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from love. This speaks of a contemporary hollowness of the heart greater
than Josef K's. Kafka was saying that man has no higher court to go to
for justice about his lack of love. He is in a sponsorless Inquisition of
modern times that can rise to a heart-stabbing intensity. He is us.
SINGER'S YIDDISH ACCENT troubled, if not horrified, the backers of the
seminar for psychiatrists. They killed the Kafka recording. Not long
after, Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He became an interna–
tional celebrity. He was kissed by Hollywood when Barbra Streisand
made a smash movie from one of his stories, "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy."
Another film followed, starring Ron Silver and Angelica Houston, from
Singer's pithy American novel,
Enemies: A Love Story.
Then came a TV
documentary on Singer's early years in America, sans his long discom–
bobulation, his own inability to commit to a woman in his most lost and
bewildered phase. New theater is presently in the works.
The Nobel Prize, frequent publication, and films secured Singer and
Alma in their old age. He was making good money, aided by a string of
patently Jewish juveniles out of Hasidic lore. Magazines that had
rejected him when he was down now sought him out.
In
merciless book
tours, he gave boilerplate lectures and signed copies by the thousands.
Was it to collect his autograph or to read his books that people lined up?
Somehow Singer remained vaguely obscure even in his newfound fame.
Many occasional readers still believed he was a dead European writer
from centuries past who had been newly resuscitated into English.
IT
HAS BEEN SAID of Dostoyevsky that if he were born in the Trobriand
Islands, he would have been as different from those around him as he
was in Russia. Isaac Bashevis Singer stood at an even further remove.
He did not brood upon his transformations by Western culture so much
as remember the deep rural plunge of his roots.
Singer had learned to express intimacy best on a Yiddish typewriter
through the heartbreak and limitations of the common folk. "We are all
smugglers," he once told me as he shook ketchup onto his French fries
like an American teenager, "smuggling ourselves through life." He had
reported on three hundred years of Jewish history on inhospitable Polish
soil, going sparingly on the blood, concentrating on the magic and mys–
tery of the elan vital in the heart and the ether, and the fleeting feet of
time. He had reported on ambient light, and Jedwabne darkness too, not
from astrophysics, but from metaphysics, which he did not lay on his
readers.
In
the end, he escaped the fate of Poe. He died at eighty-six in
J
991,
respected and rich, his own kind of Jew and post-biblical narrator.
