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instruments of righteousness and as vessels of demonry.
Singer does not face the typical problem of the modern writer-of
having to improvise a milieu and make it credible to his readers, or of
having to take a familiar (or potentially familiar) milieu and make it
exotic to his readers. This
is
not because of anything inherently more
plausible, or answerable to his readers' experience, in the world he
presents; but simply because of the unfailing assurance and lack of
apologetic distance with which he moves in it. It is an utterly bounded,
though not a limited world: that of Eastern European, particularly
Polish, Jewry, with its whole complex history from the seventeenth to
the early twentieth century of Cabbalistic mysticism and magic, Cossack
persecution and massacre, the Sabbatian heresy, Hassidism, and the
translation under the pressure of the Enlightenment of the religious
ideals of study and pious unworldliness into the secular ideal of the
scholar-intellectual. On the face of this highly local and historically
dense environment, Singer inscribes the universal conflicts of reason
versus the flesh, and of creedal and ritual religion versus a free spirit–
uality. Entirely absent from his work is any merely historical motive,
the impulse to evoke this world and thereby to preserve it simply because
it
is
both past and mercilessly destroyed. There is no nostalgia and no
pathos, because there is no distance. Singer's fiction is intimate, meticu–
lous, laconic, and unsentimental. At times he reminds one of Babel–
except he is more spacious, less ambiguous and troubled in tone.
Singer's characters are typically beset by motives whose clarity and
forcefulness confound the hesitations of our modern psychological
sophistication. They are wholly conscious motives, that can
be
ranked
on the traditional schedule of virtues and vices. Lust, envy, gluttony,
pride, and avarice predominate among the vices; pity, simplicity, and
humility among the virtues. (Singer's accounts of gluttony include some
of the most stunning descriptions of the pleasures of eating since the
Iliad.)
He brilliantly executes this pre-modern account of motivation,
which includes a self-understanding of character as a drama of con–
tending supernatural forces. Of necessity, these are not characters in the
modern, infinitely expandable, individual sense, but creatures of a
vigorously collective psychology. Singer presents an image of Jewry
not in terms of individuals struggling in an alien setting-the familiar
image of the Jew from Shylock to Swann-but in terms of a rigorously
bounded, sensuous community of physical things and almost palpable
beliefs and avoidances. It is a world whose moving principle is appetite,
whether the appetite for learning and salvation or for warm flesh and
succulent foods and fine clothes and furnishings, and in this respect
