274
PARTISAN REVIEW
pushing his own occult beliefs, but was reporting what the country folk
believed. He abandoned the supernatural and leaned more
to
transi–
tional Jews whose mojo was rising in Western culture. This trend
increased in his American stories, set in modern New York, Tel Aviv,
Miami Beach-about uprooted East European Jews living banal middle–
class lives without Cossacks, Poles, or Nazis savagely attacking them.
Singer's American stories remained far removed
fwm
the norms of
American Jewish fiction. He did not write about the immigration expe–
rience (as Henry Roth) or the assimilated Jew whose vestigial.Jewishness
resembled the human coccyx (as Saul Bellow), a tail that had lost its tail–
ness. He wrote about Jews who were displaced in rural Poland, in New
York City, in Miami Beach. When they got to the big city, especially in
America, they metamorphosed.
Singer's characters were descended from biblical heroes. But they had
shlepped their kitchen problems and heartaches with them, in displace–
ments from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, and .Judea, and had lost
much of their heritage along the way. Though half the planet has read
the Hebrew Bible, are there even thirty-six sages who truly understand
the long view of four thousand years of displacement?
THE SHEER AMOUNT of lonely sitting a prolific writer must put in is
beyond most people's endurance. Aside from two
Partisan I\cl'icU'
stal–
warts-Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld-each of whom translated a
story, Singer was the most isolated of writers, a Yiddish Napoleon at
Elba. He had little contact with fellow writers. His folk past was his
most trusted companion.
While writing, Singer sometimes conversed with his wife as his fingers
flicked over the keys. When several young people visited him, he might get
a little giddy coming out of his self-imposed isolation. Yet he was formal.
He preferred to be called "Mr. Singer." He usually wore a funereal dark
suit, shiny from overuse, and a dull tie. On sultry summer evenings, if
someone asked to remove a jacket, he rose and said, "We will all remove
our jackets." He had to know you well to receive you in his shirtsleeves.
At his suggestion, Singer and I began to meet for lunch. He suggested I
read Knut Hamsun, even though Hamsun was a Nazi sympathizer during
World War
II.
We generally took brisk walks to a busy cafeteria on Broad–
way in the
80S
or else lunched in a coffee shop on 72nd Street. Here, amid
fork-and-knife clatter, over matzoth briar, he might open up a little.
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER had been burnt by having too much sensibility
and not enough taste of life, love, or money. He feared he might one day
