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grovel like Hamsun's character in
Hunger,
eating his own shoe leather
while a woman's image faded from the retina of his imagination. His
concept of dread was to suffer the fate of Poe. His main earnings came
from the
./ewish Daily forward,
which published his briefs and fiction to
an ever-dwindling Yiddish readership. His wife worked
in
a department
store. While he later claimed she didn't need to work, I suspected she did
when I first met them. They were comfortable, but not yet secure.
for his first forty years, Singer lived in the long shadow of his older
brother, Isadore Joshua Singer. Isaac Bashevis Singer (born Yitzak Hersh
Singer) was the third child behind a sister, Esther (who also wrote fic–
tion), and he had a younger brother, Moses.
In
the early thirties,
I.
j.
Singer became known locally as a natural talent that flowed like the Vis–
tula. He was discovered by the
./ewish Daily Forward,
who brought him
to America. To this day, some readers prefer
I.
J. to
I.
B.
I.
J.
Singer was published by both Liveright and Knopf, then the two
most prestigious American publishers. He wrote socially conscious novels
aboLlt what life was really like behind ghetto and
shtetl
walls, tales that
Sholol11 Aleichem was too Broadway and schmaltzy to handle. Here was
a different voice than Yiddish literature had heard before.
I.
J.
Singer wrote
with bite and spoke in the detailed and humane-conscience tone of Dreiser,
an American Catholic. Both
l.
J.
and Dreiser tied in to the prophetic tra–
dition of Judaism, borrowing a little from Jeremiah, but in softened tones
of muted outrage. He dug deep into the psychic vein of characters and
society. His vision was Tolstoyan (though he preferred Stendhal).
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote more like a rational mystic, in itself a con–
tradiction. The two sides warred in him. He was deeply intelligent yet
avoided showing it, preferring a humble voice and simple characters. Yet
he could peer over the precipice and see the murk below. He leaned a lit–
tle toward the black humor of the regional champion, Gogol. (Take for
example, Gogol's shorr story, "The Nose," where a man wakes up one
morning, discovers his nose missing, and goes looking for it,
to
find it
parading about the streets in the man's cloak with the bluster of a VIP.)
Above all, Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction teemed with characters harried
by
the l11yriad slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, including life's
many deceits. (A man climbs in a woman's window late at night, con–
vinces her he is a ghost who should not be disturbed, gets into bed with
her, then leaves-to return on an as-needed basis.) His rural characters
seemed ro float willy nilly in a timeless stream that included the ether
around them. Did it make any difference whether they lived in Bruegel's
era or in roday's Miami Beach? Not really. Only after his death could we
fully appreciate what Isaac Bashevis Singer was doing: chronicling the
