AL
SUNDEL
Heartaches and Limitations: Isaac Bashevis
Singer
I
FIRST MET ISAAC BASJ-IEVIS SINGER shortly hefore he was mugged. He
was then known as an ethnic writer only to a rather small circle of
readers; the grand scheme of his writings was not yet apparent. He
lived on Central Park West just above Tooth Street, where the avenue
starts a downscale dip. He entered his lobby elevator hehind a black
woman. As the door closed, a man inside put a gun to Singer's head,
speaking in a dialect muddled by drugs. The woman li fted Singer'S wal–
let only to find a few dollars. The man pushed the muzzle in Singer's
face, demanding more. He was flying so high his trigger hand tremhled.
In
his own thick accent, Singer told him he didn't have any more. It
sounds comical, accents and all, but it was extremely life-threatening to
a rare man who would, in time, win a Nobel Prize.
The gun did not go off. Singer left the elevator in his usual shuffling
style and the elevator door closed. The next day Singer shopped for a
new apartment. He resettled on West 72nd Street, less than a block and
a half from where John Lennon would live and be killed. It was from
this 72nd Street apartment that Singer came to know a wider interna–
tional audience for his uniquely Jewish writings.
The young Isaac Bashevis Singer began as both Hasid and modern–
day Bruegel the Elder who gave us panoramic verbal folk tales. Entire
communities came alive on his typewriter, mainly of a forgotten people.
Rural Hasids were not simpl y second-class citizens of Poland; in the
g loom of their medieval caftans they were often looked down upon by
more worldly Jews. The young Singer became a Hasidic
vox populi,
per–
haps more than any predecessor. He wrote in his mother tongue, Yid–
dish. Once in America, Singer knew he was writing about an obscure
cu lture in a dying language. Yet hi s daily grind kept piling up more
reams of fiction than Dickens or Dostoyevsky. He badly needed trans–
lators, even amateurs. Good ones in Yiddish were scarce, and there was
no money even to pay for indifferent ones.
To begin with, translating Singer into English was akin
to
entry-level
archaeology without boots. Book publishers often helped with his
numerous novels. But in order to sell his voluminous short stories (well
