos Menahem was always in the background, a self-effacing, cowardly figure, Bathsheba was an unusually intelligent, capable woman with a strong personality. It is no coincidence that Singer invented the pseudonym Bashevis for himself in 1927 in her honor.
Bathsheba inherited wisdom and an interest in study from her father, Rabbi Zylberman. She learned Hebrew on her own, and read and reread, in the original, Duty of the Heart, The Book of the Covenant, and The Straight Path, books she kept at her bedside. She knew the Bible better than anyone. She was able to cite hundreds of rabbinical maxims and could even replace her husband if need be. She should have been a rabbi rather than a rebbetzin, the wife of a rabbi, a role that bored her and failed to satisfy her thirst for learning. According to Israel Joshua Singer, Pinchos and Bathsheba would have been better matched if she had been the husband and he the wife. "Even externally each seemed better suited for the other's role. Father was short and round, with a soft, fine, delicate face; warm blue eyes; full rosy cheeks; a small, chiseled nose; and plump, feminine hands. If not for the great reddish-brown beard and corkscrew-like earlocks, he would have resembled a woman. Mother, on the other hand, was tall and somewhat stooped, with large, piercing, cold-gray eyes, a sharp nose, and a jutting pointed chin like a man's."16 Bathsheba rapidly sank into depression, or more precisely, a kind of caustic melancholy. Was it her confinement to the domestic sphere, or her lukewarm feelingsfor her husband that made her sad? With time, she became blunt and curt, as well as despondent, distant, and increasingly withdrawn.
Bathsheba clearly had not married Pinchos out of love. At sixteen, her father had given her the choice between two suitors: Pinchos Menahem, or the son of a rich family from Lublin. Bathsheba was said to have chosen the more erudite of the two. The marriage certificate, written in the Cyrillic alphabet, states that the ceremony was celebrated by her father, Rabbi Zylberman, in June 1889, year 5649 in the Jewish calendar. They formed such a bad pair that separation was discussed. Bathsheba's brothers urged her to leave this gentle dreamer, but by then the couple already had two children, Hinde Esther and Israel Joshua. In the end, they never divorced. Bathsheba and Menahem continued their marriage uninterrupted until the latter's death in 1929. The two were not so much together, but rather side by side, each cloistered in his or her own impermeable world. For Isaac, born into this atmosphere, the message was clear. He would have to create his own inner world very quickly, escape and protect himself from others, and rely primarily on himself.
FROM LEONCIN TO RADZYMIN
Singer was helped by a change in their lives. In 1907, after spending ten years in Leoncin, Pinchos Menahem was given the position of assistant to the rabbi of Radzymin. He was put in charge of the small yeshiva, or Talmudic school. Isaac was only three years old when the whole family set out for Radzymin. The two villages were a few miles apart, but the trip by wagon impressed the young Singer and worked its way into his imagination:
All the Jews in town came to bid us goodbye, and the women kissed Mother. Then we rode through fields, forests, and past windmills. It was a summer evening, and the sky seemed ablaze with blowing coals, fiery brooms, and beasts. There was a buzzing, a humming, and the croaking of frogs. The wagon halted, and I saw a train, first a large locomotive with threelamps like suns, then freight cars trailing behind in a slow, preoccupied way. They seemed to come from nowhere and to go to beyond the end of the world, where the darkness loomed.
I began to cry. Mother said, "Why are you crying, silly? It's just a train." I know exactly what I saw at that time--a train with oil cars, but there was a sense of mystery about it then that still remains with me ... 17
Radzymin. Close to a century later, the ambience is less oppressive there than in Leoncin. In fact, if you go through the town today and ask the bookseller for a book on Radzymin, she spontaneously brings out a book by Singer. Then she tells you his address: "Dom ... Tak, tak ... Stary Rynek, 7." Radzymin is a large town, about twelve miles northeast of Warsaw. Singer's house still stands on the main square, a sprawling building with a peeling façade and a wooden door, squeezed between a florist and greengrocer, steps away from the highway, the church, and the Solidarity delegation. The Friends of Radzymin Society even placed a plaque of the same gray as the façade on the building: "To Isaac Singer, an inhabitant of Radzymin, Nobel Laureate in Literature." The plaque is recent; it dates from 1991. Directly under it, in a makeshift stall, a jumble of cabbage, turnips, and carrots awaits the customer.
