276
PARTISAN REVIEW
Hasidic saga inside the Wild West (East) of Christendom. In doing so, he
rendered the chicken fat of the worldwide human heart.
"THE MANUSCRIPT," his story about a female survivor of the Nazi
entrance into Warsaw, focuses not on a huge historical moment, the inva–
sion, but on a single human betrayal between lovers as the jack boots
advance. The woman's paramour, Menashe, is a rake of an aspiring writer.
The couple flee to the Russian zone, noting how Jewish men in flight all
seem to be carrying rolls of unpublished manuscripts. Once the couple feel
safe, Menashe discovers he has unwittingly packed the title page of his
own best manuscript atop an acquaintance's script he had promised to
read. His girlfriend bravely goes back and retrieves his masterwork, in
spite of incredible danger. When she catches up to Menashe, clutching the
manuscript she saved, she finds him in bed with an ugly woman-and bad
poet.
I.
J. Singer would not have to ld this kind of story. Where
I.
J
was
socially critical, digging ever deeper into mind and society,
I.
B. Singer
zeroed in on what people do in the constant fender benders to multiple–
car pileups of their lives. He claimed that after the Ten Commandments it
was superfluous for any writer to send a message to mankind.
[n his fiction, Isaac Bashevis Singer would never ask the penultimate
question: Why did Christianity (and Islam) need to degrade Jews and
lock them up at night in ghettoes for hundreds of years? Yet he and his
brother came from one of the grimmest in Europe, the pre-World War 1I
Warsaw Ghetto. They lived on grungy Krochmalna Street, which he once
equated with New York's Delancey Street in its mad Jewish flux and din.
I.
J.
SINGER CAME
TO
AMERICA in
1933
on a wave of praise in the Yid–
dish press that spurred translation into English of
Yoshe Kalb (The Sill–
ner).
In essence, he had turned away from the Hasidic insularity of his
rabbinical father and embraced the transitional. He wrote as a modernist
with great integrity about his people and Poles, about the individual per–
plexities of Hasids as human beings behind their medieval villages,
always set within, and affecting, a community. Isaac Bashevis Singer fol–
lowed his brother to America two years later. By then, he had published
a remarkable first novel set in seventeenth-century rural Poland.
Satan ill
Garay
is about a Jewish community'S struggle to recover from the blood–
iest of Cossack pogroms by embracing a self-proclaimed messiah in an
orgasm of hope. They went like lemmings over a cliff.
Isaac Bashevis Singer floundered after arriving in New York. Disori–
ented, he could not write. With his brother's help, he found his footing
in the
Jewish Daily Forward
and Knopf. His writing was more cxpres-
