Leslie A. Fiedler
MASTER OF DREAMS
If there were dreams to sell,
Merry and sad to tell,
And the crier rung the bell,
What would you buy?
-T.
L.
BEDDoEs
"And Joseph dreamed a dream," the Book of the Jews
tells us, "and he told it to his brethren: and they hated him yet the
more." It
is
the beginning of a myth whose ending we all know, the
opening of a larger dream which a whole community has dreamed
waking and aloud for nearly three thousand years. But it is unique
among communal dreams, this myth of Joseph and his descent into
Egypt; for it is the dream of the dreamer, a myth of myth itself.
More specifically (or maybe I only mean more Jewishly), it is the
dreamer's own dream of how, dreaming, he makes it in the waking
world; the myth of myth making it
in
the realm of the nonmythic;
an archetypal account of the successful poet and the respected shrink,
the Jewish artist and the Jewish doctor-hailed in the Gentile world,
first by the Gentiles themselves, and as a consequence by their hos–
tile brethren, their fellow-Jews.
I might have hit upon the meaning of the Joseph story in any
number of ways, reflecting on the Biblical text itsdf, or reading
Thomas Mann's true but tedious retelling of the tale in
Joseph and
His Brethren;
but I did not. And only after I had begun my own
ruminations did I come on Isaac Bashevis Singer's exegesis, in a
little story called "The Strong Ones," in which he remembers the
strange resentment of his childhood friends after he had first revealed