No one here knows Singer and no one seems to pay attention to his childhood home. "The plaque? What plaque?" exclaims a middle-aged Polish woman in impeccable French. "Singer, I don't know him," she says, glancing inquiringly at the group of women artists and intellectuals from Warsaw with whom she is spending a day in the country. One of them has read a few of his novels and short stories, but when asked whether she likes them, her astonishing reply is, "I like Jews. But, you know, Isaac Singer was particularly stingy."
Indifferent to this adult talk, a little boy and a grimy-nosed little girl are sitting on the sunken steps of the house. In the dark corridor, centuries of humidity assail visitors' noses. A worm-eaten wooden staircase looks as if it dates from the beginning of time. Beyond, a small garden shaded by an old walnut tree stretches along the length of the building. Sunflowers, a bicycle, turtle doves, a water pump inworking order. Time seems to have stood still in Radzymin. One can easily recognize the town as it appears in the prewar photos collected in the Livre du souvenir de la communauté juive de Radzymin18--its unpaved streets, its two market squares, and the surrounding streets with wooden houses.
Isaac spent 1907 and 1908 in Radzymin, retaining photographic memories of those years. Here, we see him in an orchard, among currant and gooseberry bushes. There, he is at the heder learning the alphabet. There again, he is playing in the courtyard of his house or the rabbi's house, with Esther and Scheindele, his first female admirers. In those days, Radzymin had the same number of Jews as gentiles. The rabbi had the reputation of performing miracles, and people traveled from far and wide to see him. Yet this huge man with a yellowish beard wasn't at all generous with Pinchos Menahem, whom he clearly didn't like. He gave him a salary of a few rubles, doled out sporadically: the Singers lived in great poverty. But Isaac didn't seem to suffer from this. The young rebbetzin was fond of him. She gave him sweets and glass beads. Also, like many little boys his age, Isaac was curious about everything and already troubled by the larger questions.
"Standing there [in the orchard], I would gaze at the horizon. Was that the end of the world? What happened there and what was beyond it? What were day and night? Why did birds fly and worms crawl? I tormented my mother with questions. My father always answered, 'That's how the Lord made it.'"19
By this time, such answers no longer satisfied Isaac. An important aspect of those Radzymin years was precisely the intrusion of doubt. True, "the world is full of mysteries" and, as it says in the Kabbalah, "each thing contains the secret of secrets." But what if God wasn't the ultimate answer to all these questions? What if life wasn't a quest entirely focused on the pursuit of saintliness? Hinde Esther and Israel Joshua already seemed to wonder; they grew critical of the rabbi and religion. They imitated him shouting prayers and rolling his eyes as he distributed food to the Hasidim. Inevitably this influenced their younger brother.
So it was probably in Radzymin that, for Singer, the first crack began to appear in the "stronghold of Jewish puritanism." Soon therewas another, more decisive one. In 1908, the Singers left Radzymin and moved to Warsaw. "Through the train windows," Isaac recalled, "I saw trees, buildings and people moving backwards."20 He also remembered a sense of mystery that would never leave him--the idea that unintelligible things could exist, that there was a secret that he couldn't grasp. In leaving the country for the bustling city and turning from the observation of the external environment to that of human nature, the young Isaac plunged into a world that was no less obscure and enigmatic--the passions and dramas being played out in pre-1914 Jewish Warsaw on the stage of the immortal Krochmalna Street.

Copyright © 2003 by Éditions Stock