278
PARTISAN REVIEW
ambition or passion or greed slipped into overdrive, and primal urges
welled up, their religion often proved to have a hole in the dike. Yet,
lw
the same token, when light fell from a seventeenth-century
shtetllamp,
Singer did not describe it as ordinary light. Through his medieval lens,
it might be an unusually energetic light Einstein had overlooked in his
famous equation, animistic, with a life of its own.
IN
HIS WARSAW PERIOD, a Westernized Singer wrote of transitional ./ews
who, like nuns who jump over the wall, cast off their categorical strait–
jackets. The more urban his Hasids became, the more they blended in
with worldly jews and Christians. Singer's sequential epic novels,
The
Manor
and
The Estate,
tell of transitional jews pouring their energies
into the throbbing engine of boomtown Warsaw. The middlc-aged–
Singer novels are filled with urban ./ews we might recognize today for
their modern humanity, their absence of medievalism, their zest for life.
With different names, they could pass for French or Italians or Swedes.
They swam in the larger fish bowl of a major world city, worldly
to
a
far greater degree than insular Hasidism would ever allow.
By contrast, the later Singer characters were often survivors of the
Holocaust with tales to tell. They spoke not of the Holocaust, not of
faith, but of a rotten lover or a strange American experience pressing on
their minds. They were more absorbed with their imlllediate problellls
in the modern world than with the incomprehensibility of four thou–
sand years. Yet Singer could revisit medievalism from 72nd Sn-eet with
his novel
The Slave.
Set in the seventeenth century, its ch ,lraCters strive
to
recover from the horror of vicious Cossack massacres, as in
Satall ill
Coray.
Here the protagonist moves in the direction of growth of his
humanity over and above his faith or circumstance. He does this
through simplicity of heart and a kind of corresponding dim-wittedness
rather than through a sort of Kantian philosophy. He has unwirringly
become Western.
THE MORE HE MATURED as a writer, the more Isaac Bashevis Singer
defied classification. In America he became a multicultural hybrid. Can
we call him an American writer? In ethnic terms, Singer was both a
shtetl
Hasid and a New York-Miami condo-loving jew. He secmed
to
speak
to
secular, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform ./ews, and also
to
cul–
tured non-jews, to the world if it would listen. Not frolll thc synagogue
da is, but from the doorstep, street corner, ca feteria, su bwa
y
stra p. The
writers of the Hebrew Bible were jews who put factionalism on a back
burner. So did Singer in his lifelong song of songs.
